Examining the relationship between free recall and immediate serial recall: The effects of list length and output order.

In 4 experiments, participants were presented with lists of between 1 and 15 words for tests of immediate memory. For all tasks, participants tended to initiate recall with the first word on the list for short lists. As the list length was increased, so there was a decreased tendency to start with the first list item; and, when free to do so, participants showed an increased tendency to start with one of the last 4 list items. In all tasks, the start position strongly influenced the shape of the resultant serial position curves: When recall started at Serial Position 1, elevated recall of early list items was observed; when recall started toward the end of the list, there were extended recency effects. These results occurred under immediate free recall (IFR) and different variants of immediate serial recall (ISR) and reconstruction of order (RoO) tasks. We argue that these findings have implications for the relationship between IFR and ISR and between rehearsal and recall. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Semantic Organization and Verbal Memory Efficiency in Patients With Schizophrenia.

The role of semantic organization in verbal memory efficiency in schizophrenia was investigated. Patients and healthy controls were administered a free-recall task involving 1 nonsemantically organizable list, 1 list organizable in semantic categories with typical instances, and 1 list organizable in semantic categories with atypical instances. Reduced semantic organization was observed in patients. Regression analyses showed that the semantic clustering score in the atypical organizable list made a significant contribution to recall performance in patients. When semantic clustering was controlled, the effect of diagnosis on free recall was significant. These results suggest that depth of semantic organization is a crucial factor of verbal memory performance in schizophrenia. However, semantic organizational deficit does not account for the whole recall impairment. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Controlled and automatic processing during animal word list generation in schizophrenia.

Controlled and automatic aspects of semantic-associative functioning in schizophrenia were investigated by evaluating performance on animal word list generation (WLG). Responses from control (n?=?47) and patient (n?=?38) participants were subjected to multidimensional scaling (MDS), cluster analysis (CA), and indices on the basis of number of shared attributes (SA) between consecutive responses. Patient MDS results accounted for less variance and contained more error than control data. CA results yielded fewer and less clear animal-response subgroups among patients yet demonstrated intact associations among strongly related exemplars. The SA indices revealed better clustering and more effective switching among response clusters in controls than patients. Results suggest that animal WLG in schizophrenia is compromised both by aberrant automatic semantic-associative network activation and by controlled processes such as search, access, and selection. This pattern is consistent with prominent frontotemporal pathology evident in the disorder. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Using overt rehearsals to explain word frequency effects in free recall.

Three experiments examined the word frequency effect in free recall using the overt rehearsal methodology. Experiment 1 showed that lists of exclusively high-frequency (HF) words were better recalled, were rehearsed more, and were rehearsed to more recent serial positions than low-frequency (LF) words. A small HF advantage remained even when these 2 variables were equated. Experiment 2 showed that all these effect, were much reduced with mixed lists containing both HF and LF words. Experiment 3 compared pure and mixed lists in a within-subject design and confirmed the findings of Experiments 1 and 2. It is argued that number of rehearsals, recency of rehearsals, and strength of interitem association cause the word frequency effect in free recall. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Multiple inputs to episodic memory: Words tell another story.

Seven patients with semantic dementia were asked to recall and recognize 10-word lists of object-name vocabulary preselected as either still "known" (correct picture naming and word-picture matching) or now "unknown" (incorrect picture naming and word-picture matching) to each individual patient. The patients showed a significant advantage for known words in immediate free recall after several learning trials and also in delayed recall and recognition. The majority of errors of commission for known words were semantic, whereas phonological errors, especially blends of target words, were produced in the unknown condition. These findings support claims that (a) multiple inputs from semantic and perceptual systems support episodic memory and (b) success in verbal and nonverbal episodic memory tasks is differentially dependent on semantic and perceptual information. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Component processes of conceptual priming and associative cued recall: The roles of preexisting representation and depth of processing.

