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John Thorp

@johnthorp.bsky.social

psychology phd candidate at columbia studying how catecholamines guide memory updating

John Thorp @johnthorp.bsky.social · 09/12/2025

that's not the case for the high confidence recognition, but interestingly we do see that our non-generalizers have worse location memory for the items within the shocked scene, relative to the unshocked scene (bottom right).

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John Thorp @johnthorp.bsky.social · 09/12/2025

First, on the top, we show that our nervous nellies who become afraid of beaches generally recreate our effect from experiment 1, down to mostly decreasing false alarms to congruent foils. bass drop.

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John Thorp @johnthorp.bsky.social · 09/12/2025

I then make a basic generalization measure based on the shock expectancy ratings (top). this generalization was related to the skin conductance response to the unshocked scene (bottom left, sick) as well as the state anxiety they reported at the beginning of the experiment (bottom middle, whoa)

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John Thorp @johnthorp.bsky.social · 09/12/2025

what if i told you that participants ran the full gamut of attributing the shock fully to the shocked beach, attributing the shock fully to every beach, with some lying somewhere in the middle. we get this from the shock expectancy ratings of subjects 1, 2, and 3 (respectively) in the top figure

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John Thorp @johnthorp.bsky.social · 09/12/2025

but while confident recognition increased, we got a nice dissociation where participants had worse specific location memory for incongruent objects. if it walks like systems-level consolidation, and it talks like systems-level consolidation..

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John Thorp @johnthorp.bsky.social · 09/12/2025

now on the memory test, we see a new pattern of results where high-confidence recognition is increased for both incongruent and congruent items. this effect is constant for the shocked and unshocked scene (which is unsurprising considering how bad participants were at the source memory)

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John Thorp @johnthorp.bsky.social · 09/12/2025

To get closer to the latter, we split our beach schema into a CS+ (shocked) scene and CS- (unshocked) scene. Ostensibly, one should be learning that "myrtle beach" (shocked) sucks and "wrightsville beach" (unshocked) rules (or is at least better than myrtle)

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John Thorp @johnthorp.bsky.social · 09/12/2025

now, two interesting things: 1) no effect on the incongruent items, so, seemingly, the way we structured conditioning didn't touch those one-shot, episodic encounters. and 2) the effect in the congruent items was mostly driven by a reduction in false alarms to the congruent foils

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John Thorp @johnthorp.bsky.social · 09/12/2025

24 hours later on a surprise memory test for the objects, we generalized the RME such that participants showed improved recognition for the congruent items from the schema that went on to be shocked. critically, as for all retroactive effects, the objects were neutral at the time of encoding.

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John Thorp @johnthorp.bsky.social · 09/12/2025

we set up the experiment as the cleanest combination of a typical RME and a schema congruent vs. incongruent study as we could. participants saw a scene of a beach come on screen, rated a bunch of objects as congruent or incongruent, and after 60 trials of this were conditioned to fear the beach.

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