Showing papers on "Semantic memory published in 1989"
TL;DR: It is hypothesized that people possess implicit theories regarding the inherent consistency of their attributes, as well as a set of principles concerning the conditions that are likely to promote personal change or stability as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: It is hypothesized that people possess implicit theories regarding the inherent consistency of their attributes, as well as a set of principles concerning the conditions that are likely to promote personal change or stability. The nature of these theories is discussed in the context of a study of beliefs about life-span development. It is then suggested that people use their implicit theories of self to construct their personal histories. This formulation is used to interpret the results of a wide-ranging set of studies of memory of personal attributes. It is concluded that implicit theories of stability and change can lead to biases in recall. The extent and practical implications of these biases are discussed. Personal memories play an important role in people's everyday lives. Individuals dwell on their pasts for a variety of reasons including entertainment (for others' amusement, people fashion stories out of their lives), curiosity (gazing at their teenage children, parents might wonder what they, themselves, were like as teenagers), and the need to achieve self-understanding. People can study the past to learn about their preferences, abilities, and so forth. Personal recollections are also used to control and manipulate public images. Published autobiographies have served this function for hundreds of years (Korda, 1987). In short, people's personal memories are relevant to some of the traditional concerns of social psychologists, including selfunderstanding and self-presentation. Furthermore, much psychological research depends on personal recall. For example, not so long ago, psychologists formulated theories of development on the basis of parents' retrospective descriptions of their child-rearing practices. We now know that such descriptions may be invalid, and seek more direct evidence (Yarrow, Campbell, & Burton, 1970). Nonetheless, researchers and practitioners continue to make considerable use of retrospective self-reports. These include reports of voting, medical care, purchases, and finances. On the basis of such self-reports, social scientists evaluate theories of human behavior and offer advice on public policy. For a number of reasons, then, it is important to know how personal memories are formed and how accurate they maybe. In 1972, Tulving proposed what has become a widely accepted distinction between episodic and semantic memory. Episodic memory contains information that is coded both temporally and with reference to the rememberer, semantic memory stores general world knowledge that carries neither temporal nor autobiographical codes. In the present article, I examine a
1,472 citations
TL;DR: The findings indicate that autobiographical and personal semantic memory show a consistent pattern of impairment, when a comparison is made which controls for the age of the memories and the subject's own past experience.
Abstract: This paper describes a new technique for assessing "autobiographical" and "personal semantic" memory in amnesic patients and healthy controls. It provides evidence of the reliability and validity of the procedure, and reports an age-related temporal gradient in amnesic patients. The results are considered in terms of the severity, the rate of onset, and the duration of the amnesia; and a preliminary analysis is given of the findings in different diagnostic groups. The findings indicate that autobiographical and personal semantic memory show a consistent pattern of impairment, when a comparison is made which controls for the age of the memories and the subject's own past experience.
887 citations
TL;DR: The results for the PD patients suggest that the demented PD patients have endured damage to the neurologic systems subserving both motor learning and lexical priming.
Abstract: The performances of patients with dementia of the Alzheimer type (DAT), patients with Huntington's disease (HD), and demented and nondemented patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) were compared on 2 tests of implicit memory that do not require the conscious recollection of prior study episodes: (1) a pursuit-rotor motor learning task and (2) a lexical priming test. The HD patients were found to be impaired on the motor learning but not the lexical priming task, whereas the DAT patients evidenced the opposite relationship on these tasks. The demented, but not the nondemented, PD patients were found to be impaired on both tests of implicit memory. For both the HD and PD patients, deficits on the motor learning task correlated significantly with severity of dementia but not with level of primary motor dysfunction. The noted double dissociation between HD and DAT patients indicates that different forms of implicit memory, all of which are intact in amnesia, are dependent upon distinct neuroanatomic systems. Motor skill learning may be mediated by a corticostriatal system, whereas verbal priming may depend upon the integrity of the neocortical association areas involved in the storage of semantic knowledge. The results for the PD patients suggest that the demented PD patients have endured damage to the neurologic systems subserving both motor learning and lexical priming.
595 citations
TL;DR: Stroop-like effects were generated by modally pure color-color, picture-picture, and word-word stimuli instead of the usual modally mixed color-word or picture- word stimuli but unexpectedly showed a semantic gradient only in the naming and not in the reading task.
