The production effect in memory: Evidence that distinctiveness underlies the benefit.

The production effect is the substantial benefit to memory of having studied information aloud as opposed to silently. MacLeod, Gopie, Hourihan, Neary, and Ozubko (2010) have explained this enhancement by suggesting that a word studied aloud acquires a distinctive encoding record and that recollecting this record supports identifying a word studied aloud as “old.” This account was tested using a list discrimination paradigm, where the task is to identify in which of 2 studied lists a target word was presented. The critical list was a mixed list containing words studied aloud and words studied silently. Under the distinctiveness explanation, studying an additional list all aloud should disrupt the production effect in the critical list because remembering having said a word aloud in the critical list will no longer be diagnostic of list status. In contrast, studying an additional list all silently should leave the production effect in the critical list intact. These predictions were confirmed in 2 experiments. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Providing support for distinctive processing: The isolation effect in young and older adults.

The isolation paradigm is the classic method for studying the effects of distinctiveness on memory (Hunt, 1995). Previous studies using the isolation paradigm with older adults (Bireta, Suprenant, & Neath, 2008; Cimbalo & Brink, 1982; Geraci, McDaniel, Manzano, & Roediger (2009); Vitali et al., 2006) placed the isolated items late in the study list. The current experiments, which are the first to investigate the isolation effect in young and older adults when the isolated item occurs early in the list, were motivated by a new framework for understanding age-related differences in the beneficial effects of distinctive processing. The framework, which is motivated by Hunt's (2006) discussion of distinctiveness and Craik's (1986) environmental support view, proposes that when contextual support is provided for the processing of both the difference and similarity components, older adults are more likely to show beneficial effects of distinctiveness. In Experiment 1, young adults showed both early and late isolation effects, while older adults showed only a late isolation effect. In the first experiment the isolated item was the word “table” in a list of fish names. In Experiment 2, the contrast between the isolated item and background items was increased by isolating numbers in a list of words. In the second experiment older adults, as well as young adults, showed an early isolation effect. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Directed forgetting meets the production effect: Distinctive processing is resistant to intentional forgetting.

The production effect refers to the fact that, relative to reading a word silently, reading a word aloud during study improves explicit memory. The authors tested the distinctiveness account of this effect using the item method directed forgetting procedure. If saying words aloud makes them more distinctive, then they should be more difficult to forget on cue than should words read silently. Participants studied a list of words by reading half aloud and half silently; half of the words in each of these subsets were followed by a Remember instruction and half were followed by a Forget instruction. There was a robust production effect for both Remember and Forget words on an explicit recognition test. Critically, however, a directed forgetting effect was observed only for words read silently; words read aloud at study were unaffected by memory instruction. An implicit speeded reading test showed equal priming for all studied items. This pattern supports a distinctiveness account of the production effect: Words processed distinctively during production are not influenced by subsequent rehearsal differences. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The distinctiveness of the word-length effect.

The authors report 2 experiments that compare the serial recall of pure lists of long words, pure lists of short words, and lists of long or short words containing just a single isolated word of a different length. In both experiments for pure lists, there was a substantial recall advantage for short words; the isolated words were recalled better than other words in the same list, and there was a reverse word-length effect: Isolated long words were recalled better than isolated short words. These results contradict models that seek to explain the word-length effect in terms of list-based accounts of rehearsal speed or in terms of item-based effects (such as difficulty of assembling items). (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Generation and perceptual implicit memory: Different generation tasks produce different effects on perceptual priming.

The generation manipulation has been critical in delineating differences between implicit and explicit memory. In contrast to past research, the present experiments indicate that generating from a rhyme cue produces as much perceptual priming as does reading. This is demonstrated for 3 visual priming tasks: perceptual identification, word-fragment completion (WFC), and word-stem completion (WSC). This result occurred regardless of the mode of study response (written or spoken) or whether the generation condition was compared with reading words in or out of context. Rhyme generation did not produce priming on the letter height task (Masson & MacLeod, 2002), implying that the effect was not mediated by covert visualization. Nor was the effect due to the mere presence of the rhyme cue. Semantic generation (from definitions) produced a different pattern, exhibiting a reverse generation effect on WFC and WSC but full (read-level) priming on perceptual identification. The present results were not consistent with accounts based on the standard transfer-appropriate processing view, covert visualization, explicit contamination, or conceptual contributions to nominally perceptual tasks. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

False recognition of pictures versus words in Alzheimer's disease: The distinctiveness heuristic.

