Memorability judgments for high- and low-frequency words

Five experiments were conducted in order to examine subjects' judgments of the memorability of high- (HF) and low-frequency (LF) words in the context of a recognition memory task. In Experiment 1, the subjects were provided study/test experience with a list of HF and LF words prior to making memorability judgments for a new list of HF and LF items. The findings were consistent with previous evidence (Greene & Thapar, 1994; Wixted, 1992) suggesting that subjects are not explicitly aware of the greater recognition memorability of LF words. Experiments 2-5 embedded the memorability judgment task within the recognition test itself. In these experiments, the subjects consistently gave higher memorability ratings to LF items. The contrast between the pattern of results found when the subjects made their judgments at the time of list presentation (Experiment 1) and that when they made their judgments during the recognition test (Experiments 2-5) is consistent with recent evidence that even seemingly highly related metamnemonic judgments (e.g., ease of learning judgments vs. judgments of learning for the same items) may be based on very different factors if they occur at different points in the study/test cycle. The present findings are also consistent with the possibility that very rapid retrieval of memorability information for HF and LF words may affect recognition decisions and may contribute to the recognition memory word frequency effect.     

Impairment of memory for spatial context in schizophrenia.

A group of 33 patients with schizophrenia were compared with control participants using a spatial memory task in which words were presented on locations of a grid. In the first part of the experiment, recognition of target information (words) was tested. In the second, 2 tasks of spatial location (contextual information) were given involving different sets of words placed in different locations: A location memory task (determining which word was in a particular spatial location) explored an associative form of spatial memory, and a relocation task (determining where a particular word was located) explored an associative and a nonassociative form of spatial memory. Patients were more impaired with regard to the location memory task than to the target recognition and relocation tasks. The impairment was negatively correlated with Stroop task performance. The results suggest that schizophrenia is associated with a spatial context memory deficit, which could be due to defective associations between target and spatial information. This deficit seemed to be related to frontal dysfunction. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Lexical ambiguity and the timecourse of attentional allocation in word recognition.

In two experiments the allocation of attention during the recognition of ambiguous and unambiguous words was investigated. In Experiment 1, separate groups performed either lexical decision, auditory probe detection, or their combination. In the combined condition probes occurred 90, 180, or 270 ms following the onset of the lexical-decision target. Lexical decisions and probe responses were fastest for ambiguous words, followed by unambiguous words and pseudowords, respectively, which indicated that processing ambiguous words was less attention demanding than unambiguous words or pseudowords. Attention demands decreased across the timecourse of word recognition for all stimulus types. In Experiment 2, one group performed the lexical-decision task alone, whereas another group performed the lexical-decision task during the retention interval of a short-term memory task. The results were consistent with those from Experiment 1 and showed that word recognition is an attention-demanding process and that the demands are inversely related to the number of meanings of the stimulus. These results are discussed with regard to the structure of the mental lexicon (i.e., single vs. multiple lexical entries) and the effect of such a structure on attentional mechanisms. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Information-processing, storage characteristics and worry

Eysenck (1984, Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society, 22, 545-548) suggested that storage characteristics may be an important determinant of worry, and postulated that prolonged worry occurs in individuals who have tightly organised clusters of worry-related information stored in long-term memory. These clusters reflect areas or domains of worry. Because the information is stored in tight clusters, it becomes more accessible, more rapidly activated and therefore retrieved more quickly. The Worry Domains Questionnaire (WDQ) (Tallis, 1991c) is used to determine which domain worried subjects most (Primary) and least (Secondary). Two experiments are reported using a word allocation task, which requires subjects to make categorical decisions, based on these worry domains. It is reported that priming facilitates the emergence of domain effects, thus providing support for a structural hypothesis. High worries take longer to reject negative words if they are from the Primary domain and have difficulty rejecting Primary domain words when they are under a congruent heading. In addition, high worriers are reported to show retarded latencies when attempting to process ambiguous information, consistent with Metzger et al.'s studies (1990, Journal of Clinical Psychology, 48, 76-88). It is suggested that the initiation and maintenance of worry is largely attributable to an elevated evidence requirement and this may link to the personality trait of perfectionism.     

