The influence of prior knowledge on the formation of detailed and durable memories. BELLANA, B.1,3, MANSOUR, R.2, LADYKA-WOJCIK, N.3, GRADY, C. L.3,4,5 & MOSCOVITCH, M.3,4 1Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences, Johns Hopkins University; 2Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania; 3Department of Psychology, University of Toronto; 4Rotman Research Institute, Baycrest; 5Department of Psychiatry, University of Toronto Authors’ Note: Correspondence can be addressed to Buddhika Bellana (
[email protected]), Cheryl Grady (
[email protected]), or Morris Moscovitch (
[email protected]). This research was supported by a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) grant to M.M. (no. A8347), a Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) grant to C.L.G. (no. MOP-143311), and scholarships awarded to B.B. from NSERC and the Ontario Graduate Scholarship program. Data are publicly available on the Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/fqrhj/). The influence of prior knowledge on the formation of detailed and durable memories. BELLANA, B.1,3, MANSOUR, R.2, LADYKA-WOJCIK, N.3, GRADY, C. L.3,4,5 & MOSCOVITCH, M.3,4 1Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences, Johns Hopkins University; 2Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania; 3Department of Psychology, University of Toronto; 4Rotman Research Institute, Baycrest; 5Department of Psychiatry, University of Toronto Prior knowledge often improves recognition, but its relationship to the retrieval of memory detail is unclear. Resource-based accounts of recognition suggest that familiar stimuli are more efficiently encoded into memory, thus freeing attentional resources to encode additional details from a study episode. However, schema-based theories would predict that activating prior knowledge can lead to the formation of more generalized representations in memory.