Searching for Judy: How small mysteries affect narrative processes and memory.

Current theories of text processing say little about how authors' narrative choices, including the introduction of small mysteries, can affect readers' narrative experiences. Gerrig, Love, and McKoon (2009) provided evidence that 1 type of small mystery—a character introduced without information linking him or her to the story—affects readers' moment-by-moment processing. For that project, participants read stories that introduced characters by proper name alone (e.g., “Judy”) or with information connecting the character to the rest of the story (e.g., “our principal Judy”). In an online recognition probe task, responses to the character's name 3 lines after his or her introduction were faster when the character had not been introduced with connecting information, suggesting that the character remained accessible awaiting resolution. In the 4 experiments in this article, we extend our theoretical analysis of small mysteries. In Experiments 1 and 2, we found evidence that trait information (e.g., “daredevil Judy”) is not sufficient to connect a character to a text. In Experiments 3 and 4, we found evidence that the moment-by-moment processing effects of such small mysteries also affect readers' memory for the stories. We interpret the results in terms of Kintsch's (1988) construction-integration model of discourse processing. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Pronoun resolution and discourse models.

Psychological investigations of pronoun resolution have implicitly assumed that the processes involved automatically provide a unique referent for every pronoun. The authors challenge this assumption and propose a new framework for studying pronoun resolution. Drawing on advances in discourse representation and global memory modeling, this framework suggests that automatic processes may not always identify a unique referent for a pronoun. In 9 experiments, the authors demonstrate that, unlike noun anaphors, pronouns sometimes do not produce relative facilitation of their referents in comparison with nonreferents. They argue that research on pronoun resolution must consider the discourse contexts in which pronouns are likely to occur. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Discourse models, pronoun resolution, and the implicit causality of verbs.

Some interpersonal verbs (e.g., admire and amaze) describe an action or property of one person (the reactor) that is necessarily a response to an action or property of another (the initiator). It was hypothesized that these verbs make the initiator relatively more accessible in a comprehender's discourse model and that this change in relative accessibility aids identification of the referent of a pronoun in a subsequent because clause. It was predicted that, as a result, Ss would be faster to recognize a character's name after a because clause that uses a pronoun to refer to that character than after one that refers to some other character. Four experiments confirmed this prediction. Three further experiments demonstrated the importance of the verb's causal structure and of the presence of the connective because to this result. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Memory for Narrative and Expository Text: Independent Influences of Semantic Associations and Text Organization.

The author examined memory for text in terms of the independent influences of semantic knowledge associations and text organization. Semantic associations were operationalized as the semantic relatedness between individual text concepts and the text as a whole and assessed with latent semantic analysis. The author assessed text organization by simulating comprehension with the construction integration model. Text organization consistently accounted for unique variance in recall. Semantic associations strongly predicted expository recall and predicted narrative recall significantly but to a lesser extent, even when the familiarity of the narrative content was manipulated. Results suggest that prior semantic associations and novel associations in the text structure influence memory independently, and that these influences can be affected by text genre. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Psychology and life (Canadian edition).

Reviews the book, Psychology and life (Canadian edition) (2009), by Richard J. Gerrig, Philip Zimbardo, Serge Desmarais, and Tammy Ivanco. As part of an effective strategy to deal with the many emerging challenges of teaching large introductory psychology classes, a modern textbook geared toward introductory psychology must keep up with these changes and offer useful features that address the needs of the student. To this end, Psychology and Life (Canadian Edition) presents an impressive update of the classic textbook by Gerrig and Zimbardo. The text continues to hit on the key principle of psychology as a science with a thorough and updated research-based presentation. The textbook is well organised into 17 chapters covering the range of typical introductory psychology topics. The chapters are written in a midlevel text that will be accessible to the broad range of students enrolled in most introductory psychology courses. While maintaining a high level of readability and interest, the work is solidly grounded in research as it highlights psychology as a science. As the title of the textbook suggests, the authors make a conscious effort to demonstrate that the research and curriculum presented in each chapter have an immediate impact on daily life. This is a well-written, organised, and appealing text that students will find engaging and instructors will find suitable for providing a solid grounding in the science of contemporary psychology. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

When knowing more means less: The effects of fan on metamemory judgments.

