Showing papers in "Memory & Cognition in 1984"

Pre- and postlexical loci of contextual effects on word recognition

Abstract: The context in which a word occurs could influence either the actual decoding of the word or a postrecognition judgment of the relatedness of word and context. In this research, we investigated the loci of contextual effects that occur in lexical priming, when prime and target words are related along different dimensions. Both lexical decision and naming tasks were used because previous research had suggested that they are differentially sensitive to postlexical processing. Semantic and associative priming occurred with both tasks. Other facilitative contextual effects, due to syntactic relations between words, backward associations, or changes in the proportion of related items, occurred only with the lexical decision task. The results indicate that only associative and semantic priming facilitate the decoding of a target; the other effects are postlexical. The results are related to the different demands of the naming and lexical decision tasks, and to current models of word recognition.

Memory for unattended events: Remembering with and without awareness.

Abstract: The effects of memory for unattended events—for example, events that occur while a person is asleep, anesthetized, or selectively attending to other ongoing events, as in a speech-shadowing task—are rarely revealed in tests of retention that require remembering to be deliberate or intentional. Might such effects become evident in tests that do not demand awareness of remembering? Results of the present shadowing study, involving the recognition and spelling of previously unattended homophones, suggest an affirmative answer to this question.

Bilinguals in a monolingual and a bilingual speech mode: The effect on lexical access

Abstract: The time course of lexical access in fluent Portuguese-English bilinguals and in English speaking monolinguals was examined during the on-line processing of spoken sentences using the phoneme-triggered lexical decision task (Blank, 1980). The bilinguals were tested in two distinct speech modes: a monolingual, English or Portuguese, speech mode, and a bilingual, code-switching, speech mode. Although the bilingual’s lexical decision response times to word targets in the monolingual speech modes were identical to those of the monolingual subjects, their response times to code-switched word targets in the bilingual mode were significantly slower. In addition, the bilinguals took longer to detect nonwords in both the monolingual and bilingual modes. These results confirm that bilinguals cannot totally deactivate their other language when in a monolingual speech mode. It is hypothesized that bilinguals search both lexicons when confronted with nonwords, even when in a totally monolingual mode, and that they search the base-language lexicon before the other lexicon when in a bilingual, code-switching, speech mode.

A word’s meaning affects the decision in lexical decision

Abstract: The influence of an isolated word’s meaning on lexical decision reaction time (RT) was demonstrated through four experiments. Subjects in two experiments made lexical decision judgments, those in a third experiment pronounced the words used in the lexical decision task, and those in a fourth experiment quickly pronounced their first associative response to the words. Differences in lexical access time for the words were measured with the pronunciation task, and differences in meaning were assessed with the association task. Multiple regression analyses of lexical decision RT were conducted using associative RT, pronunciation RT, and other target word properties (printed frequency, length, instance dominance, and number of dictionary meanings) as predictor variables. These analyses revealed a relationship between lexical decision RT and associative RT after the effects of other variables had been partialed out. In addition, word frequency continued to have a significant relationship to lexical decision RT beyond that shared with pronunciation RT and the other variables. The results of these experiments indicate that at least some of the effect of word meaning and word frequency in lexical decision is attributable to a decision stage following lexical access.

Retrieval inhibition from part-set cuing: A persisting enigma in memory research

Abstract: When people are asked to recall words from a list they have just studied or to produce as many items as possible from a well-known category (e.g., states of the United States), having available a subset of the items as cues often does not facilitate retrieval of the remaining items and sometimes inhibits it. The finding has been obtained many times with a variety of experimental tasks including recall from categorized and noncategorized lists and retrieval from very long-term memory. This paper reviews the studies that have yielded the effect, and considers several explanations of it that have been proposed. None of these explanations is viewed to be entirely adequate and compelling.

