Competition between Associations in Memory
Bibliographic record
Abstract
If two associations share an item, one may be remembered at the expense of the other (BC recalled but not AB). Here, we identify the neural processes by which this competition materializes and is resolved. We analyzed fMRI signal while participants studied sets of pairs that reliably induced pair-to-pair associative interference, but which participants could not fully resolve. Precuneus activity tracked retrieval of previous pairs during study of later overlapping pairs. This retrieval apparently produced interference by diverting study resources from the currently displayed pair. However, when activity in ventromedial prefrontal cortex, as well as anterior subregions of the hippocampus, was present while the earlier pair had been studied, interference was reversed, and both pairs were likely to be recalled. Angular gyrus and mid-frontal activity were related to interference resolution once the participant had seen both pairs. Taken together, associations compete via precuneus-mediated competitive retrieval, but ventromedial prefrontal cortex may neutralize this by ensuring that when the earlier association is remembered while studying the later pair, memories of the two pairs can overcome interference likely via activity in mid-frontal cortex and angular gyrus.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".