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Poster F in Poster Session F: Thursday, August 6, 1:45 – 3:30 pm, Kimmel Center, Shorin & Rosenthal Rooms

A Novel Paradigm for Examining Social Influences on Neural Representations Guiding Memory

Kahini Mehta¹, Aminah Twyman², Shawn A. Rhoads³, Salman Qasim², Nuttida Rungratsameetaweemana¹; ¹Columbia University, ²Rutgers RWJMS, ³Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai

Presenter: Kahini Mehta

Social recall, or the act of using cues from others to aid memory retrieval, is known to influence individual memory. However, the factors determining the strength of this social influence and the mechanism behind its effect on memory remain poorly understood. In this work, we present a novel paradigm for characterizing how social interactions modulate the recognition of previously seen stimuli. Specifically, we operationalize social influence through partners whose memory judgments are either largely accurate or largely inaccurate. In doing so, we probe the influence of reliability on participant recall, and demonstrate that in pilot runs, participants are implicitly influenced by reliable partners. Moving forward, we also aim to examine single-neuron recordings and local field potentials from participants to determine the impact of social influence on neural representations of stimuli during memory retrieval.

Topic Area: Memory, Learning & Knowledge Structures