Abstract: Presents a series of 6 experiments in which Stroop-like effects were generated by modally pure color-color, picture-picture, and word-word stimuli instead of the usual modally mixed color-word or picture-word stimuli. Naming, reading, and categorization tasks were applied. The Stroop inhibition was preserved with these stimuli but unexpectedly showed a semantic gradient only in the naming and not in the reading task. Word categorizing was slower and more interference prone than picture categorizing. These and other results can be captured by a model with two main assumptions: (a) semantic memory and the lexicon are separate, and (b) words have privileged access to the lexicon, whereas pictures and colors have privileged access to the semantic network. Such a model is developed and put to an initial test.
550 citations
520 citations
01 Jan 1989
TL;DR: This chapter discusses the development and nature of Implicit Memory, as well as the role of theory and models, and their applications to human and animal memory.
Abstract: Contents: Part I:Introduction. R.S. Lockhart, The Role of Theory in Understanding Implicit Memory. Part II:Characterizing Implicit Memory. J.C. Dunn, K. Kirsner, Implicit Memory: Task or Process? W. Hirst, On Consciousness, Recall, Recognition, and the Architecture of Memory. D.L. Schacter, J. Bowers, J. Booker, Intention, Awareness, and Implicit Memory: The Retrieval Intentionality Criterion. H.L. Roediger, K. Srinivas, M.S. Weldon, Dissociations Between Implicit Measures of Retention. Part III:Theories and Models. E.U. Weber, B.B. Murdock, Priming in a Distributed Memory System: Implications for Models of Implicit Memory. K. Kirsner, J.C. Dunn, P. Standen, Domain-Specific Resources in Word Recognition. M.E.J. Masson, Fluent Preprocessing as an Implicit Expression of Memory for Experience. M.S. Humphreys, J.D. Bain, J.S. Burt, Episodically Unique and Generalized Memories: Applications to Human and Animal Amnesics. Part IV:Processes and Representations. C.M. MacLeod, J.N. Bassili, Are Implicit and Explicit Tests Differentially Sensitive to Item-Specific vs. Associative Information? L-G. Nilsson, L. B ckman, Implicit Memory and the Enactment of Verbal Instructions. S. Lewandowsky, K. Kirsner, V. Bainbridge, Context Effects in Implicit Memory: A Sense Specific Account. M. Carroll, Implicit Memory: Compatibility Between Study-Test Operations. S. Kinoshita, Masked and Unmasked Repetition Effects: Activation of Representation or Procedure? Part V:Development and Learning. A.J. Parkin, The Development and Nature of Implicit Memory. K. Durkin, Implicit Memory and Language Acquisition. J.G. Snodgrass, Sources of Learning in the Picture Fragment Completion Task. Part VI:Comment. M. Coltheart, Implicit Memory and the Functional Architecture of Cognition.
436 citations
TL;DR: Performance of Alzheimer patients on tests of various aspects of semantic memory, including word finding, knowledge of the semantic attributes, and associates of concepts, as well as their category membership is reviewed.
Abstract: Patients with Alzheimer's disease have been suggested to have a semantic memory impairment not present in the normal old. This article reviews the performance of Alzheimer patients on tests of various aspects of semantic memory, including word finding, knowledge of the semantic attributes, and associates of concepts, as well as their category membership. The effect that semantic context has on cognitive processes such as lexical and semantic priming and memory encoding is also reviewed. Finally, the ability of theoretical constructs such as implicit memory and automaticity to explain intertask variability in Alzheimer patients' semantic performance is discussed.
402 citations
TL;DR: It is concluded that both patient groups show a retrieval deficit in remote memory, that a superimposed anterograde impairment produces the steeper temporal gradient in Korsakoff patients, and that the deficit in temporal context memory is unlikely to be related to frontal atrophy or frontal dysfunction.
351 citations
TL;DR: Age by memory task dissociations, the manipulation of codability produced slower naming latencies and more naming errors, yet promoted better recall and recognition (episodic memory).
