Themen für Masterarbeiten

Beschreibung: Wie viele Ereignisse in unserer Umwelt können wir gleichzeitig beachten? Gibt es dafür eine begrenzte Kapazität? Ziel der Masterarbeit ist, ein Mass für die Kapazität der visuellen Aufmerksamkeit zu entwickeln und zu überprüfen.
Kontakt: Prof. Klaus Oberauer, E-Mail

Beschreibung: When people are asked to remember lists of words in their correct order, around 10-20% report to engage in forming a mental image of the to-be-remembered words. For instance, for the list "Pony- Tooth- Coffee-Golf ball", they could imagine a pony losing a tooth falling into its coffee after being hit by a golf ball. Experimental evidence shows that this technique does not benefit immediate memory, but instead leads to the build-up of long-term memory (LTM) traces. The question is, why does improved LTM not also help in an immediate memory test? It could be that participants in the immediate test simply do not draw on these LTM representations. Alternatively, the LTM representations have the same quality as the WM representations, and thereby lead to the same level of performance.
The goal of this master thesis is to develop experiments that can investigate how representations build through mental imagery contribute to WM.

Kontakt: Lea Bartsch, E-Mail

Beschreibung: Recent evidence shows that, people draw on episodic long-term memory in immediate tests of memory that are commonly used to test working memory. This is the case, once the capacity of WM is exceeded ? but only then. In case WM load is low (e.g. if only 2 items have to be remembered), WM is shielded from beneficial or detrimental influences from LTM (Bartsch et al., 2023; Oberauer et al., 2017). This pattern can be explained by a gating hypothesis, that assumes that WM operates via separate gate and maintenance mechanisms. When the gate is open, available information can enter WM, yet when the gate is closed the contents of WM are protected from proactive interference but also beneficial effects. To date, it is unclear how this gate operates ? via a meta-cognitive assessment of the available information at retrieval, or already at encoding. The goal of this master thesis is to develop experiments that can identify factors that influence behavioral patterns in order to better understand underlying mechanisms of the gate between LTM and WM.
Kontakt: Lea Bartsch, E-Mail

Beschreibung: Forgetting is a natural property of the memory system, but it can also occur intentionally. When people study a list of items, and after each item they are told to remember (TBR items) or to forget (TBF items) the item, they have better memory for TBR relative to TBF items. Some researchers have argued that the instruction to forget causes people to engage in active inhibition of the just created memory (Fawcett & Taylor, 2008; 2012). In support of this claim, Fawcett & Taylor (2008, 2012) asked people to respond to unrelated visual probes presented at the same time as the memory list. They showed that reaction times to the irrelevant probes were longer after TBF items, suggesting that people were still engaged in attempting to forget the TBF item. In contrast, Popov, Marevic, Rummel & Reder (2019) have shown better memory for words in the same list studied after TBF items than after TBR items. These results suggested that to-be-forgotten items deplete less resources than to-be-remembered items. These findings are in apparent contradiction to prior results by Fawcett & Taylor. The goal of this Master?s thesis would be to investigate and attempt to reconcile this discrepancy.
Kontakt: Dr. Ven Popov, E-Mail

Beschreibung: The spacing effect refers to the findings that long-term retention of information is better, when repeated study trials are spaced farther apart. It is also known that the ideal spacing length depends on how far into the future memory will be tested ? the greater the test delay, the greater the study spacing should be for optimal memory. A number of different memory models exist to explain these findings. A recent memory model, the source of activation confusion (SAC) model (Popov & Reder, 2020), surprised us in that it produces the spacing effect without being designed to do so, and without fitting any parameters. The goal of this project is to explore why a simplified version of the SAC model generates the spacing effect and the optimal study-test lag relationship, and to compare it to existing models of the spacing effect. Additional goal would be to identify unique predictions of this new spacing effect model that could be empirically tested.
Kontakt: Dr. Ven Popov, E-Mail

Beschreibung: Why can people only remember a limited amount of information at any given time? One proposal is that storing information in long-term-memory depletes a limited cognitive resource that in turn *recovers gradually over time*. Evidence for this assumption comes from a recent discovery of ?sequential study effects?, namely, that people are more likely to remember words, if during study these words were preceded by information that is easier to process. For example, memory for one word is better, if the preceding words during study are of higher normative frequency (Popov & Reder, 2020), or if people were instructed to forget rather than remember them (Popov, Marevic, Rummel & Reder, 2019). However, all of these findings are an indirect evidence for resource depletion and recovery, since these are inferred based on a subsequent memory test. In this project, we want to use pupil dilation during study as a measure of cognitive load to investigate the time course of resource depletion and recovery during memory encoding.
Kontakt: Dr. Ven Popov, E-Mail

Beschreibung: Complex span tasks, often used to investigate working memory, combine storage demands, such as remembering memoranda in serial order, with processing demands like judging whether a math equation is correct or incorrect. Interference theories of working memory assume that processing imposes additional interference and thus decreases the fidelity of representations, leading to worse performance compared to memory tasks not involving processing. Yet, it is unclear with which aspect of memory representations in working memory the processing of distractors interferes specifically.

The proposed master thesis should investigate this using adapted complex span task, in which participants remember feature pairs (such as digit-color pairs, or color-spatial location pairs), and the distractor task involves processing the same kind of pairs. Using this task, we want to investigate in how far processing one of the features (e.g. color or spatial position) affects the interaction and fidelity of memory representations during retrieval depending on using the processed or non-processed feature as retrieval cue. This might be a promising way to evaluate in how far processing specifically interferes with feature representations or bindings in WM.
Kontakt: Dr. Gidon Frischkorn, E-Mail

Beschreibung: Recent evidence shows that, under some circumstances, increasing load in a WM task with previously formed LTM representations does not incur any behavioural costs for the retention of novel information in WM. However, if WM load is low, adding LTM load impairs performance. This pattern can be explained by a gating hypothesis, that assumes that WM operates via separate gate and maintenance mechanisms. When the gate is open available information can enter WM, yet when the gate is closed the contents of WM are sustained while keeping irrelevant information out. The goal of this master thesis is to identify temporal factors that influence this behavioral pattern in order to better understand underlying mechanisms of the gate between LTM and WM. Specifically, it is unclear how long it takes to open or close this gate and whether the timing within a list alters the effect.
Kontakt: Dr. Lea Bartsch, E-Mail

Beschreibung: Ein Befund aus der Forschung zum Arbeitsgedächtnis ist "output interference": Wenn mehrere Elemente einer Liste, die im Arbeitsgedächtnis gehalten wird, nacheinander getestet werden, dann beeinträchtigt jeder Test die Erinnerung an die noch verbleibenden Elemente, so dass von einem Test zum nächsten die Erinnerungsleistung schlechter wird. Ziel der Masterarbeit ist, herauszufinden, was diesen Effekt verursacht: Ist es das Abrufen eines Elements aus dem Arbeitsgedächtnis, oder entsteht der Effekt durch die Antwort, die man beim Test geben muss (z.B. das getestete Element reproduzieren)?
Kontakt: Prof. Klaus Oberauer, E-Mail