Children's and adults' use of spelling-sound information in three reading tasks

Abstract: This research examined the effects of irregular spelling and irregular spelling-sound correspondences on word recognition in children and adults. Previous research has established that, among skilled readers, these irregularities influence the reading of only lower frequency words. However, this research involved the lexical decision and naming tasks, which differ from the demands of normal reading in important ways. In the present experiments, we compared performance on these tasks with that on a task requiring words to be recognized in sentence contexts. Results indicated that adults showed effects of spelling and spelling-sound irregularities in reading lower frequency words on all three tasks, whereas younger and poorer readers also showed effects on higher frequency words. The fact that irregular spelling-sound correspondences affected performance on the sentence task indicates that access of phonological information is not an artifact of having to read a word aloud or perform a lexical decision. Two other developmental trends were observed: As children became more skilled in reading, the effects of irregular spelling were overcome before the effects of irregular spelling-sound correspondences; the latter effects were eliminated on silent reading tasks earlier than on the naming task.

Division of attention: age differences on a visually presented memory task.

Abstract: Young and old adults were compared in their efficiency of remembering concurrently presented series of letters and digits in three separate experiments. Instructions and payoffs to vary attentional emphasis across the two types of material in different conditions allowed the examination of attention-operating characteristics in the two age groups. Strategy-independent measures derived from these attention-operating characteristics revealed that older adults exhibited greater performance deficits than young adults when dividing their attention between the two tasks, even though dual-task difficulty was individually adjusted for each subject. It was concluded that either the total amount of attention available for distribution or the efficiency of its allocation decreased with age even though the ability to vary one’s attention between concurrent tasks in response to instructions and payoffs remained intact.

Typicality and familiarity of faces

Abstract: We examined context-free familiarity information as a source of the effects of face typicality upon face recognition. Experiment 1 tested memory for typical and unusual faces by (1) subjects who received an input list followed immediately by a recognition test (standard condition), (2) subjects who viewed all test faces (targets and lures) prior to the input list (prefamiliarization condition), and (3) subjects who viewed all test faces after the input list but prior to recognition (postfamiliarization condition). Although false-alarm errors in the standard condition were lower for unusual than for typical faces, this effect was reduced by postfamiliarization and was eliminated entirely by prefamiliarization. The prefamiliarization and typicality effects were replicated in Experiment 2, which showed that patterns of old judgments were compatible with the hypothesis that, although familiarity of new faces is greater if these faces are typical, the increment in familiarity that results from presentation is greater if these faces are unusual.

Contextual effects on metaphor comprehension in reading

Abstract: Subjects read target sentences preceded by either short or long context that induced either a metaphoric or a literal target reading. As had been found by Ortony, Schallert, Reynolds, and Antos (1978), metaphoric targets were comprehended about as quickly as literals when context was long, but more slowly than literals when context was short. The latter result may have been due to the failure of computing a conceptual relationship between short context and metaphoric target; targets unrelated to prior context took as long to comprehend as metaphoric targets. Another experiment showed that metaphorically expressed targets were read more quickly when they followed metaphorically expressed context than when they followed literal context, but literal targets were read quickest when they followed literal context. These results are discussed within a schema framework and within a “process priming” hypothesis.

Parallel structure: a source of facilitation in sentence comprehension.

Abstract: Reading time for the second clause of a conjoined sentence was found to be faster when the clause was structurally similar to the first clause than when the clausal structures differed. This “parallel structure” effect was found for each of several types of structures, including active versus passive constructions, direct object versus sentential complement (minimal vs. nonminimal attachment), nonshifted versus shifted heavy noun phrase, agent versus theme, and animate versus inanimate noun phrase. The pervasiveness of the effect ruled out some hypotheses about its basis, including the hypothesis that it would occur only when a subject’s just having processed a structure would affect how temporary ambiguities are resolved. Detailed analysis of the data suggested the existence of several distinct sources of the effect and provided indirect evidence that people typically compute both a surface structure and an S-structure representation of a sentence.

The effects of information order and learning mode on schema abstraction.

Abstract: Three experiments investigated the effects of information order and representativeness on schema abstraction in a category learning task. A set of category members, in which the variability and frequency of member types were correlated, was divided into four study samples. In the high-variance condition, each sample was representative of the allowable variation in the category and the frequency with which it occurred. In the low-variance condition, the initial study sample focused only on the most frequently occurring category members. Subsequent samples gradually introduced exemplars, and hence additional variance, from remaining member types. After the fourth study sample, all subjects in all conditions had seen the same category members. Experiment 1 revealed that transfer performance was better if subjects began with a low-variance sample and were gradually introduced to the allowable variation on subsequent samples than if they consistently saw representative samples. Experiments 2 and 3 suggested that this information-order effect may interact with learning mode: Subjects induced to be more analytic about the material performed better if their initial and subsequent samples were representative of the category variation.

