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Krasnow Institute > Monday Seminars > Abstracts EPISODIC MEMORY FOR EXTERNAL INFORMATION Erik Altmann Our environment contains much information, of which only a fraction is visible at one time. People are able to recall the existence of hidden information, in a manner that is useful to them. The present research takes an information-processing perspective on how people recall the existence of hidden information. Two specific questions are addressed. First, what memory do people retain about a feature that enables finding the feature later? Our hypothesis is that the memory is episodic, capturing the event of seeing the feature, and recognitional, retrievable only when the feature itself is present as a cue in working memory. This implicates the mind's eye: people recall having seen something by generating a mental image of that thing and recognizing the image. Second, what prompts people to recall having seen something? Such recollections seem to occur when they are relevant to the task at hand, suggesting that the syntactic process of generating images has a semantic basis in what we know about the task. Our data consist of detailed observations of real-world programming behavior, in which an expert programmer steps interactively through a complex program. As program output fills the programmer's screen, older output scrolls off automatically to make room. This hidden output remains accessible through scrolling, and occasionally the programmer scrolls back to examine a particular region. We account for these scrolling events with a computational cognitive model -- a computer simulation specifying what symbolic information the programmer might have processed, and how, at both encoding time and retrieval time. The model is grounded in a cognitive architecture embodying independently-motivated psychological constraints. The key constraint is the architectural learning mechanism, which shapes our hypotheses about the encoding and retrieval of episodic information. Guided by the data and the model, we propose a theory of _episodic long-term working memory_, extending previous research into how long-term memory can mediate rapid storage of and access to dynamic, working information.
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