Abstract: The present research tested Tulving's (1985) ternary memory theory. Young (ages 19-32) and older (ages 63-80) adults were given procedural, semantic, and episodic memory tasks. Repetition, lag, and codability were manipulated in a picture-naming task, followed by incidental memory tests. Relative to young adults, older adults exhibited lower levels of recall and recognition, but these episodic measures increased similarly as a function of lag and repetition in both age groups. No age-related deficits emerged in either semantic memory (vocabulary, latency slopes, naming errors, and tip-of-the-tongue responses) or procedural memory (repetition priming magnitude and rate of decline). In addition to the age by memory task dissociations, the manipulation of codability produced slower naming latencies and more naming errors (semantic memory), yet promoted better recall and recognition (episodic memory). Finally, a factor analysis of 11 memory measures revealed three distinct factors, providing additional support for a tripartite memory model.
262 citations
TL;DR: The series of experiments demonstrated that two very different tasks—speeded judgment of evaluative meaning and nonspeeded judgment of word position—yielded statistically significant and replicable influences of the semantic content of apparently undetectable words.
Abstract: In three experiments, the subjects' task was to decide whether each of a series of words connoted something good (e.g.,fame, comedy, rescue) or bad(stress, detest, malaria). One-half second before the presentation of each such target word, an evaluatively polarized priming word was presented briefly to the nondominant eye and was masked dichoptically by either the rapidly following (Experiment 1) or simultaneous (Experiments 2 and 3) presentation of a random letter-fragment pattern to the dominant eye. (The effectiveness of the masking procedure was demonstrated by the subjects' inability to discriminate the left vs. right position of a test series of words.) In all experiments, significant masked priming effects were obtained; evaluative decisions to congruent masked prime-target combinations (such as a positive masked prime followed by a positive target) were significantly faster than those to incongruent (e.g., negative prime/positive target) or noncongruent (e.g., neutral prime/positive target) combinations. Also, in two of the three experiments, when subjects were at chance accuracy in discriminating word position, their position judgments were nevertheless significantly influenced by the irrelevant semantic content (LEFT vs. RIGHT) of the masked position-varying words. The series of experiments demonstrated that two very different tasks—speeded judgment of evaluative meaning and nonspeeded judgment of word position—yielded statistically significant and replicable influences of the semantic content of apparently undetectable words. Coupled with previous research by others using the lexical decision task, these findings converge in establishing the reliability of the empirical phenomenon of semantic processing of words that are rendered undetectable bydichoptic pattern masking.
TL;DR: A 40-yr-old woman, K.S., who showed a severe loss of memory for people following a history of epilepsy and right anterior temporal lobeectomy was reported in this paper.
Abstract: A 40-yr-old woman, K.S., is reported, who shows a severe loss of memory for people following a history of epilepsy and right anterior temporal lobectomy. Despite this memory problem, K.S. is not clinically amnesic, has a Memory Quotient of 122 on the Wechsler Memory Scale in line with her IQ of 119, and performs well on conventional tests of recognition and recall. She does not have a generalized semantic memory deficit for living things, but her deficit extends beyond people to include famous animals, buildings and product names. Autobiographical memory is good, except where memory for people is concerned. The nature of the memory store that is impaired in K.S. is discussed, as are the implications of her case for theories of the organization of long-term memory.
TL;DR: In six patients with probable Alzheimer's disease (AD), greater semantic priming was found relative to age-matched normals in a primed lexical decision task and off-line tests of comprehension.
TL;DR: In this article, the relation between three aspects of memory (behaviour, knowledge, and experience) is discussed and four examples of this research are briefly reviewed: repetition priming, source amnesia, remembering vs knowing and neural correlates of episodic and semantic memory as revealed by regional cerebral blood flow.
Abstract: The relation between three aspects of memory—behaviour, knowledge, and conscious experience—is discussed. Memory research of the past has tended to concentrate on memory performance, and to neglect memory as conscious experience. This neglect may reflect the acceptance of a tacit assumption that behaviour, knowledge, and experience are closely correlated, an assumption designated here as the doctrine of concordance. Some recent research, explicitly concerned with conscious experience in remembering, has thrown doubt on concordance as a general rule. Four examples of this research are briefly reviewed: repetition priming, source amnesia, remembering vs knowing, and neural correlates of episodic and semantic memory as revealed by regional cerebral blood flow. This research suggests that there is no general correlation between memory performance, retrieved knowledge, and conscious recollective experience, and that these relations in different situations must be discovered rather than just postulated...
TL;DR: Results indicate the need to incorporate age of onset of seizures into laterality models of memory function following unilateral temporal-hippocampal resection and suggest a "crowding effect" was suggested by the decline in figural memory following surgery in early onset LT patients who remained stable or improved in semantic memory.