Facilitation of auditory word recognition.

Abstract: An experiment that investigated facilitation of recognition of spoken words presented in noise IS described, Prior to the test session, the subjects either read words or heard them spoken in one of two. voices while making a semantic judgment upon them. There was a large effect of auditory priming on word recognition that did not depend upon the voice (male or female) of presentation, There were much smaller, but significant, effects of prior visual experience of the words. The implications of these data for the logogen model are discussed.

Memory for faces: encoding and retrieval operations.

Abstract: The reliable finding that trait judgments of faces yield better recognition memory than do feature judgments of faces is conceptualized as an encoding-specificity effect. Specifically, both trait-judgment encodings of faces and face-recognition tests are argued to be holistic, involving topographical information with between-feature processing. Consistent with the concept that encoding and retrieval operations interact to produce retrieval success, it was expected that a memory-for-face test using the Identi-kit (which requires reconstructions of the face at a feature level of analysis) would show trait-encoding tasks to be inferior to feature-encoding tasks. Eighty subjects were assigned randomly to judge a face on 10 trait dimensions (e.g., honesty-dishonesty) or on 10 feature dimensions (e.g., narrow nose-wide nose) and subsequently attempted to recognize the target among five distractors or to reconstruct the face from an Identi-kit. The significant interaction between encoding and retrieval operations indicated that the face was best identified under trait-encoding conditions but best reconstructed under feature-encoding conditions. The match between trait encoding and recognition in yielding high memory performance suggests strongly that trait judgments foster holistic processing of faces (i.e., interfeature topographical information is p-art of the context) and that the recognition of faces also is holistic. Finally, the utility of the feature- vs. holistic-processing distinction is questioned, and an alternative is proposed.

Lexical decision in sentences: Effects of syntactic structure

Abstract: A lexical decision paradigm was used to examine syntactic influence on word recognition in sentences. Initial fragments of sentences were presented visually (CRT display) one word at a time (at reading speeds), from left to right. The string terminated with the appearance of a lexical decision target. The grammatical structure of the incomplete sentence affected lexical decision reaction time (RT). In Experiment 1, modal verb contexts followed by main verb targets and preposition contexts followed by noun targets produced lower RTs than did the opposite pairings (i.e., modal/noun and preposition/verb). In Experiment 2, transitive verb contexts followed by noun targets and subject noun phrase contexts followed by verb targets yielded lower RTs than did the opposite pairings. Similar contrasts for adjective targets did not yield comparable effects in Experiment 2, but did when the adjective was the head of a predictable phrase (Experiment 4). In Experiment 3, noun targets yielded lower RTs than did verb targets after contexts of a transitive verb followed by a prepositional phrase. An account of these effects is offered in terms of parsing constraints on phrasal categories.

The similarity and diversity of semantic relations

Abstract: There is a rich variety of semantic relations in natural languages. Subjects’ perceptions of similarities among relations were studied for a wider variety of relations than had been used in previous studies. Forty subjects sorted 31 cards bearing five example pairs of each of 31 semantic relations. Subjects were able both to distinguish the relations and to perceive their similarities. A hierarchical clustering analysis of the sorting data indicated that the subjects perceived five families of semantic relations (contrasts, class inclusion, similars, case relations, and part-wholes). The five families were distinguished in terms of three properties of semantic relations: contrasting/noncontrasting, logical/pragmatic, and inclusion/noninclusion. Within each family, relations also were sorted in ways consistent with their defining properties. Relations were therefore viewed not as unanalyzable primitives, but in terms of the relational properties that distinguished them.

Why 2 + 2 = 5 looks so wrong: on the odd-even rule in sum verification.

Abstract: The odd-even status of a sum depends on the odd-even status of its addends. A sum must be odd if an odd number of its addends are odd; else it must be even. A proposed sum that violates the required odd-even status of the sum—that is, deviates from the correct sum, whether odd or even, by an odd value (e.g., splits of ±1, ±3, ±5)—can be rejected immediately as false. Subjects in the present study did indeed use the odd-even rule in sum verification, because they were as fast and accurate in rejecting a split of ±1 as one of ±2, and a split of ±3 as one of ±4, even though a larger split generally is easier to reject (symbolic distance effect), and splits of ±3 and ±4 were rejected faster and more accurately than those of ±1 and ±2. Performance on separate odd-even tasks indicated that the odd-even properties of numbers and sums are readily available for use by adults, and that persons who do well on such tasks are especially likely to use the odd-even rule in sum verification.