Clinical and neurocognitive aspects of source monitoring errors in schizophrenia

OBJECTIVE: Source monitoring, an aspect of memory that involves judgments about the origin of information, has been found to be more prone to errors in schizophrenic subjects than in normal persons. To examine the precise nature of such errors and their relationship to clinical and neurocognitive variables, the authors compared schizophrenic and normal subjects. METHOD: Schizophrenic subjects who had been medication free for 1 week (N = 26) and demographically matched normal subjects (N = 21) performed a source monitoring task and were assessed on current psychiatric symptoms, IQ, and frontal lobe functioning. RESULTS: The schizophrenic subjects had normal recognition memory of target words (recognition hits) and a normal generation effect but made more errors than the comparison subjects in identifying the source of target words. Specifically, the schizophrenic subjects made more errors in remembering the source of new and self-generated items, and they tended to attribute items to an external source. In 11 retested subjects, these errors were stable and independent from medication status after a 2-year interval. Secondary analyses suggested that certain source monitoring errors may be associated with hostility and lower IQ. When the effect of IQ was controlled, correlations with frontal dysfunction were not significant. CONCLUSIONS: Schizophrenic subjects make significantly more source monitoring errors than normal subjects, but not because of problems with recognition memory hits or with the generation effect. This tendency may be trait like and may be related to hostility. Lower IQ in schizophrenia plays a partial role in these errors, but frontal dysfunction does not.     

Episodic encoding of voice attributes and recognition memory for spoken words.

Recognition memory for spoken words was investigated with a continuous recognition memory task. Independent variables were number of intervening words (lag) between initial and subsequent presentations of a word, total number of talkers in the stimulus set, and whether words were repeated in the same voice or a different voice. In Exp 1, recognition judgments were based on word identity alone. Same-voice repetitions were recognized more quickly and accurately than different-voice repetitions at all values of lag and at all levels of talker variability. In Exp 2, recognition judgments were based on both word identity and voice identity. Ss recognized repeated voices quite accurately. Gender of the talker affected voice recognition but not item recognition. These results suggest that detailed information about a talker's voice is retained in long-term memory representations of spoken words. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Contributions of surface and conceptual information to recognition memory

The present experiments were designed to determine whether memory for the voice in which a word is spoken is retained in a memory system that is separate from episodic memory or, instead, whether episodic memory represents both word and voice information. These two positions were evaluated by assessing the effects of study-to-test changes in voice on recognition memory after a variety of encoding tasks that varied in processing requirements. In three experiments, the subjects studied a list of words produced by six voices. The voice in which the word was spoken during a subsequent explicit recognition test was either the same as or different from the voice used in the study phase. The results showed that word recognition was affected by changes in voice after each encoding condition and that the magnitude of the voice effect was unaffected by the type of encoding task. The results suggest that spoken words are represented in long-term memory as episodic traces that contain talker-specific perceptual information.     

What is the mechanism for fluency in successive recognition?

There are a number of reasons to believe that processing fluency may affect successive recognition judgements, but evidence about the mechanism for these effects is currently lacking. This study used a successive task design to examine whether subjective ease might underlie effects of fluency on recognition. At study subjects performed lexical decisions; in a subsequent test with studied and new items, subjects performed lexical decisions followed immediately by recognition or ease judgments. In a previous study we used that process dissociation procedure to show that recognition in a similar task was largely based upon fluency. In the present study, successive recognition judgments interfered with lexical decision performance to a greater degree than did ease judgments, suggesting that the recognition judgment was not automatic and involved processes additional to the judgment of ease. The data suggest that the fluency involved in successive recognition is more complex than a subjective judgment of ease of processing. One possible mechanism for fluency in recognition may be based upon reductions in the orientation of attention that accompany item repetition.     