TL;DR: The present study was aimed at assessing the nature of the breakdown in the semantic memory of a prosopagnosic patient, by orthogonally varying category and modality, while assessing difficulty level.
TL;DR: Analysis of the language function of patients with transcortical sensory aphasia, of the influence of sensory modalities on language function, and of the interaction between semantic memory and semantic lexical functions suggests the existence of a specific brain system for semantic functions.
Abstract: • We examined four patients with transcortical sensory aphasia and eight with milder language disturbances but with similar thalamic and/or temporo-occipital lesions. Specific attention was paid to differentiation of the computed tomographic lesion site of the milder cases from the transcortical sensory aphasia cases. The critical lesion for transcortical sensory aphasia in these patients involved pathways in the posterior periventricular white matter adjacent to the posterior temporal isthmus, pathways that are probably converging on the inferolateral temporo-occipital cortex. Analysis of the language function of these patients, of the influence of sensory modalities on language function, and of the interaction between semantic memory and semantic lexical functions suggests the existence of a specific brain system for semantic functions. This semantic system has a particular distributed anatomy. We propose that damage to this system may have a variety of clinical manifestations in language and in memory, depending on the exact lesion configuration.
TL;DR: This article showed that implicit memory for new associations, though elaboration dependent, is also modality specific: Associative effects on a visual word-completion test were consistently reduced by study-test modality shifts.
Abstract: In previous research we demonstrated that newly acquired associations between unrelated word pairs influence the magnitude of priming effects on word-completion tests. This phenomenon of implicit memory for new associations is observed only following semantic study elaboration. The present experiments reveal that implicit memory for new associations, though elaboration dependent, is also modality specific: Associative effects on a visual word-completion test were consistently reduced by study-test modality shifts. In contrast, explicit memory for new associations, as indexed by cued-recall performance, was uninfluenced by modality shifts. The modality effect on completion performance was eliminated when subjects were given brief visual preexposures to, or were required to construct visual images of, word pairs presented in auditory study conditions. The results pose a theoretical puzzle insofar as they indicate that within the domain of implicit memory, access to the products of elaborative processing depends on modality-specific, sensory-perceptual processing.
TL;DR: The diazepam-induced dissociation between explicit and implicit memory supports the notion of two distinct forms of memory and reproduced the dissociation observed in organic amnesia.
Abstract: The effects of 0.2 mg/kg orally administered diazepam and of a placebo on explicit memory, implicit and knowledge memory were assessed using a free recall task, a word-stem completion task and two category-generation tasks. Twenty four healthy volunteers took part in this double-blind study. Diazepam impaired explicit but not implicit memory. The drug also spared knowledge memory. Explicit memory was linked with the diazepam-induced sedation and with the self-rated affective load of to-be remembered words, but implicit memory was not. The diazepam-induced dissociation between explicit and implicit memory supports the notion of two distinct forms of memory and reproduced the dissociation observed in organic amnesia.
TL;DR: In children, the BNT relates more to word knowledge than to retrieval or fluency, and verbal memory appears to be relatively independent of these linguistic functions.
Abstract: The Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-Revised (PPVT-R), Boston Naming Test (BNT), Paired Associate Learning of the Wechsler Memory Scale (PAL), and verbal fluency tests were administered to 241 normal children aged 6-12 years. Normative data were compiled for the BNT, PAL, and verbal fluency tests. A Principal Components Factor Analysis with Varimax Rotation was conducted to determine whether the tests evaluated similar or differential functions. Three factors emerged, accounting for 67.7% of the variance: Factor 1 contained loadings from two semantic fluency measures (animals and food), Factor 2 contained the PPVT-R and the BNT, and Factor 3 contained two measures from the PAL (easy and hard associations). In children, the BNT relates more to word knowledge than to retrieval or fluency, and verbal memory appears to be relatively independent of these linguistic functions.
TL;DR: Patients with mild-to-moderate dementia of the Alzheimer type, healthy elderly adults, and young adults under a variety of different encoding and retrieval conditions were examined, with particular emphasis placed on the role of semantic memory and encoding failure.
TL;DR: The effects of levels-of-processing and word frequency were directly compared in three different memory tests and the relationship of these results to current views of the mechanisms by which word frequency and depth of processing affect performance in implicit and explicit memory tests was focused on.