Incidental learning of event frequency

Abstract: Two experiments studied the effect of intentionality of learning on memory for the frequency of occurrence of words on a list. Subjects who learned the items intentionally in preparation for an unspecified memory test remembered frequency as accurately as did those who studied specifically for a frequency-estimation test. Both groups recalled frequency information more accurately than did a group that learned the words incidentally. These results. along with a review of the literature. suggest that there is no strong evidence for the automatic encoding of frequency information.

Recognizing familiar and unfamiliar faces.

Abstract: These experiments addressed why, in episodic-memory tests, familiar faces are recognized better than unfamiliar faces. Memory for faces of well-known public figures and unfamiliar persons was tested, not only with old/new recognition tests, in which initially viewed faces were discriminated from dis tractors, but also with tests of memory for specific information. These included: detail recall, in which a masked feature had to be described; orientation recognition, in which discrimination between originally seen faces and mirror-image reversals was required; and recognition and recall of labels for the public figures. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that memory for orientation and featural details was not robustly related either to facial familiarity or to old/new recognition rates. Experiment 3 showed that memory for labels was not the exclusive determinant of the famous-face advantage in recognition, since famous faces were highly recognizable even they were not labelable or when labels were forgotten. These results suggest that the familiarity effect, and face recognition in general, may reflect a nonverbal memory representation that is relatively abstract.

Diagnosticity and the base-rate effect.

Abstract: A common judgmental task involves predicting the category membership of an individual on the basis of information specific to that individual and background information regarding the base rate of different categories. According to statistical theory, predictions may deviate from base rates only to the extent that the individuating information is diagnostic. Previous research has demonstrated that diagnosticity is often judged by “representativeness,” the degree to which the individuating information is differentially suggestive of the different possible categories. Thus, information with high differential representativeness will swamp base-rate information even if it is almost worthless (e.g., because its source is unreliable). The present studies varied differential representativeness by manipulating the prediction categories’ similarity to one another vis-a-vis the individuating information. It was found that the effect of the base rate increased systematically as differential representativeness decreased. Representativeness was measured independently by several converging techniques. These measures predicted the magnitude of the base-rate effect, supporting the hypothesis that neutral stimuli are assigned to categories in proportion to the base rates.

Functional amnesia as induced by a psychological trauma.

Abstract: The present study was designed to elucidate whether factors of encoding (attention), storage (consolidation), retrieval (reconstruction), or combinations of these are responsible for amnesia due to exposure to psychologically traumatic events. Subjects in four experiments were preseated a series of slides consisting of photographs of faces, with each face accompanied by four verbal descriptors. For the control subjects, all faces were neutral. For the experimental subjects, faces in the middle of the series were horribly disfigured. Measurements of palmar and cardiac activity were made continuously during the stimulus presentation. Tests of free recall, cued recall, recognition, and cued recognition were used to measure memory performance of the verbal descriptors attached to the faces. Data from the physiological measurements and postexperimental interviews showed clearly that the emotional state wanted actually had been induced. Amnesia was found for items associated with the traumatic events. This finding was interpreted primarily in terms of encoding factors, but storage factors could not be excluded. Furthermore, anterograde amnesia was found in tests of recall but not of recognition, indicating that factors of encoding and retrieval but not of storage play a crucial role in this type of amnesia. Finally, no significant retrograde amnesia effects were obtained.

Using both an auditory and a visual short-term store to increase digit span

Abstract: Can digit span be increased by storing digits nonredundantly in both an auditory short-term store and a visual short-term store (dual storage)? In Experiment 1, when four digits were presented visually and then the remaining digits were presented auditorily, digit span increased three digits over a baseline measurement, but only when the auditorily presented digits were reported first (inverted response). Normal order of response for this presentation was not as effective. Possible reasons for the advantage of inverted response are suggested, based upon dual storage. For all-auditory and all-visual presentations that controlled for parsing, digit span increased only 1 to 1.5 digits over baseline, and inverted and normal order of response did not differ. Experiment 2 demonstrated that an improvement for dual storage could occur when the type of presentation was held constant and the order of response was normal rather than inverted. The results are consistent with the idea of separate auditory and visual short-term stores.