False recognition of semantic associates can be reduced when older adults also study pictures representing each associate. D. L. Schacter, L. Israel, and C. Racine (1999) attributed this reduction to the operation of a distinctiveness heuristic: a response mode in which participants demand access to detailed recollections to support a positive recognition decision. The authors examined patients with probable Alzheimer's disease (AD) and older adults with this paradigm. Half of the participants studied pictures and auditory words; the other half studied visual and auditory words. Older adults who studied pictures were able to reduce their false alarms compared with those who studied words only. AD patients who studied pictures were unable to reduce their false alarms compared with those who studied words only and, in fact, exhibited trends toward greater false recognition. Implications for understanding semantic memory in AD patients are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Memory: Lawless but principled?

Roediger (2008) argued that none of the general laws of learning and memory have stood the test of time, and when making any generalizations about memory one must add that “it depends”. Undaunted, Surprenant and Neath (2009) have proposed seven principles of memory: cue-dependence, encoding-retrieval, cue-overload, reconstruction, impurity of tasks and processes, relative distinctiveness, and cue specificity. In this review, these principles are briefly outlined, and the universality and usefulness of these principles for our understanding of memory are discussed. Although the principles differ in terms of their theoretical precision, empirical support, and their applicability, they do provide a basis for considering what memory does depend upon. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

When learning met memory.

The first sentence of the introduction to Hebb's (1949) classic monograph, The organization of behavior, is “It might be argued that the task of the psychologist, the task of understanding behaviour and reducing the vagaries of human thought to a mechanical process of cause and effect, is a more difficult one than that of any other scientist” (p. xi). Nowhere is this more true than in the realm of human learning and memory, given our truly remarkable ability to acquire and retain prodigious amounts of information. This article is divided into two parts. The first part sketches my lifelong fascination with learning that led me to study first memory, then attention, and then their interplay, with examples of a few interesting findings along that path. The second part details recent work in my laboratory exploring a simple yet quite powerful encoding technique: Saying things aloud improves memory for them. This benefit, which we call the production effect, likely occurs by enhancing the distinctiveness of the things said aloud, and may constitute a beneficial study method. Understanding how we learn and remember is ultimately a crucial step in understanding ourselves. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Aging and implementation of encoding strategies in the generation of rhymes: The role of executive functions.

This experiment examines whether the age-related decrease in the generation effect of rhymes is mediated by executive functioning. Young and elderly adults read and generated pairs of rhyming words for subsequent recall. Participants were also administered neuropsychological tests (executive and mnemonic functions). Results showed that elderly adults performed less well on the neuropsychological tests and benefited less than the younger participants from the generation effect. Hierarchical regression analyses revealed that the executive functions composite score was correlated with the generation effect and that it accounted for a large proportion of the age-related variance of the size of this measure. This finding supports the view that the age-related decrement in strategic encoding implementation is due to a decrease of executive functioning. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Planning scope in spoken sentence production: The role of grammatical units.

Four experiments investigate the scope of grammatical planning during spoken sentence production in Japanese and English. Experiment 1 shows that sentence latencies vary with length of sentence-initial subject phrase. Exploiting the head-final property of Japanese, Experiments 2 and 3 extend this result by showing that in a 2-phrase subject phrase, sentence latency varies with the length of the sentence-initial phrase rather than that of the whole subject phrase or its head phrase. Experiment 4 confirms this finding in English. The authors' interpretation suggests that these effects derive from grammatical encoding processes. Planning scope varies according to the relation between the 2 phrases composing the subject phrase. A thematically defined functional phrase is suggested as defining this scope. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The low-frequency encoding disadvantage: Word frequency affects processing demands.

