A test battery for the assessment of associative memory

Abstract

Associative memory (AM) is the ability to remember and retrieve multiple pieces of information bound together. Here we present a test battery for the assessment of AM consisting of three tasks assessing both associative recall and recognition - Face-word (FW), Face-object (FO), and Object location (OL) task; each designed in four parallel forms. FW and FO tasks have the same structure: 1) learning block in which 30 face-word/face-object pairs are sequentially presented (2500ms), 2) recall block in which previously seen faces are presented and the participant's task is to recall the word/object previously associated with a given face, 3) recognition block in which participants are presented with 30 previously seen pairs mixed with 30 rearranged pairs where they need to decide if each pair is “old” or “new”. The OL task consists of: 1) a learning block of 32 trials in which images of different animals are quasi-randomly presented (2500ms) in a 4x4 matrix; 2) in the recall block, participants are asked to indicate the location in the matrix where each stimulus was previously presented; 3) in the recognition block they make judgments on whether a stimulus has been previously presented at a given location or not (32 “new” and 32 “old”). All tasks are programmed in OpenSesame and freely available. To assess psychometric properties three randomly selected subsamples of participants (N1 = 24, N2 = 27, N3 = 33) completed each of the four forms of the same AM tasks in counterbalanced order. The results have shown satisfactory reliability (recall FW α = .74-.84, FO α = .59-.76, OL α = .78-.86; recognition FW α = .76-.86, FO α = .74-.85, OL α = .76-.85), as well full range of difficulties (average accuracies for recall FW 20.3%, FO 21.9%, OL 51.5%; recognition FW 70.2%, FO 70.8%, OL 73.7%). Finally, within each task, parallel forms have shown satisfactory convergence (ICC) for both recall (.71-.87) and recognition (.80-.86). The use of AM tasks in different experimental designs will be discussed.