The authors used a "fan" paradigm (J. R. Anderson, 1974) to test the accessibility and competition models of metamemory using judgments of learning (JOLs). JOLs in this study reflect one's confidence level in subsequently recognizing newly learned material. The number of facts, or "fan," associated with JOL-queried concepts varied from 1 to 3 associates. Results of 3 experiments indicated that as the level of fan increased, the magnitude of JOLs decreased. This finding was observed even when the fan effect (i.e., slower recognition as number of facts increase) was attenuated on a verification task in 2 of the experiments by manipulating the organization of the multiple concepts. The results supported the competition hypothesis (T. A. Schreiber, 1998; T. A. Schreiber & D. L. Nelson, 1998) as an important determinant of JOLs. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Rules of engagement: Incomplete and complete pronoun resolution.

Research on shallow processing suggests that readers sometimes encode only a superficial representation of a text and fail to make use of all available information. Greene, McKoon, and Ratcliff (1992) extended this work to pronouns, finding evidence that readers sometimes fail to automatically identify referents even when these are unambiguous. In this paper we revisit those findings. In 11 recognition probe, priming, and self-report experiments, we manipulated Greene et al.'s stories to discover under what circumstances a pronoun's referent is automatically understood. We lengthened the stories from 4 to 8 lines. This simple manipulation led to automatic and correct resolution, which we attribute to readers' increased engagement with the stories. We found evidence of resolution even when the additional text did not mention the pronoun's referent. In addition, our results suggest that the pronoun temporarily boosts the referent's accessibility, an advantage that disappears by the end of the next sentence. Finally, we present evidence from memory experiments that supports complete pronoun resolution for the longer but not the shorter stories. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Short-term retention of discourse during reading.

In 2 experiments, 68 3rd, 4th, and 6th graders at different reading levels were given a probe memory task assessing the availability in working memory of recently read discourse segments. During oral and silent reading (Exp I), retention was related to segment length and the occurrence of a sentence boundary. The limits on retention were tested by increasing segment length and difficulty (Exp II). For these segments, performance of less skilled readers was uniformly low, whereas that of the skilled and older readers continued to be affected by length and sentence boundary. Relationships between individual differences in verbal coding processes and short-term retention of discourse as well as implications for text comprehension models are discussed. (16 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Sleep's function in the spontaneous recovery and consolidation of memories.

Building on 2 previous studies (B. R. Ekstrand, 1967; B. R. Ekstrand, M. J. Sullivan, D. F. Parker, & J. N. West, 1971), the authors present 2 experiments that were aimed at characterizing the role of retroactive interference in sleep-associated declarative memory consolidation. Using an A-B, A-C paradigm with lists of word pairs in Experiment 1, the authors showed that sleep provides recovery from retroactive interference induced at encoding, whereas no such recovery was seen in several wake control conditions. Noninterfering word-pair lists were used in Experiment 2 (A-B, C-D). Sleeping after learning, in comparison with waking after learning, enhanced retention of both lists to a similar extent when encoding was less intense because of less list repetition and briefer word-pair presentations. With intense encoding, sleep-associated improvements were not seen for either list. In combination, the results indicate that the benefit of sleep for declarative memory consolidation is greater for weaker associations, regardless of whether weak associations result from retroactive interference or poor encoding. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Concreteness and item-to-list context associations in the free recall of items differing in context variability.

Context variability can be defined as the number of preexperimental contexts in which a given concept appears. Following M. Steyvers and K. J. Malmberg's (2003) work, the authors have shown that concepts that are experienced in fewer preexperimental contexts generally are better remembered in episodic memory tasks than concepts that are experienced in a greater number of preexperimental contexts. The purpose of this article is to demonstrate that low context variability confers its memorial advantage because of stronger item-to-list context associations as compared with high context variability. Three experiments that use environmental context changes from study to test demonstrate that the low context variability advantage is eliminated when item-to-list context associations are not available because of environmental changes at test. In addition, the low context variability advantage is eliminated when inward processing at study prevents the formation of item-to-list context associations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The influence of morphological information on cataphoric pronoun assignment.

In 3 eye-tracking experiments, the authors investigated the use of morphological information during pronoun resolution. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that disruption occurred when a preferred assignment was inconsistent with gender information. Experiment 2 ensured that this difficulty was not due to the introduction of a new discourse entity. Experiment 3 showed that disruption also occurred when number information was inconsistent with the preferred assignment. The results indicate that the use of morphological information is delayed until after the computation of coreference relations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effect of genre expectations on text comprehension.