Low-frequency words produce more hits and fewer false alarms than high-frequency words in a recognition task. The low-frequency hit rate advantage has sometimes been attributed to processes that operate during the recognition test (e.g., L. M. Reder et al., 2000). When tasks other than recognition, such as recall, cued recall, or associative recognition, are used, the effects seem to contradict a low-frequency advantage in memory. Four experiments are presented to support the claim that in addition to the advantage of low-frequency words at retrieval, there is a low-frequency disadvantage during encoding. That is, low-frequency words require more processing resources to be encoded episodically than high-frequency words. Under encoding conditions in which processing resources are limited, low-frequency words show a larger decrement in recognition than high-frequency words. Also, studying items (pictures and words of varying frequencies) along with low-frequency words reduces performance for those stimuli. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Verbal working memory and language production: Common approaches to the serial ordering of verbal information.

[Correction Notice: An erratum for this article was reported in Vol 136(3) of Psychological Bulletin (see record 2010-07936-010). In the article “Verbal Working Memory and Language Production: Common Approaches to the Serial Ordering of Verbal Information” by Daniel J. Acheson and Maryellen C. MacDonald (Psychological Bulletin, 2009, Vol. 135, No. 1, pp. 50–68), the initial sentence of the text of the article (p. 50) contains an error. The first name of the researcher Andrew W. Ellis was listed incorrectly. The sentence should read as follows: Nearly 30 years ago, Andrew W. Ellis (1980) observed that errors on tests of verbal working memory (WM) paralleled those that occur naturally in speech production.] Verbal working memory (WM) tasks typically involve the language production architecture for recall; however, language production processes have had a minimal role in theorizing about WM. A framework for understanding verbal WM results is presented here. In this framework, domain-specific mechanisms for serial ordering in verbal WM are provided by the language production architecture, in which positional, lexical, and phonological similarity constraints are highly similar to those identified in the WM literature. These behavioral similarities are paralleled in computational modeling of serial ordering in both fields. The role of long-term learning in serial ordering performance is emphasized, in contrast to some models of verbal WM. Classic WM findings are discussed in terms of the language production architecture. The integration of principles from both fields illuminates the maintenance and ordering mechanisms for verbal information. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The similarities (and familiarities) of pseudowords and extremely high-frequency words: Examining a familiarity-based explanation of the pseudoword effect.

The pseudoword effect is the finding that pseudowords (i.e., rare words or pronounceable nonwords) give rise to more hits and false alarms than words. Using the retrieving effectively from memory (REM) model of recognition memory, we tested a familiarity-based account of the pseudoword effect: Specifically, the pseudoword effect arises because pseudowords lack distinctive semantic meanings. Because semantics can differentiate orthographically similar words (e.g., horse vs. house), by lacking distinctive semantics, pseudowords have greater interitem similarity than words, and hence more familiarity, which gives rise to the pseudoword effect. Across two sets of simulations, we demonstrate that this account explains the pseudoword effect in addition to accounting for why the pseudoword effect is absent when irregular nonwords are compared with words. Furthermore, our modeling efforts suggest a novel experiment that leads us to the discovery of a new concordant effect. Namely, extremely high-frequency words behave like pseudowords (giving rise to more hits and false alarms than high-frequency words) and also have less distinctive semantics than high-frequency words. We conclude that our work provides strong evidence in favor of the familiarity-based accounts of the pseudoword effect. We discuss the implications of our research with regard to various issues surrounding the pseudoword effect and REM model. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The emergent generation effect and hypermnesia: Influences of semantic and nonsemantic generation tasks.

The generation effect is moderated by experimental design, affecting recall in within-subjects designs but typically not in between-subjects designs. However, N. W. Mulligan (2001) found that the generation effect emerged over repeated recall tests in a between-subjects design, calling into question the generality of this limiting condition. In addition, the generate condition but not the read condition produced hypermnesia (increased recall over tests). The present experiments demonstrate that semantic-based (semantic-associate and category-associate) generation tasks produce this pattern of results whereas nonsemantic (letter transposition, rhyme, word fragment) generation tasks do not. Thus, the emergent generation effect appears to be a byproduct of semantic elaboration rather than a direct product of generation. In addition, high- and low-imagery words produced equivalent hypermnesia and emergent generation effects, arguing against a mediating role for imagistic encoding. Finally, there is no evidence of an emergent generation effect for nonwords, another traditional limiting condition of the generation effect. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Revisiting the novelty effect: When familiarity, not novelty, enhances memory.

