Memory & Cognition 

About: Memory & Cognition is an academic journal published by Springer Science+Business Media. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Recall & Free recall. It has an ISSN identifier of 0090-502X. Over the lifetime, 4903 publications have been published receiving 275784 citations. The journal is also known as: remembering & memory process.

Ad hoc categories

Abstract: People construct ad hoc categories to achieve goals. For example, constructing the category of “things to sell at a garage sale” can be instrumental to achieving the goal of selling unwanted possessions. These categories differ from common categories (e.g., “fruit,” “furniture”) in that ad hoc categories violate the correlational structure of the environment and are not well established in memory. Regarding the latter property, the category concepts, concept-to-instance associations, and instance-to-concept associations structuring ad hoc categories are shown to be much less established in memory than those of common categories. Regardless of these differences, however, ad hoc categories possess graded structures (i.e., typicality gradients) as salient as those structuring common categories. This appears to be the result of a similarity comparison process that imposes graded structure on any category regardless of type.

Lexical complexity and fixation times in reading: effects of word frequency, verb complexity, and lexical ambiguity.

Abstract: Two experiments investigated whether lexical complexity increases a word’s processing time. Subjects read sentences, each containing a target word, while their eye movements were monitored. In experiment 1, mean fixation time on infrequent words was longer than on their more frequent controls, as was the first fixation after the Infrequent Target. Fixation Times on Causative, factive, and negative verbs and ambiguous nouns were no longer than on their controls. Further analyses on the ambiguous nouns, however, suggested that the likelihood of their various meanings affected fixation time. This factor was investigated in experiment 2. subjects spent a longer time fixating ambiguous words with two equally likely meanings than fixating ambiguous words with one highly likely meaning. The results suggest that verb complexity does not affect lexical access time, and that word frequency And the presence of two highly likely meanings may affect lexical access and/or postaccess integration.

Priming of pop-out: I. Role of features

Abstract: We examined a visual search task, in which observers responded to the high-acuity aspect of a popout target (shape of an odd-colored diamond or vernier offset of an odd spatial-frequency patch) Repetition of the attention-driving feature (color or spatial frequency) in this task primes the popout; repetition of the high-acuity aspect (shape, vernier offset) does not Priming of pop-out is due to a decaying memory trace of the attention-focusing feature laid down with each trial The trace exerts a diminishing effect over the following five to eight trials (≈30 sec), and its influence over this time is cumulative Observers cannot willfully overcome the priming, which suggests that it is passive and autonomous Both target facilitation and distractor inhibition are evident; the former has a greater effect The phenomenon shows complete binocular transfer

Functional aspects of recollective experience.

Abstract: The functional relationship between recognition memory and conscious awareness was examined in two experiments in which subjects indicated when recognizing a word whether or not they could consciously recollect its prior occurrence in the study list. Both levels of processing and generation effects were found to occur only for recognition accompanied by conscious recollection. Recognition in the absence of conscious recollection, although less likely, was generally reliable and uninfluenced by encoding conditions. These results are consistent with dual-process theories of recognition, which assume that recognition and priming in implicit memory have a common component. And they strengthen the case for making a functional distinction between episodic memory and other memory systems.

Remembering and knowing: Two means of access to the personal past

Abstract: The nature of recollective experience was examined in a recognition memory task. Subjects gave “remember” judgments to recognized items that were accompanied by conscious recollection and “know” judgments to items that were recognized on some other basis. Although a levels-of-processing effect (Experiment 1) and a picture-superiority effect (Experiment 2) were obtained for overall recognition, these effects occurred only for “remember” judgments, and were reversed for “know” judgments. In Experiment 3, targets and lures were either preceded by a masked repetition of their own presentation (thought to increase perceptual fluency) or of an unrelated word. The effect of perceptual fluency was obtained for overall recogrntion and “know” judgments but not for “remember” judgments. The data obtained for confidencejudgments using the same design (Experiment4) indicated that “remember”/”know” judgments are not made solely on the basis of confidence. These data support the two-factor theories of recognition memory by dissociating two forms of recognition, and shed light on the nature of conscious recollection.