The authors investigated depth-of-processing effects on conceptual priming by comparing incidental (implicit) and intentional (explicit) tests of word association. In Experiment 1, depth of processing at study influenced priming of weak and medium associates but not of strong associates. In Experiment 2, depth of processing influenced priming of weak associates but not of compound phrases (e.g., coathanger), whose preexperimental association strength matched that of weak associates. In Experiment 3, the same pattern persisted when study was auditory and test was visual, ensuring that priming was conceptual and not perceptual. In all experiments, in matched intentional tests, depth-of-processing effects occurred for all association strengths and for both phrases and associates, suggesting that the incidental tests were uncontaminated by voluntary retrieval, because they showed depth-of-processing effects only for some materials and not others, within the same participants and tests. Because depth-of-processing effects on involuntary free-association priming depend on the presence versus absence of a cohesive preexperimental representation, the memory-systems and conceptual/perceptual processing approaches to memory-test dissociations require modification to account for component processes of conceptual priming. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Collaborative remembering in older adults: Age-invariant outcomes in the context of episodic recall deficits.

Rapidly growing research reveals complex yet systematic consequences of collaboration on memory in young adults, but much less is known about this phenomenon in older adults. Young and older adults studied a list of categorized words and took three successive recall tests. Test 1 and 3 were always taken individually, and Test 2 was done either in triads or alone. Despite older adults recalling less overall than young adults, both age groups exhibited similar costs and benefits of collaboration: Collaboration reduced both correct and false recall during collaborative remembering, was associated with more positive beliefs about its value, and produced reminiscence, collective memory, and some forgetting in its cascading effects on postcollaborative recall. We examine the role of retrieval organization in these effects. As environmental support may play a substantial role in healthy aging, the relatively preserved effects of collaboration on memory in older adults hold promise for testing judicious uses of group remembering in aging. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

The list-strength effect in recall: Relative-strength competition and retrieval inhibition may both contribute to forgetting.

According to the principle of relative-strength competition, stronger items in memory block the retrieval of weaker items. This principle, integral to many theories of forgetting over the years, derives much of its support from the list-strength effect (LSE), in which strengthening some items in a study list makes it more difficult to recall other items. Work in the retrieval-induced forgetting literature has challenged the existence of relative-strength competition, 1st by offering many examples of a null LSE and 2nd by proposing that extant observations of the LSE can be explained by retrieval inhibition. In the present study, a series of experiments produced a robust LSE in cued recall under conditions meant to control the contribution of retrieval inhibition. Simulations of the SAM-REM model of recall (K. J. Malmberg & R. M. Shiffrin, 2005) showed that a model based on relative-strength competition can accommodate both the presence and absence of an LSE. The empirical results and model simulations together make a case for the role of strength-based competition in forgetting. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Contribution of Organizational Strategy to Verbal Learning and Memory in Adults With Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder.

Statistical mediation modeling was used to test the hypothesis that poor use of a semantic organizational strategy contributes to verbal learning and memory deficits in adults with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Comparison of 28 adults with ADHD and 34 healthy controls revealed lower performance by the ADHD group on tests of verbal learning and memory, sustained attention, and use of semantic organization during encoding. Mediation modeling indicated that state anxiety, but not semantic organization, significantly contributed to the prediction of both learning and delayed recall in the ADHD group. The pattern of findings suggests that decreased verbal learning and memory in adult ADHD is due in part to situational anxiety and not to poor use of organizational strategies during encoding. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Comprehension as a basis for metacognitive judgments: Effects of effort after meaning on recall and metacognition.

We examined free recall and metacognitive judgments of ambiguous sentences studied with and without clues to facilitate their comprehension. Sentences were either studied without clues, with clues meaningfully embedded, or with clues following a 10-s interval delay. After presentation, subjects made judgments of comprehension (JCOMPs) or judgments of learning (JOLs). Puzzling over the meaning of sentences for several seconds prior to receiving the clue enhanced recall compared with studying sentences without clues or with embedded clues. This benefit of effort after meaning was not reflected in JCOMPs or JOLs. Rather, sentences considered relatively easy to understand received higher JOLs regardless of experimental condition. Although effort after meaning enhanced recall, subjects displayed no awareness of this benefit in their judgments. Our study adds to a growing literature showing students’ ignorance of factors affecting their own learning, which have important implications for education. Making learning conditions more difficult, thus requiring students to engage more cognitive effort, often leads to enhanced retention. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Dynamics of the attentional control of word retrieval: Analyses of response time distributions.

