We test this with an additional face inversion experiment. We find greater inversion effects for easier perceptual levels --> more holistic processing at easy levels --> more interaction at easy levels as a result of face-specific interference which disrupts holistic processing.

This pattern of interaction does not fit with theories of increased cognitive load, or overlapping shared resources. Also, just increasing cognitive load through an orthogonal, non-face related interference condition (math), has negligible effect on performance on the face task.

An equally robust finding though, is that under more complex conditions (when an emotional face interference task was inserted into the delay period), we do find interactions. Surprisingly, these go in an unexpected direction - more interaction for easy rather than hard perceptual conditions. Why?

We designed the Face Memory and Perception (FMP) task to systematically test whether perceptual and memory components of face processing rely on shared cognitive resources, or function independently.

Still one month left to apply for the tenure-track faculty position in "Measurement Issues in Complex Data Structures" in the UCLA Dept of Psychology.

The scope is broad, but includes methodologists working with brain data (fMRI, EEG, cellular neurophysiology/imaging).
recruit.apo.ucla.edu/JPF09885

Finally, we looked to see how all this representational change related to behavior. Regardless of how a pair was learned or the semantic relatedness of the pair, more representational change in the cue was associated with a higher probability of recall.

Then, we looked at how the representational structure of individual words changed across learning - we showed that semantically related cues were drawn asymmetrically towards their targets, while semantically unrelated cues and targets were drawn together symmetrically.

Next, we showed that testing repelled words that were moderately related to the to-be-learned cues. Put another way, words that might have tripped up recall of our to-be-learned pairs were pushed further away in semantic space so they didn’t interfere with recall.

Using this measure, we first showed that words in semantically related pairs were drawn closer in representational space than those in semantically unrelated pairs.

This gave us a sensitive measure of how the semantic representation of each of our words changed across learning.

The twist here was that we never directly asked them to make judgements on words in our to-be-learned pairs – we didn’t want them to have any top-down biases after learning. That meant that we had to impute these values using the relational judgements of the other words!

Just looking at accuracy doesn’t tell us about how this change happens, so we were inspired by neuroimaging analyses and had our participants do a drag-and-drop task where they judged how related words were to each other before and after learning.

At the final test, there was a smaller testing effect for semantically related pairs. Pre-existing semantic information rescued memory for the restudied pairs to make the difference between testing and restudying smaller!

We wanted to understand how these processes interact, so we had 80 participants learn semantically related and semantically unrelated pairs of words through either active retrieval practice or passive restudying.

In case you missed @crewalsh.bsky.social’s thread on the other network, I wanted to share our latest paper here. We used a novel approach to examine the representational underpinnings of the testing effect and the bidirectional interplay of episodic & semantic memory.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Every year when I teach about fMRI, I show this same crappy 1990’s era illustration of the subject setup. Is this really the best we have?? If you have a better figure, please send it my way!

Lab outing to celebrate my grad student Catherine Walsh’s (left) successful defense of her dissertation “Decomposing complex cognitive processes precious to understand individual differences in behavior”. She’s now off to NIMH to work with Peter Bandettini’s group. So proud of her accomplishments!