Abstract: The effects of levels-of-processing and word frequency were directly compared in three different memory tests. In the episodic recognition test, the subjects decided whether or not a word or a pronounceable nonword had been previously studied. In the two lexical decision tests with either pronounceable or unpronounceable nonwords as distractors, the subjects decided whether a test item was a word or a nonword. There were four main results: (1) in all three tests, reaction times (RTs) in response to studied words were faster if they had received semantic rather than rhyme processing during study; (2) in the episodic recognition test, RTs were faster for low- than for high-frequency words; in both lexical decision tests, RTs were faster for high- than for low-frequency words, though less so when the non word distractors were unpronounceable; (3) prior study facilitated lexical decisions more in response to low- than to high-frequency words, thereby attenuating the word-frequency effect, but more so when the nonword distractors were pronounceable; (4) in the lexical decision test with pronounceable nonword distractors, relative to prior rhyme processing, prior semantic processing facilitated performance more for high- than for low-frequency words, whereas the opposite was the case in the episodic recognition test. Discussion focused on the relationship of these results to current views of the mechanisms by which (1) word frequency and depth of processing affect performance in implicit and explicit memory tests, and (2) repetition priming attenuates word-frequency effects for lexical decisions.
TL;DR: An anomic aphasic patient, EST, whose inability to recall the names of familiar people occurred in the context of a general word-finding problem showed a preserved ability to access semantic information from familiar faces, voices, and spoken and written names and to process facial expressions, but he was unable to name many familiar faces.
TL;DR: The results suggest that AD and PD patients have different patterns of memory dysfunction, and the AD patients seem to perform poorly because of their inability to inhibit irrelevant information and because of increased sensitivity to interference, whereas the deficits of PD patients only reflect sensitivity to proactive interference.
TL;DR: Findings demonstrate that M.S. has impaired knowledge of the structure of living semantic categories when explicit access to this information is required, but that some form of preserved category structure can be demonstrated in tasks which assess this implicitly.
TL;DR: Event-related potentials (ERPs) provide a relatively new tool that complements behavioral measures of word recognition and enable the researcher to examine word perception and reading in more natural situations, without time constraints and overt responses.
Abstract: Visual word recognition requires the matching of an orthographic unit to its meaning via a phonological unit in the mental lexicon. The nature and the speed of this process are affected by "bottom-up" factors (e.g., the manner in which the phonology is represented by the orthography) and by "top-down" factors (e.g., network connections between related words in the lexicon, and contextual semantic information). Event-related potentials (ERPs) provide a relatively new tool that complements behavioral measures of word recognition. ERP components recorded during word perception tasks have been found to be sensitive to orthographic, phonological, and semantic manipulations. They go beyond behavioral measures by providing continuous information about the activity of the cognitive system from stimulus onset to the occurrence of the response. In addition, ERPs enable the researcher to examine word perception and reading in more natural situations, without time constraints and overt responses. Finally, intra-cranial ERP recording in humans and modern analytical techniques may shed light on the relations between cognitive linguistic processes and brain structures. Collaboration between cognitive psychologists, linguists, and ERP researchers will be necessary to exploit the great potential of these electrophysiological techniques.
TL;DR: It appears that the procedural/declarative dichotomy is not adequate to explain preserved memory in amnesia.
TL;DR: Both group of Alzheimer patients showed lexical decision latency differences between unrelated and related prime words, suggesting that patients with Alzheimer's disease are sensitive to the semantic relationships between words.
TL;DR: The results suggest that depressives perform better on more automatic than on effort-demanding tasks, and that manic and stable bipolar patients do not differ in speech production when experimentally imposed restrictions are present.
Abstract: Eleven depressed, 11 stable bipolar and six manic patients, 20 normals and eight late middle-age normals were tested for speech production using a word-fluency task. Fluency was prompted by either a letter (a relatively automatic task), or a semantic category (an effort-demanding task). The results showed that depressed patients were more impaired in speech production than other patients when prompted by a semantic category than when prompted by a letter. A post hoc matched-tasks check suggested that this finding was not due to differences in discriminating power between the two word-fluency tasks. Manic and stable bipolar patients did not differ in their speech production, although matched on age. The results suggest that depressives perform better on more automatic than on effort-demanding tasks, and that manic and stable bipolar patients do not differ in speech production when experimentally imposed restrictions are present.