Does memory affect judgment? Self-generated versus recall memory measures.

Most evidence regarding the independence of memory and judgment comes from studies that used memory measures consisting of Ss' recall of raw input data (recall measures). Such evidence provides the primary support for on-line judgment formation. The results of 2 experiments suggest that self-generated memory measures capture the contents of memory at the time of judgments more effectively than recall measures and, accordingly, are more likely to provide evidence that memory and judgment are related. When directly compared, a self-generated measure provided evidence of a memory–judgment relationship and a recall measure did not. Thus, memory-based judgment formation may be more prevalent than the on-line processing literature suggests. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Serial organization and prior free recall.

Assessed serial recall and organization of a list after different levels of prior free-recall learning with the same list. Performance was expected to be impaired as a direct function of amount of free recall because of inappropriate organizational units formed during free recall. Recall on serial trials following 15 free-recall trials was inferior to 5 or 10 prior free-recall trials. 4 groups of 24 Ss each were tested. Serial organization on the 1st serial trial was inferior if prior free recall occurred, but did not vary with the amount of free recall. These results, and those of part-whole and whole-part free-recall transfer studies, were interpreted by a component analysis of free recall, including response learning/unlearning and organizational learning/unlearning. (16 ref.) (French summary) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Serial position and set size in short-term memory: The time course of recognition.

Subjects viewed sequentially presented lists of 3–6 words, which were followed by a recognition probe. Memory retrieval speed (dynamics) and strength were measured in an interruption speed–accuracy trade-off (SAT) procedure and a collateral reaction time (RT) procedure. In SAT, item strengths depended on serial position, but only two retrieval speeds were observed: a fast rate for the last item in the study list (a case of immediate repetition between study and test) and a slow rate for all other items that was independent of serial position and set size. Serial-position-dependent strengths and set-size-dependent criterion shifts accounted for standard RT patterns that have been taken as evidence for serial scanning in short-term memory. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Recognition versus recall in schizophrenia.

Twenty-four schizophrenic and 24 normal Ss, 8 in each group being overinclusive and 16 non-overinclusive, were presented with two 20-word lists, one for free recall and one for recognition. The recognition alternatives were rhymes, synonyms, and synonym-rhymes of the various target words. Schizophrenics were poorer than normals in recall but not in recognition, and the ratio of recall over recognition was significantly greater for schizophrenics than for normals. The results of an analysis of the recognition errors suggested that the recall deficit of schizophrenics may be due to an inability to organize information for retrieval. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A developmental study of recall from natural categories.

27 6th graders, 25 college students, and 26 older adults (aged 57–77 yrs) were asked to list exemplars from the semantic domains of animals and occupations for 6 min each. Cumulative recall curves were found to fit a hyperbolic model of recall and to be stable over age in the animal domain; in the occupation domain, 6th graders reached asymptote earlier. A slope-difference algorithm was used to identify clusters within recall. It was found that the size of clusters was stable over time. Older adults tended to find new clusters at a faster rate in the later stages of recall, and the youngest and oldest Ss reported items within clusters at a slower rate. Results demonstrate the stability of some basic functions in semantic memory and support a production deficiency view of reported deficits in episodic memory tasks. (15 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Multiple roles for time in short-term memory: Evidence from serial recall of order and timing.

Three experiments are reported that examine the relationship between short-term memory for time and order information, and the more specific claim that order memory is driven by a timing signal. Participants were presented with digits spaced irregularly in time and postcued (Experiments 1 and 2) or precued (Experiment 3) to recall the order or timing of the digits. The primary results of interest were as follows: (a) Instructing participants to group lists had similar effects on serial and timing recall in inducing a pause in recall between suggested groups; (b) the timing of recall was predicted by the timing of the input lists in both serial recall and timing recall; and (c) when the recall task was precued, there was a tendency for temporally isolated items to be more accurately recalled than temporally crowded items. The results place constraints on models of serial recall that assume a timing signal generates positional representations and suggest an additional role for information about individual durations in short-term memory. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Auditory short-term memory and digit span: Normal versus poor readers.

Investigated the relationship between reading comprehension level, digit span, and short-term memory for Morse codelike temporal patterns in 3 experiments. Consistent with previous research on children, Exp I using 60 undergraduates demonstrated that Ss performed better when the 1st pattern was auditory than when it was visual or tactual. In Exps II and III with 36 undergraduates and 98 5th graders, respectively, no relationship was found between digit span and accuracy in comparing patterns of tones presented a few seconds apart. However, both tasks discriminated between children with normal and poor reading comprehension scores on a standardized test (Reading Comprehension subtest of the California Achievement Tests). It appears that these 2 tasks index fundamental processes that underlie reading comprehension. Digit span seems to assess an individual's ability to rapidly develop meaningful codes in memory for incoming verbal stimuli. The auditory pattern comparison procedure appears to measure ability to maintain information in short-term memory. (24 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Retrieval strategies in recall of natural categories and categorized lists.

