Inductive reasoning and implicit memory:

evidence from intact and impaired memory

systems





Authors: Luisa Girelli, Carlo Semenza and Margarete Delazer.

Appeared in Neuropsychologia 42 (2004)


Review by: Sonja Damnjanovic
Introduction
Inductive reasoning process of
inferring a general rule by inspection of
specific instances
Inductive reasoning is essential in
problem solving, development of
expertise and learning
Typical examples of inductive reasoning
tasks are series completion problems

Series completion problem
Letter or number series completion are
given to participants (e.g. A C E G or
2 4 8 16)
The task is to discover a general rule,
which defines the relations between
constituent elements. The rule has to be
identified and applied to continue given
series!
Purpose of the study
To investigate role of implicit memory in
problem solving
Previous studies show that number
series completion may be facilitated by
a priming procedure
Priming effects in number series
completion


Presented studies
Experiment 1
A) explores the time course of priming in number series
completion. The number of intervening trials between prime and
the target varied (4 and 10)
B) explores whether the trials were explicitly remembered or not

Experiment 2 used just the lag 4 and was designed to
examine which stage in number series completion is the most
sensitive to priming

Case study amnesic patients performance on number series
completion task
Experiment 1
Number series completion task

Experimental trials were mixed with filler trials
Both experimental and filler trials varied in difficulty
Primes and targets were separated by four trials (block1) or by
10 trials (block 2).
Task: say aloud what number comes next

Recognition task

Similar to series completion design, but following different
criteria
Experimental trials were either identical prime-target pairs or
pseudo-pairs
Task: Answer whether the trial was presented
before !
Experiment 1
Results

- reliable priming effect!
- faster and more accurate answers for target series
then for primes series
- Lack of significant difference between priming effects
in lag4 and lag10 conditions
(they are both pretty long for priming)
-Difficulty of the trial influenced accuracy
- Easy trials (floor effect): low error rate for primes and
targets
- Performance on recognition task was poor-
excluding strategies of explicit recollection
Experiment 2
1. Series completion task identical to
the Experiment1

2. Identification task identify the algorithm
without completing it

3. Extrapolation task (e.g.,+2 for 2 4 6 8 ;
participants were to say 10).
Experiment 2 results
Discussion Experiment 2
Question: Whether priming can be attributed to
different processing components?

Identification task participants were faster and more
accurate in identifying rules for targets in comparison
to the rules for primes
Difficult tasks yielded larger priming effects
(my comment: probably easy items were too easy)
Authors comments: completion of easy and difficult
series relies on different subprocedures
Experiment 2
Extrapolation task
- significant priming for difficult items only
My comment: easy items, too easy to catch
the difference between primes and targets
Processing differences between easy and
difficult problems
Case study
Case of amnesia:
PR, 55 years old
Performance on memory tests:
Average WM span, impaired autobiographical
memory, severe deficits in learning verbal
and visual information
Other results in the table

- Tasks were the same as in Experiments
1 and 2
Results:
Significant priming for lag 4 series completion
task (p<.0001) in both difficult and easy trials
Not significant priming for lag 10
Identification tasks
Significant priming for difficult (p< .01), but
not for easy trials

Extrapolation task
No significant difference

Recognition task
There is no evidence that he was able to
explicitly recognize previously presented trials
General discussion
Studies support the view that priming occurs
via implicit memory activation. Participants
did not explicitly recognized previously
presented trials.
PR shows the evidence that the priming
doesnt occur due to explicit processes
Long lasting priming (because of the lag 10)
But lag of 4 is also long


Comments:
Experiment 1. Lag 4 and lag 10 are
arbitrary and not too different

Experiment 2. Not sure that the stages
are measuring what underlies priming.

Case study. Sample size of 1 might not
reflect what is really going on.