Semantic satiation affects category membership decision time but not lexical priming

Abstract: Experiments 1 and 2 examined the effects of semantic satiation on category membership decision latency. Subjects overtly repeated the name of a category either 3 or 30 times, and then decided whether or not a target exemplar was a member of the repeated category. Experiment 1 obtained some evidence that member decisions are slower and nonmember decisions are faster following 30 repetitions, but only the interaction was reliable. Experiment 2 confirmed only that member decisions are slower following satiation of the category name. The results support the hypothesis that prolonged repetition of a word reduces the availability of semantic information related to that word. Experiment 3 showed that the magnitude of priming in the lexical decision task is unaffected by satiation of the prime. Several general approaches to understanding semantic satiation are discussed. The most parsimonious account assumes that satiation affects the links or pathways connecting concepts in the satiated category. The net effect is to decrease the rate of search and associative spread of activation in conceptual structures.

Coactivation and comprehension: contribution of text variables to the illusion of knowing

Abstract: When a reader’s self-assessment of comprehension is high, but an objective assessment reveals that comprehension is faulty, an illusion of knowing has occurred. This illusion is observed when subjects who have been instructed to find contradictions between sentences in an otherwise coherent text fail to do so, but claim comprehension of the text. Three variables intended to modulate the frequency of contradiction detection and hence the illusion of knowing were manipulated. Illusions of knowing were more frequent when the contradictions involved inferences, when the contradictory sentences were in separate paragraphs, and when contradictory sentences used paraphrase to convey the same concepts. These effects are related to an activation account of contradiction detection.

Different slopes for different folks: Process analysis of spatial aptitude

Abstract: Adults differing in spatial ability were tested on problems involving the mental rotation of familiar alphanumeric stimuli and unfamiliar stimuli drawn from the Primary Mental Abilities Space Test. Individual differences in spatial ability were associated with speed rather than accuracy of mental rotation processes. Ability differences were correlated with the time to rotate familiar alphanumerics and the additional time to encode, compare, and rotate unfamiliar stimuli. The results are discussed in terms of differences in elementary information processes associated with the representation and transformation of visual information.

Infant search errors: Stage of concept development or stage of memory development

Abstract: An 8-to-I2-month-old infant, having found an object hidden at a first location (A), will fre­ quently continue to search at the A location when the object is moved, in full view of the infant, to a second location (B) and hidden there. In Piaget's (1954)theory of the way in which children acquire knowledge of the external world through actions, the occurrence of such AS(or Stage IV) search errors is considered to provide critical evidence that such infants are egocentrically con­ cerned with their own actions and do not yet appreciate the systematic nature of spatial rela­ tionships or the permanence of objects. The present research, however, casts serious doubt upon the considerable theoretical significance that has been attached to the AB error by demonstrat­ ing that it occurs primarily as an artifact of the almost universally employe.!! two-choice hiding task, which constrains all search errors made during B-hiding trials to be AB errors. In two ex­ periments using less constrained hiding tasks, infants demonstrated no tendency to search in­ correctly at the A location during B-hiding trials, and they produced a pattern of errors sup­ portive of the notion that search errors result from a memory problem rather than from a con­ ceptual one. A memory explanation is proposed to account for the present results as well as for search errors made throughout the sensorimotor period of development. In nearly every area of psychology, the errors subjects make when performing different types of tasks are used to make inferences concerning possible underlying processes or structures. In the study of infants, the errors they make while searching for hidden objects have served-since Piaget's (1954) original observations­ as a rich data source for making inferences about the cognitive development of children. One of the more intriguing and better known errors studied by Piaget (1954) and others is the so-called

Elaboration and knowledge acquisition

Abstract: Three experiments that explored the effects of different types of elaboration on knowledge acquisition are presented. The materials used were adapted from Stein and Bransford (1979) and were designed to simulate conceptual relationships encountered by people working in an unfamiliar domain. These materials were supplemented with elaborations that were designed to increase the distinctiveness of the memory trace, increase the distinctiveness of the memory trace while maintaining a high level of associative relatedness to key concepts, or reduce the arbitrariness of relationships among key concepts. The results replicate and extend previous research by showing that elaborations that reduce the arbitrariness of relationships facilitate both cued recall and recognition performance but that other types of elaborations appear to have little effect on performance. The implications of these results for theories of elaboration and knowledge acquisition are discussed.