Exps I and II, using a total of 192 undergraduates, examined the effect of retrieval strategies on 3 or 12 min of recall from a natural category. Exp III, with 29 undergraduate Ss, examined the effect of strategy on 6 min of recall from a subset of a category presented as a list. In Exps I and II, a large recall deficit was produced by retrieval strategies involving recall in alphabetic order and by size of the words' referents, relative to free recall. In Exp III, 4 strategies—alphabetic, size, serial order, and free recall—gave similar levels of recall after 6 min, though the growth rate of the cumulative output functions differed among the strategies. An extension of the search of associative memory model of J. G. Raaijmakers and R. M. Shiffrin (1980; see also PA, Vol 66:491) was developed to explain these results; the new model postulates attention sharing among probe cues and the use of idiosyncratic strategies for free recall from natural categories. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Slope analysis in short-term memory.

Presents procedures for transforming dichotomously scored data from short-term memory experiments into slope measures for evaluation by analysis of variance techniques. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Binding in short-term visual memory.

The integration of complex information in working memory, and its effect on capacity, shape the limits of conscious cognition. The literature conflicts on whether short-term visual memory represents information as integrated objects. A change-detection paradigm using objects defined by color with location or shape was used to investigate binding in short-term visual memory. Results showed that features from the same dimension compete for capacity, whereas features from different dimensions can be stored in parallel. Binding between these features can occur, but focused attention is required to create and maintain the binding over time, and this integrated format is vulnerable to interference. In the proposed model, working memory capacity is limited both by the independent capacity of simple feature stores and by demands on attention networks that integrate this distributed information into complex but unified thought objects. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Binomial variability in short-term memory.

Experiments in short-term memory usually collect binary data, e.g., an item is either correctly recalled or not. If the probability of recall is constant for Ss and/or items under a given condition, the proportion based on n observations can be transformed to angles by the arcsin transformation and will have variance 1/n. Violations of the assumptions are discussed and different strategies for pooling are assessed by conventional analysis of variance. Illustrative experiments with distractor and probe techniques, paired-associates and serial presentation, and single-trial free recall are briefly presented. The correspondence between observed and expected results seems good; apparently considerable latitude is possible in pooling Ss or items in data analyses of experiments in short-term memory. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Serial recall by schizophrenic and affective patients during and after psychotic episodes.

Eight schizophrenics (mean age 27.3 yrs), 8 depressed patients (mean age 33.1 yrs), and 8 normal controls (mean age 27 yrs) completed the MMPI and were asked to recall short word strings in both the presence and absence of distraction. Results show a differential cognitive deficit among schizophrenics both before and after a general improvement in their level of adjustment. That is, despite an overall improvement in their accuracy of recall prior to discharge, their performance continued to be impaired relative to depressed and normal Ss on the words presented in the 1st serial position. A tendency toward greater distractibility among schizophrenics failed to reach statistical significance at both points of assessment. Further substantiation of such stable forms of cognitive impairment may facilitate the identification of individuals who are vulnerable to the development of schizophrenia and may shed light on the adjustment problems that many chronic patients continue to experience after discharge from the hospital. (18 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Verbal short-term memory deficit in Alzheimer''s disease: an examination with the free recall paradigm

To elucidate the presence and distribution of Endothelin-1 (ET-1) in tissues of human salivary glands, we performed an immunohistochemical analysis of ET-1 in 15 normal salivary glands, 8 adenolymphomas, 13 pleomorphic adenomas and 5 carcinomas, using the mouse monoclonal antibody against human ET-1. In normal glands, immunoreactivity for ET-1 was observed in the striated duct cells. In adenolymphomas, the columnar cells of the granular epithelium showed strong intracytoplasmic immunoreactivity. In carcinomas, moderate or strong immunoreactivity was observed in the tumor cells, whereas in pleomorphic adenomas, weak immunoreactivity was observed. A good relation was detected between the size of pleomorphic adenoma and ET-1 immunoreactivity, as well as between the duration of tumor in carcinoma and ET-1 immunoreactivity. The presence and distribution of ET-1 in salivary glands and salivary gland tumors suggests a possible role for ET-1 in the regulation of electrolytes and water transport in salivary glands, and as a growth-promoting factor for tumors.     

Visual short-term memory is influenced by haptic perception.