Since W. Wundt (1904) and H. J. Watt (1906), researchers have found no agreement on how goals direct word retrieval. A prevailing associative account (E. K. Miller & J. D. Cohen, 2001) holds that goals bias association strength, which determines retrieval latency and whether irrelevant words interfere. A symbolic account (A. Roelofs, 2003) holds that goals enable retrieval rules and predicts no strict dependence of interference on latency. Here, 3 chronometric experiments in which the role of relative retrieval latency was investigated through distributional analyses, following Watt, are reported. Participants verbally categorized picture-word pairs that were semantically related or unrelated, or they categorized single pictures or words. The pairs yielded semantic latency effects in both word and picture categorizing, although single words were categorized slower than single pictures. Semantic effects occurred in word categorizing even when postexposure of the pictures compensated for the difference in categorizing latency. Vincentile and ex-Gaussian analyses revealed that the semantic effects occurred throughout the latency distributions, excluding goal neglect as the cause of the effects. The results were interpreted as most consistent with the symbolic account, which was corroborated by computer simulations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Association, abstraction, and the conceptual organization of recall: Implications for clinical tests.

Recent discoveries about associative meaning were hypothesized to have important implications for the problem of assessment of abstraction by clinical tests. The major hypothesis was that association functions in abstraction tests by eliciting both (1) the concept required for the abstraction item, and (2) the associative neighborhood containing the required concept. A series of 4 experiments investigated this hypothesis for both the WAIS Similarities and BRL (Bolles, Rosen, and Landis) Object Sorting tests. In a 5th experiment, an abstraction test (the BRL) was administered as a memory task in order to investigate the role of association in the conceptual organization of recall. All experiments provided strong support for the major hypothesis and have implications for construction of abstraction tests of enhanced clinical sensitivity. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

False memory in aging: Effects of emotional valence on word recognition accuracy.

Memory is susceptible to distortions. Valence and increasing age are variables known to affect memory accuracy and may increase false alarm production. Interaction between these variables and their impact on false memory was investigated in 36 young (18-28 years) and 36 older (61-83 years) healthy adults. At study, participants viewed lists of neutral words orthographically related to negative, neutral, or positive critical lures (not presented). Memory for these words was subsequently tested with a remember-know procedure. At test, items included the words seen at study and their associated critical lures, as well as sets of orthographically related neutral words not seen at study and their associated unstudied lures. Positive valence was shown to have two opposite effects on older adults' discrimination of the lures: It improved correct rejection of unstudied lures but increased false memory for critical lures (i.e., lures associated with words studied previously). Thus, increased salience triggered by positive valence may disrupt memory accuracy in older adults when discriminating among similar events. These findings likely reflect a source memory deficit due to decreased efficiency in cognitive control processes with aging. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The Contribution of Mediator-Based Deficiencies to Age Differences in Associative Learning.

Production, mediational, and utilization deficiencies, which describe how strategy use may contribute to developmental trends in episodic memory, have been intensively investigated. Using a mediator report-and-retrieval method, the authors present evidence concerning the degree to which 2 previously unexplored mediator-based deficits--retrieval and decoding deficiencies--account for age deficits in learning. During study, older and younger adults were instructed to use a strategy (imagery or sentence generation) to associate words within paired associates. They also reported each mediator and later attempted to retrieve each response and the mediator produced at study. Substantial deficits occurred in mediator recall, and small differences were observed in decoding mediators. Mediator recall also accounted for a substantial proportion of the age deficits in criterion recall independently of fluid or crystallized intelligence. Discussion focuses on mediator-based deficiencies and their implications for theories of age deficits in episodic memory. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The contributions of primary and secondary memory to working memory capacity: An individual differences analysis of immediate free recall.

