Durable Change in Implicit Cognition through Retrieval-Based Memory Modification

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This award was provided as part of NSF's Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellowships (SPRF) program. The goal of the SPRF program is to prepare promising, early career doctoral-level scientists for scientific careers in academia, industry or private sector, and government. SPRF awards involve two years of training under the sponsorship of established scientists and encourage Postdoctoral Fellows to perform independent research. NSF seeks to promote the participation of scientists from all segments of the scientific community, including those from underrepresented groups, in its research programs and activities; the postdoctoral period is considered to be an important level of professional development in attaining this goal. Each Postdoctoral Fellow must address important scientific questions that advance their respective disciplinary fields.This postdoctoral fellowship award supports a rising scholar investigating the formation and change of implicit (i.e., relatively automatic) reactions to people and groups. The project will utilize research across work in social psychology, neuroscience, and animal research on memory updating to advance scientific understanding of how implicit social impressions can be effectively and durably revised. Although many people hold explicitly (i.e., self-reported) egalitarian and tolerant beliefs, implicit measures of cognition have revealed far more negative impressions of stigmatized or marginalized groups, such as those based on race, ethnicity, age, gender, and sexuality. These implicit reactions can have a variety of consequences for decision-making and interpersonal relations in many areas of society, but the ways in which they can be reliably changed are not well understood. This project seeks to fill that gap by testing various methods through which existing memories about other people and groups can be reactivated and revised to incorporate new information and become more consistent with explicit beliefs.Although implicit reactions to socially meaningful groups often have been difficult to revise, recent work on memory retrieval-based updating and reconsolidation has shown that cognitive and affective reactions can be durably altered by retrieval of the memories that underlie those reactions prior to learning new information aimed at revising them. In a series of studies employing diverse methods and target groups, this project will test the critical role of identification and retrieval of memories that support negative group impressions in moderating the success of interventions aimed at changing those implicit reactions. Novel social targets (individuals and groups) will be presented in conjunction with various types of initial learning, including evaluative conditioning, behavioral descriptions, and general group information, to allow a test of the effectiveness of subsequent memory retrieval and new learning for modifying initial implicit reactions following diverse experiences with the social targets. Using novel and real group targets, the project will also assess the impact of different types of new learning on producing durable revision after memory retrieval, including: mere re-presentation of the target(s), reframing the meaning of specific event memories, connecting participant thoughts about groups to the personal experiences of the participant, and presentation of new factual group information. A further goal of the project will be to test the characteristics of the memory reactivation episode that produces the most effective revision, including an examination of the type of memory that is reactivated. In particular, expectancy violation during memory reactivation has been theorized to be of central importance in enabling memory updating to occur. Studies in this project will examine the role of expectancy violation in the updating of the memory representations that contribute to implicit impressions and in so doing will extend and build upon memory updating theory. The generalizability of the results will be promoted through the use of community and online samples, and the results will be used to develop computational models of implicit memory change to understand shifts in implicit cognition in terms of basic processes of learning and memory.