The present study investigated whether and how visual memory and haptic perception are related. Participants were required to compare a visual reference velocity with a visual test velocity separated by a 4-s interval. During the retention interval, a fast or slow hand movement was performed. Although the hand movement was not visible, effects of the speed of the distracting body movement occurred. Slow movements resulted in a lowering of the represented visual velocity, whereas fast movements heightened the represented velocity. Subsequent experiments extended the effect to body movements that differed from the visual motion and ruled out the possibility that the effect was due to changes in visual perception or interference from semantic, verbal, and acoustic memory codes. Perhaps haptic velocity information and visual velocity information stored in short-term memory am blended. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Modality effects in short-term verbal memory.

Argues that for short-term memory, auditory presentation is consistently superior to visual presentation, with the difference restricted to recently presented items. A review of the literature indicates that recall increases with fast presentation rates when auditory presentation is used in a serial recall task; otherwise, recall decreases as presentation rate increases. Some puzzling findings on dichotic and bisensory split-span memory are shown to be related to aspects of the modality difference, notably the strong sequential associations in auditory memory. (116 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Attention gating in short-term visual memory.

Investigated attention shift to a stream of numerals, in rapid serial visual presentation, using 3 graduate students with normal or corrected-to-normal vision. Ss detected a target embedded in a stream of letters presented at the left of fixation and, as quickly as possible, shifted their attention to a stream of numerals at the right of fixation. They attempted to report, in order, the 4 earliest occurring numerals after the target. Numerals appeared at rates of 4.6, 6.9, 9.2, and 13.4 sec. Analyses demonstrated that, for all Ss, targets, and numeral rates, the relative position of numerals in the response sequence showed clustering, disorder, and folding. Reported numerals tended to cluster around a stimulus position 400 msec after the target. Numerals were reported in an apparently haphazard order. The actual order of report resulted from a mixture of correctly ordered numerals with numerals ordered in the direction opposite to their order of presentation. Results are quantitatively described by a strength theory of order and are efficiently predicted by a computational attention gating model (AGM). The AGM may be derived from a more general attention model that assumes that (a) after detection of the target, an attention gate opens briefly to allow numerals to enter a visual short-term memory and (b) subsequent order of report depends on both item strength (how wide the gate was open during the numeral's entry) and on order information (item strength times cumulative strength of prior numerals). (78 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Emerging attributes in monkey short-term memory.

Conducted 2 experiments to examine the role of recency information and stimulus novelty and familiarity in delayed-matching-to-sample (DMTS) performance. Five female 5–8 yr old macaques (one of which was not included in Exp II) were tested on DMTS problems in which the correct and incorrect choice stimuli were both familiar, both relatively novel, or different in familiarity. Initially, novelty and familiarity exerted their influence as preferences (familiar stimuli were preferred). As more training was given, however, novelty and familiarity began to act as discriminative attributes. For example, Ss came to use the fact that the to-be-remembered stimulus was relatively novel to reject alternative choice stimuli that were more familiar. Theories of animal memory based on a single memory attribute cannot address these results. (12 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Trial-to-trial carryover in auditory short-term memory.

Using a short-term recognition memory task, the authors evaluated the carryover across trials of 2 types of auditory information: the characteristics of individual study sounds (item information) and the relationships between the study sounds (study set homogeneity). On each trial, subjects heard 2 successive broadband study sounds and then decided whether a subsequently presented probe sound had been in the study set. On some trials, the similarity of the probe item to stimuli presented on the preceding trial was manipulated. This item information interfered with recognition, and false alarms increased from 0.4% to 4.4%. Moreover, the interference was tuned so that only stimuli that were very similar to each other interfered. On other trials, the relationship among stimuli was manipulated to alter the criterion subjects used in making recognition judgments. The effect of this manipulation was confined to the trial on which the criterion change was generated and did not affect the subsequent trial. These results demonstrate the existence of a sharply tuned carryover of auditory item information but no carryover of the effects of study set homogeneity. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Parrel processing in visual short-term memory.

Visual short-term memory for the contrast and spatial frequency of sinusoidal gratings was measured in a delayed discrimination task in which the 2 stimuli to be compared were separated in time by 1-10 s interstimulus intervals (ISIs). Delayed discrimination thresholds for spatial frequency and contrast were compared, both when the 2 types of thresholds were measured in separate blocks of trials and when the 2 types of measures were randomly intermixed in an uncertainty paradigm, which required participants to process information about both dimensions on each trial. In both cases, accuracy of memory for spatial frequency was independent of ISI, but memory for contrast decreased as ISI increased. Performance was lower in the uncertainty case, but only by an amount predicted by statistical decision theory for independent sources. The results are consistent with a model assuming a set of parallel special-purpose visual discrimination and short-term memory mechanisms. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)