Affective valence of words, explicit and implicit memory in clinical depression

Explicit and implicit memory for affectively valenced words (positive, negative or neutral) were investigated in 30 patients suffering from a major depressive episode (DSM-III-R criteria) and 30 normal control subjects. Explicit memory was assessed with a free-recall and a recognition task and implicit memory with a word-stem completion task. Depressed and control subjects recalled more emotional, i.e., positive and negative, words than neutral ones. They recognized less negative than neutral words. In contrast, to recall and recognition performance, word-completion performance was not sensitive to the affective valence of words: depressed and control subjects exhibited equivalent priming of positive, negative and neutral words. These results indicate that, in depressed and normal subjects, the affective valence of words influences memory when conscious, intentional recollection is required but is devoid of effect when such a recollection is not required.     

Parental alcoholism and the effects of alcohol on mediated semantic priming.

In this study, researchers tested the effects of a moderate dose of alcohol on the spread of activation of associated information in memory using a mediated semantic priming task in which target words are preceded by primes that are either unrelated or indirectly related to the target. Male and female participants with or without a parental history (PH+ and PH-, respectively) of alcoholism were administered the priming task after consuming alcohol or a placebo beverage. Among PH- individuals, alcohol constrained the spread of activation of associated information, as manifested by a reduced priming effect. In contrast, alcohol enhanced priming effects among PH+ participants, though this latter effect appears to be due to a particularly slow response among these individuals to unprimed words. Results are discussed with regard to theories of alcohol's effects on cognitive processes. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Why do non-color words interfere with color naming?

In the non-color-word Stroop task, university students' response latencies were longer for low-frequency than for higher frequency target words. Visual identity primes facilitated color naming in groups reading the prime silently or processing it semantically (Experiment 1) but did not when participants generated a rhyme of the prime (Experiment 3). With auditory identity primes, generating an associate or a rhyme of the prime produced interference (Experiments 2 and 3). Color-naming latencies were longer for nonwords than for words (Experiment 4). There was a small long-term repetition benefit in color naming for low-frequency words that had been presented in the lexical decision task (Experiment 5). Facilitation of word recognition speeds color naming except when phonological activation of the base word increases response competition. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Blinks of the mind: Memory effects of attentional processes.

If 2 words are presented successively within 500 ms, subjects often miss the 2nd word. This attentional blink reflects a limited capacity to attend to incoming information. Memory effects were studied for words that fell within an attentional blink. Unrelated words were presented in a modified rapid serial visual presentation task at varying stimulus-onset asynchronies, and attention was systematically manipulated. Subsequently, recognition, repetition priming, and semantic priming were measured separately in 3 experiments. Unidentified words showed no recognition and no repetition priming. However, blinked (i.e., unidentified) words did produce semantic priming in related words. When, for instance, ring was blinked, it was easier to subsequently identify wedding than apple. In contrast, when the blinked word itself was presented again, it was not easier to identify than an unrelated word. Possible interpretations of this paradoxical finding are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Visual word recognition: Reattending to the role of spatial attention.

Three experiments examine whether spatial attention and visual word recognition processes operate independently or interactively in a spatially cued lexical-decision task. Participants responded to target strings that had been preceded first by a prime word at fixation and then by an abrupt onset cue either above or below fixation. Targets appeared either in the cued (i.e., valid) or uncued (i.e., invalid) location. The proportion of validly cued trials and the proportion of semantically related prime-target pairs were manipulated independently. It is concluded that spatial attention and visual word recognition processes are best seen as interactive. Spatial attention affects word recognition in 2 distinct ways: (a) it affects the uptake of orthographic information, possibly acting as "glue" to hold letters in their proper places in words, and (b) it (partly) determines whether or not activation from the semantic level feeds down to the lexical level during word recognition. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

On the relation between feeling of knowing and lexical decision: Persistent subthreshold activation or topic familiarity?