The present study tested the dual-component model of working memory capacity (WMC) by examining estimates of primary memory and secondary memory from an immediate free recall task. Participants completed multiple measures of WMC and general intellectual ability as well as multiple trials of an immediate free recall task. It was demonstrated that there are 2 sources of variance (primary memory and secondary memory) in immediate free recall and that, further, these 2 sources of variance accounted for independent variation in WMC. Together, these results are consistent with a dual-component model of WMC reflecting individual differences in maintenance in primary memory and in retrieval from secondary memory. Theoretical implications for working memory and dual-component models of free recall are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Individual Differences in Susceptibility to False Memory in the Deese-Roediger-McDermott Paradigm.

The authors addressed whether individual differences in the working memory capacity (WMC) of young adults influence susceptibility to false memories for nonpresented critical words in the Deese-Roediger-McDermott associative list paradigm. The results of 2 experiments indicated that individuals with greater WMC recalled fewer critical words than individuals with reduced WMC when participants were forewarned about the tendency of associative lists (e.g., bed, rest, . . .) to elicit illusory memories for critical words (e.g., sleep). In contrast, both high and low WMC participants used repeated study-test trials to reduce recall of critical words. These findings suggest that individual differences in WMC influence cognitive control and the ability to actively maintain task goals in the face of interfering information or habit. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Alcohol's Dissociation of Implicit and Explicit Memory Processes: Implications of a Parallel Distributed Processing Model of Semantic Priming.

Alcohol's dissociation of implicit (unintentional) and explicit (intentional) memory processes in social drinkers was examined. It was hypothesized that an alcohol challenge would lower the percentage of words recalled and result in more retroactive interference in explicit recall tasks but would not lengthen reaction time in an implicit semantic priming task involving highly semantically similar words. Men and women completed all memory tasks in each of 2 counterbalanced sessions (alcohol challenge vs. no-alcohol) separated by 1 week. Alcohol significantly degraded processing in both explicit memory tasks, yet implicit semantic priming remained intact. A parallel distributed processing model that simulates semantic memory is presented. When this system is strongly activated, it does not appear to be altered during moderate alcohol intoxication. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Monetary incentives improve recall of research consent information: It pays to remember.

Research participants often fail to recall substantial amounts of informed consent information after delays of only a few days. Numerous interventions have proven effective at improving consent recall; however, virtually all have focused on compensating for potential cognitive deficits and have ignored motivational factors. In this pilot study, the authors randomly assigned 31 drug court clients participating in a clinical research trial to a control group that received a standard informed consent procedure or to a group that received the same procedure plus incentives for correctly recalling consent information. The incentive group was told they would receive $5 for each of the 15 consent items they could answer correctly 1 week later. At the follow-up, the incentive group recalled a significantly greater percentage of consent information overall than the control group (65% vs. 42%, p     

Distinctive features hold a privileged status in the computation of word meaning: Implications for theories of semantic memory.

The authors present data from 2 feature verification experiments designed to determine whether distinctive features have a privileged status in the computation of word meaning. They use an attractor-based connectionist model of semantic memory to derive predictions for the experiments. Contrary to central predictions of the conceptual structure account, but consistent with their own model, the authors present empirical evidence that distinctive features of both living and nonliving things do indeed have a privileged role in the computation of word meaning. The authors explain the mechanism through which these effects are produced in their model by presenting an analysis of the weight structure developed in the network during training. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The effects of sad mood on memory in older adults: A test of the mood congruence effect.

Mood congruence effects have long been studied in younger adults. but not in older adults. Socioemotional selectivity theory (SST) suggests that mood congruence could operate differently in older adults. One hundred and nineteen younger and 78 older adults were randomly assigned to sad or neutral mood inductions, using combined Velten and music induction procedures. Results indicated that during sad mood induction both older and younger adults showed enhanced recall of sad words on delayed word list recall task and in autobiographical memory. However, only older adults displayed mood congruence effects on lexical ambiguity and lower recall of positive words in the word list task. Results provided partial support for developmental effects on mood congruence derived from SST. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)