Reports of superior memory for novel relative to familiar material have figured prominently in recent theories of memory. However, such novelty effects are incongruous with long-standing observations that familiar items are remembered better. In 2 experiments, we explored whether this discrepancy was explained by differences in the type of familiarity under consideration or by differences in the difficulty of discriminating targets from lures, which may lead to source confusion for familiar but not novel targets. In Experiment 1, we directly tested whether previously observed novelty effects were the result of novelty, discrimination demands, or both. We used linguistic materials (proverbs) to replicate the novelty effect but found that it occurred only when familiar items were subject to source confusion. In Experiment 2, to examine better how novelty influences episodic memory, we used experimentally familiar, pre-experimentally familiar, and novel proverbs in a paradigm designed to overcome discrimination demand confounds. Memory was better for both types of familiar proverbs. These results indicate that familiarity, not novelty, leads to better episodic memory for studied items, regardless of whether familiarity is experimentally induced or based on prior semantic knowledge. We argue that proposals that state that information is encoded better if it is novel are based on over-generalizations of effects arising from the distinctiveness of novel materials. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Age differences in recollection: Three patterns of enhanced encoding.

Memory encoding conditions can be manipulated in a variety of ways, and many of these methods result in improved recollection for both younger and older adults relative to baseline conditions. Previous results have shown differential age-related patterns of improvement, however, with some manipulations giving equal improvement to young and old participants, some benefiting older adults more, and others benefiting younger adults more. In 2 experiments, the authors show that presenting pictures with words benefited older more than younger participants, word generation benefited both groups equally, and an encoding condition requiring novel integrative processing benefited younger more than older adults. The authors discuss these results in terms of the enhanced elaboration afforded and processing demanded by differential combinations of age groups and encoding conditions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The production and perception of randomness.

This article contains a discussion of the elusive nature of the concept of randomness, a review of findings from experiments with randomness production and randomness perception tasks, and a presentation of theoretical treatments of people's randomization capabilities and limitations. The importance of task instructions and the difficulty of interpreting results when instructions are vague or ambiguous are stressed. The widely held view that people are incapable of generating or recognizing randomness is shown to lack the strong experimental support that has sometimes been claimed for it. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

The effect of normative context variability on recognition memory.

According to some theories of recognition memory (e.g., S. Dennis & M. S. Humphreys, 2001), the number of different contexts in which words appear determines how memorable individual occurrences of words will be: A word that occurs in a small number of different contexts should be better recognized than a word that appears in a larger number of different contexts. To empirically test this prediction, a normative measure is developed, referred to here as context variability, that estimates the number of different contexts in which words appear in everyday life. These findings confirm the prediction that words low in context variability are better recognized (on average) than words that are high in context variability. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The specific-word frequency effect: Implications for the representation of homophones in speech production.

In a series of experiments, the authors investigated whether naming latencies for homophones (e.g., /nΛn/) are a function of specific-word frequency (i.e., the frequency of nun) or a function of cumulative homophone frequency (i.e., the sum of the frequencies of nun and none). Specific-word but not cumulative-homophone frequency affected picture-naming latencies. This result was obtained in 2 languages (English and Chinese). An analogous finding was obtained in a translation task, where bilingual speakers produced the English names of visually presented Spanish words. Control experiments ruled out that these results are an artifact of orthographic or articulatory factors, or of visual recognition. The results argue against the hypothesis that homophones share a common word-form representation, and support instead a model in which homophones have fully independent representations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

When does generation enhance memory for location?

Generation is thought to enhance both item-specific and relational processing of generated targets as compared with read words (M. A. McDaniel & P. J. Waddill, 1990). Generation facilitates encoding of the cue-target relation and sometimes boosts encoding of relations across list items. Of interest is whether generation can also increase the encoding of target-location associations. Because the literature on this point is mixed, 3 procedural differences between 2 studies (E. J. Marsh, G. Edelman, & G. H. Bower, 2001; N. W. Mulligan, 2004) were identified and manipulated. A positive generation effect was found for location memory, but this effect was reduced when subjects wrote down the study words and when the filler task involved generation. Generation can enhance location memory in addition to item memory but only if the experimental parameters do not interfere with the processing benefits of generation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)