A comparison of two techniques for reducing context-dependent forgetting

Abstract: Recall is poorer when tested in a new environment than when tested in the original learning context. Two techniques for reducing this context-dependent forgetting were compared. One technique involved instructing subjects to recall their learning room(s), and the other attempted to establish multiple environmental retrieval cues by presenting lists in multiple rooms rather than all in the same room. Subjects were given three word lists to study in one or three rooms. All subjects were given a free-recall test in a new room, and half were asked to use remembered environmental context (EC) information to facilitate word memory. Multiple input contexts benefited only subjects who were uninstructed in the use of EC cues. Subjects given EC-recall instructions, however, recalled somewhat less in the three-room condition than in the one-room condition. The facilitative effects of the two techniques were not additive: EC-recall instructions benefited only one-room subjects. The results suggest that both EC-recall instructions and mul­ tiple learning contexts induce subjects to use contextual retrieval cues that are otherwise not spontaneously utilized, and that the greater the number of context cues stored in memory, the less accessible those cues become. Context-dependent memory (COM) has referred typically to the common finding that recall tested in a new context is poorer than recall tested in the orig­

Is temporal order encoded automatically

Abstract: The reported experiment tested the suggestion that encoding of temporal order is automatic. Specifically, two of Hasher and Zacks’s (1979) automaticity criteria were examined: (1) that the amount and appropriateness of practice received would not affect acquisition of temporal information, and (2) that reliable individual differences would not be found on a test of memory for temporal order. Contrary to expectations, neither of these criteria was confirmed: Retention of temporal order increased with practice at three (or four) successive lists. And, reliable individual differences were indicated by the findings that subjects’ relative performance levels remained stable across lists, and that groups with higher average academic ability outperformed those with lower ability. Similar results were obtained for a flee-recall task (in which case they were expected). Problems of assessing degrees of nonautomaticity are discussed. Our data are seen to be in general conformity with Tzeng’s (e.g., Tzeng & Cotton, 1980) “study-phase” retrieval theory of temporal coding.

Optimal learning strategies and their spontaneous use: The importance of task-appropriate processing

Abstract: College students were given three verbal learning tasks to perform, with some subjects instructed to use a particular verbal or imaginal encoding strategy for all three tasks and other subjects not instructed to use any particular strategy. It was found that the relative effectiveness of the assigned encoding strategies varied as a function of the learning task. In addition, “uninstructed” subjects, for the most part, spontaneously employed strategies that produced recall comparable to that observed for subjects assigned the most effective strategy for a particular learning task. In Experiment 2, subjects were instructed to perform a different encoding strategy for each learning task. Subjects who were assigned the strategies in a “task-appropriate” fashion recalled more, in general, than subjects who were assigned the same strategies paired with the learning tasks in a haphazard fashion. Subjects not instructed to use a particular strategy again demonstrated relatively high recall and were found to vary processing across learning tasks. It was concluded that optimal learning for a range of tasks can require deployment of several semantic/elaborative strategies in a task-appropriate fashion. Furthermore, mature learners seem to spontaneously utilize semantic and imaginal strategies and do so task appropriately.

Establishing and accessing referents in discourse.

Abstract: Four experiments explored the processes by which people understand references. Subjects read naturalistic stories one sentence at a time, and their reading-comprehension times were recorded. The first two experiments investigated differences between definite and indefinite reference. Their results suggest that establishing a new discourse referent (as indicated by an indefinite article or pronoun) produces longer comprehension times than referring to an already existing referent. The last two experiments investigated reference to one versus two discourse referents. They showed that accessing more referents led to longer reading times even when the referring sentences were identical. The results are explained in terms of a discourse model approach to comprehension. According to this view, readers construct a mental model of the discourse domain, and the ease of comprehension is related (in part) to the number of elements in the model that are accessed and the operations performed on them.