Exp 1 replicated I. Yaniv and D. E. Meyer's (1987) finding that lexical decision and episodic recognition performance was better for words previously yielding high-accessibility levels (a combination of feeling-of-knowing and tip-of-the-tongue ratings) in comparison with those yielding low-accessibility levels in a rare word definition task. Exp 2 yielded the same pattern even though lexical decisions preceded accessibility estimates by a full week. Exp 3 dismissed the possibility that the Exp 2 results may have been due to a long-term influence from the lexical decision task to the rare word judgment task. These results support a model in which Ss (1) retrieve topic familiarity information in making accessibility estimates in the rare word definition task and (2) use this information to modulate lexical decision performance. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Flexible coding in word recognition

An experiment was designed to examine the contribution of phonetic information in the processing of words in tachistoscopic recognition masking. Following stimulus presentation, subjects were required to indicate which of two alternatives had appeared. On trials containing word stimuli, the alternatives were either phonetically identical (SENT, CENT) or not (SOLD, COLD). Recognition performance was inferior in the former case, provided conditions were not structured to discourage reliance on phonetic information. The findings were interpreted as showing that more than one type of coding process can underly the word superiority effect. Phonetic information is ordinarily used to code words in this type of task, but an alternative processing tactic (e.g., one relying on visual or perhaps semantic codes) can also be effectively used in word recognition when phonetic information does not discriminate well among response alternatives.     

Working memory and aphasia

This study investigated the relationship between working memory capacity and reading comprehension in aphasia. A measurement of working memory capacity was obtained using a modified version of Daneman and Carpenter's (1980) Reading Span Task. Sets of sentences ranging in length from one to six words were presented to 22 aphasic subjects who were required to retain the terminal words following each sentence for subsequent recognition. The maximum number of words retrieved was used as an index of working memory capacity. Two versions of the task (listening and reading) were presented depending on the subjects' ability to read. Strong positive correlations were found between working memory capacity, reading comprehension, and language function. These results support the notion that the ability of aphasic individuals to comprehend language is predictable from their working memory capacities.     

Overdependence on degraded gist memory in Alzheimer's disease.

Alzheimer's disease (AD) reduces associative effects on false recognition in the Deese-Roediger-McDermott task, either due to impaired memory for gist or impaired use of gist in memory decisions. Gist processes were manipulated by blocking or mixing studied words according to their associations and by varying the associative strength between studied and nonstudied words at test. Both associative blocking and associative strength had smaller effects on false recognition in AD patients than in control participants, consistent with gist memory impairments. However, unlike the case with control participants, blocking influenced true and false recognition equally in AD patients, demonstrating an overdependence on gist when making memory decisions. AD also impaired item-specific recollections, relative to control participants, as true recognition of studied words was reduced even when the two groups were equated on gist-based false recognition. We propose that the overdependence on degraded gist memory in AD is caused by even larger impairments in item-specific recollections. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Semantic priming in major depressive state

We studied semantic priming in 20 major depressive subjects. The methodology used was a visual lexical decision task. Semantic priming is the facilitation of target word recognition (shortening of response time) by the prior presentation of a semantically related context (a prime word). It relies on semantic processing of words and context, facilitating early cognitive stages of response. Varying the temporal interval between prime and target words onset allows us to distinguish between two priming mechanisms, relying on more automatic (test 1) or more controlled (i.e. attention dependent) (test 2) information processing. We observe a significant retardation for words and pseudo-words in depressives (in relation to controls) in both tests. In spite of a general retardation and increase of response times in depressives, semantic priming is evident in both groups and both tests, and does not differ significantly between depressive and control groups in either automatic or controlled conditions. Theses results confirm that semantic processing is not impaired in depression, and are discussed with regard to the hypothesis of an effortful processing impairment in depression, and to depressive retardation.     

Referent cognitions and task decision autonomy: Beyond equity theory.

A laboratory experiment was conducted to test referent cognitions theory, which integrates distributive and procedural justice. Undergraduates worked on two tasks knowing that performance scores from only one of these would count toward their chances for earning a reward. In the subject-decision conditions, the students selected (prior to knowledge about their performance) which task would count. The experimenter selected the crucial task in the experimenter-decision conditions. Feedback from the task that did not count indicated to subjects in high-referent conditions that they would have won the reward if these scores had counted, whereas subjects in low-referent conditions learned they would have lost no matter which set of scores counted. All subjects "lost" on the task that counted. Only subjects in the high-referent, experimenter-decision condition subsequently expressed feelings of unfair treatment. The results are discussed in terms of limitations to equity theory. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)