Dr. İlke Öztekin

Dr. Öztekin & Emotional Memory

In 2011, Dr. Öztekin won the APA’s New Investigator award for her work with memory. These days, she is an Associate Professor at Koç University in Turkey, one of the top universities in the country. Her current research continues to explore working memory, using the response deadline speed-accuracy trade-off (SAT) procedure that she used in her award-winning study. Dr. Öztekin's research focuses on many aspects of memory, as described in her own words below:

"My broad area of research is Human Memory. More specifically, I'm interested in investigating the controlled processes that support memory function. I have focused on two primary lines of research related to cognitive control of working memory and episodic memory retrieval. One line of my research has investigated representational sates in memory. Another line of my research investigates interference resolution in memory, particularly during working memory retrieval."

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The Speed-Accuracy Trade-Off

You have probably experienced speed-accuracy trade-offs many times as you have completed various tasks (Fitts, 1954). For example, you know from experience that the faster you move your computer mouse, the more likely you are to miss the icon you are moving to click. Similarly, you also know that you need to slow down to ensure that your key goes into the lock when you want to open your front door. Both of these examples demonstrate the fact that many tasks require us to trade between speed and accuracy in our movements.

This is usually not a problem until we are faced with a task that gives us a limited amount of time to respond. When we are compelled to act quickly, we can sometimes emphasize speed over accuracy and actually end up missing the goal of the task entirely. For example, think about how many times you have hurriedly reached to flip a light switch as you passed by it without slowing your stride. Because you knew that you had one short opportunity to hit the switch, you probably emphasized speed and in some cases missed the switch completely. What I find interesting about this particular situation is how our perceived need to act fast often initiates a cycle of several reaches and misses, which ends up taking far longer than if we had simply slowed down in the first place.

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Testing the Speed-Accuracy Trade-Off

Much of Dr. Öztekin's work uses the speed-accuracy trade-off (SAT) procedure. Describing the SAT procedure can be tricky, but once you see it demonstrated, it's much easier to understand.

The slideshow below illustrate's the SAT procedure, step-by-step. There are slightly different version of the procedure, depending on what's being tested. In this case, Dr. Öztekin is examining how emotion impacts memory retrieval, so the test uses pictures that are linked to neutral or negative emotions.

Once you're finished learning the SAT Procedure below, you'll need to interpret some of Dr. Öztekin's results, so make sure you understand it thoroughly!

SAT Procedure 2

Understanding the Results

Now that you've read about the SAT procedure, see if you can make sense of the results reported below. Research in cognitive psychology is often full of jargon and complex ideas, so you might need to look some words up, or scribble down a question to come back to later. The paragraph below is taken from Dr. Öztekin’s study, and will be hard to make sense of in the first run-through. Plan to run through the paragraph at least twice!

“Emotional information is treated differently due to its survival value, hence, the importance of how a task-irrelevant emotional memory representation could interfere with recognition memory judgments. Our false alarm (FA) analysis showed that: (a) the buildup of proactive interference (PI) for emotional material was slower ... compared with neutral material; (b) emotional material did not lead to as many FA differences as neutral material [...] ; and (c) however later in retrieval, the resolution of PI was less effective for emotional ... than neutral material.

Our findings indicating a slower buildup and a lower amount of PI for emotional material are consistent with the delayed onset of information accrual for positive [non-false-alarm] trials. Taken together, the data indicate that the impact of emotion on memory processing is largely dominant early in retrieval during automatic processing, presumably reflecting the contribution of familiarity-based judgments. On the other hand, we also observed an effect of emotion on the controlled memory operations that aid successful resolution of PI. However, this effect was not in favor of emotional stimuli. Conclusively, our FA analysis revealed that while once goal relevant but yet irrelevant emotional stimuli reduce the effects of PI early in retrieval, its resolution is not as effective later in retrieval.”

Interested in the study? You can read more about it online here!

Reflection Questions

When participants hear a beep and see an image, what do they need to do next? If the image is negative and emotional (such as a big picture of a spider) and it takes a long time for the participant to react, what do you think happened?
What did Dr. Öztekin find in her study?
Were there any words or phrases you struggled with when reading the results? Talk about one or two of them here, and how you made sense of them.

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