This article investigates whether expectations about discourse genre influence the process and products of text comprehension. Ss read texts either with a literary story or with a news story as the purported genre. Subsequently, they verified statements pertaining to the texts. Two experiments demonstrated that Ss reading under a literary perspective had longer reading times, better memory for surface information, and a poorer memory for situational information than those reading under a news perspective. Regression analyses of reading times produced findings that were consistent with the memory data. The results support the notion that readers differentially allocate their processing resources according to their expectations about the genre of a text. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Intact text-specific implicit memory in patients with Alzheimer's disease.

The ability of patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) to acquire and retain text-specific knowledge was investigated in a rereading study. Ten AD patients (aged 59–84 yrs) and 10 normal control Ss read 2 passages 3 times, each as quickly as possible, and answered recognition memory questions after the 3rd reading of each passage. The AD patients had poor explicit memory as evidenced by impaired recognition memory for the passages. In contrast, normal decreases in the times required for successive readings of each passage for AD patients indicated intact implicit memory for the passages. The absence of facilitation across passages indicated that the rereading effect was text specific, suggesting that AD patients may retain the ability to form certain kinds of implicit new associations. Alternative accounts of the mechanism underlying text-specific priming, and of the nature of intact and impaired implicit memory in AD, are considered. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Interactive Dimensions in the Construction of Mental Representations for Text.

To detail the structure and format of memory for texts, researchers have examined whether readers monitor separate text dimensions for space, time, and characters. The authors proposed that the interactivity between these individual dimensions may be as critical to the construction of complex mental models as the discrete dimensions themselves. In the present experiments, participants read stories in which characters were described as traveling from a start to a final location. During movement between locations, characters engaged in activities that could take either a long or short amount of time to complete. Results indicate that accessibility for the spatial locations was a function of the passage of time. The authors interpret this as evidence that the interactive nature of text dimensions affects the structure of representations in memory. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Sources of priming in text rereading: intact implicit memory for new associations in older adults and in patients with Alzheimer's disease

The contributions of text meaning, new between-word associations, and single-word repetition to priming in text rereading in younger and older adults, and in patients with Alzheimer's disease. (AD), were assessed in Experiment 1. Explicit recognition memory for text was also assessed. Equivalent single-word and between-word priming was observed for all groups, even though patients with AD showed impaired explicit memory for individual words in the text. The contribution of generalized reading task skill to priming in meaningless text rereading in younger adults was assessed in Experiment 2. Generalized reading task skill was also found to contribute to priming. These results reveal 3 mechanisms of priming: new between-word associations for meaningful and meaningless text, individual word repetition for meaningless text, and general task or skill factors for meaningless text. All priming mechanisms appear to be intact in older adults and in patients with AD.     

The fan effect: A tale of two theories.

This article addresses J. R. Anderson and L. M. Reder's (see record 1999-05245-004) account of the differential fan effect reported by G. A. Radvansky, D. H. Spieler, and R. T. Zacks (see record 1993-16287-001). The differential fan effect is the finding of greater interference with an increased number of associations under some conditions, but not others, in a within-subjects mixed-list recognition test. Anderson and Reder concluded that the differential fan effects can be adequately explained by assuming differences in the weights given to concepts in long-term memory. When a broader range of data is considered, this account is less well supported. Instead, it is better to assume that the organization of information into referential representations, such as situation models, has a meaningful influence on long-term memory retrieval. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The Amygdala Modulates Hippocampus-Dependent Context Memory Formation and Stores Cue-Shock Associations.

Preexposing rats to the context facilitates subsequent contextual fear conditioning. This effect depends on the hippocampus (J. W. Rudy, R. M. Barrientos, & R. C. O'Reilly, 2002). The authors report that inactivating the basolateral region of the amygdala (BLA) by injecting muscimol, a GABAA agonist, before or after preexposure reduced this effect. In contrast, bilateral injections of anisomycin, a protein synthesis inhibitor, into BLA did not impair the consolidation of the context memory. However, when injected after fear conditioning, anisomycin impaired consolidation of both contextual and auditory-cue fear conditioning. Results are consistent with 2 ideas about the amygdala's contribution to memory: (a) It modulates memory formation in other regions of the brain, and (b) it is a storage site for cue-shock associations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)