Characteristics of associative learning in younger and older adults: Evidence from an episodic priming paradigm.

Two experiments investigated age differences in the encoding of associative information during a speeded naming task. In both experiments, semantically unrelated prime-target word pairs were presented 4 times, in either massed or spaced fashion, during the learning phase. An immediate or delayed test trial was presented following the fourth presentation. In Experiment 1, participants named both the primes and the targets. Younger and older adults showed similar benefits when naming targets that were part of a consistent prime-target pairing compared with targets presented with different primes at each presentation. In Experiment 2, participants named only the target word. Younger adults showed a benefit for consistently paired words, whereas older adults showed no benefit for consistently paired words. The results of the test trials showed a greater benefit for massed repeated words than for spaced repeated words at the immediate test and a reversed pattern at the delayed test. This spacing by test delay interaction was evident in response latency in Experiment 1 and in cued recall performance in Experiment 2. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Specific and nonspecific factors in psychotherapy: A problematic paradigm for psychotherapy research.

Discusses the specific/nonspecific hypothesis—a paradigm that has guided psychotherapy research for the last 3 decades—and suggests that underlying this hypothesis is the assumption that research can ultimately separate and assess the relative contributions to psychotherapeutic outcome of specific and nonspecific factors. This assumption, in turn, has held the promise that specific, active ingredients of psychotherapy could be identified. Categorical rejection of the specific/nonspecific hypothesis is advocated. It is suggested that the identity of psychotherapy with its interpersonal context must be acknowledged. In this way, the goal of psychotherapy research shifts from the search for active ingredients toward efforts to identify fundamental principles of human interaction that underlie the interpersonal conditions essential for therapeutic change. (63 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Search of associative memory.

Describes search of associative memory (SAM), a general theory of retrieval from long-term memory that combines features of associative network models and random search models. It posits cue-dependent probabilistic sampling and recovery from an associative network, but the network is specified as a retrieval structure rather than a storage structure. A quantitative computer simulation of SAM was developed and applied to the part-list cuing paradigm. When free recall of a list of words was cued by a random subset of words from that list, the probability of recalling one of the remaining words was less than if no cues were provided at all. SAM predicted this effect in all its variations by making extensive use of interword associations in retrieval, a process that previous theorizing has dismissed. (55 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Configural processes in human associative learning.

The extent to which human discrimination learning is based on elemental or configural stimulus representations was examined in 7 experiments. In Experiments 1a and 1b, participants were able to learn nonlinear discrimination problems in a food-allergy task. In unique-cue theories, such learning is explained by individual stimulus elements acquiring independent connections with the outcome and also combining to form unique cues that function elementally. In Stage 1 of Experiments 2, 3, and 4a–c, Food A signaled an allergy outcome (O) (A?→?O) when presented alone but signaled no allergy (AB?→?no O) when paired with Food B. In Stage 2, Food B was paired with the allergy (B?→?0). In a test phase, the original discrimination between A and AB was found to be intact, at variance with the unique-cue theory. By contrast, in Experiments 5a, 5b, and 6, an effect of the B?→?O trials on the A–AB discrimination was observed with training procedures previously found by D. A. Williams (1995) to encourage elemental processing. Experiment 7 showed that the influence of B?→?0 trials on the A–AB discrimination was unaffected by pretreatments designed to foster an elemental processing strategy.… (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

One-trial associative memory in black-capped chickadees.

Black-capped chickadees (Parus atricapillus), birds that store food, inspected feeders in an aviary (1 of which was baited) and returned after a 5-min retention interval to consume the then-hidden food. In Exp 1, Ss quickly learned this task but only if different feeders were used on each trial. In Exp 2, memory for the baited feeder decayed substantially after 24 hrs but not after 30 min. In Exps 3 and 4, there were 4 alternatives to the baited feeder. Ss performed better than chance from the beginning of these experiments. When Ss made errors on their 1st choice, Ss performed better than chance on their 2nd choice. Exp 4 tested the notion that increasing the cost of inspecting the feeders would reduce errors; however, this did not improve performance. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

On the nature of associative information in recognition memory.

In a typical associative-recognition task, participants must distinguish between intact word pairs (both words previously studied together) and rearranged word pairs (both words previously studied but as part of different pairs). The familiarity of the individual items on this task is uninformative because all of the items were seen before, so the only way to solve the task is to rely on associative information. Prior research suggests that associative information is recall-like in nature and may therefore be an all-or-none variable. The present research reports several experiments in which some pairs were strengthened during list presentation. The resulting hit rates and false alarm rates, and an analysis of the corresponding receiver operating characteristic plots, suggest that participants rely heavily on item information when making an associative-recognition decision (to no avail) and that associative information may be best thought of as a some-or-none variable. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Methodological considerations in the forbidden toy paradigm.

Designed 2 studies to investigate the forbidden fruit effect in 83 3rd and 4th graders. Results indicate (a) no support for a forbidden fruit effect, (b) that procedural aspects other than the prohibition in the forbidden toy paradigm influenced the child's valuation of the entire toy set, and (c) that there is a necessity for an appropriate comparison condition when using the forbidden toy paradigm. These results are extended to the previous research on the sour grapes effect. (4 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Asymmetry of inference in the dishabituation paradigm.

The habituation paradigm is frequently used to assess cognitive development in infants. Habituation to a stimulus by repeated presentation, followed by dishabituation (increased attention to a novel stimulus) is taken to imply discriminability of the novel stimulus. However, infants do not always dishabituate, even when the old and new stimuli are known to be discriminable. It is postulated that failure of dishabituation could be due either to a lack of discriminability of the new stimulus or to failure to relate it to the schema elaborated during habituation. Support for this postulate was obtained in 4 experiments with a total of 200 infants ranging in age from 5.5 to 29 mo. The materials varied from geometric forms through auditory stimuli to conceptual categories. In some cases dishabituation did not occur despite the known discriminability of familiar and novel stimuli. The degree of attention directed toward the new stimulus might better be understood in terms of the degree of discrepancy between the unfamiliar stimulus and the schema for the familiar (the curvilinear discrepancy hypothesis) rather than the ease of discriminability between old and new stimuli. (French abstract) (30 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Congruity effects in the survival processing paradigm.

Five experiments were conducted to investigate a proposal by Butler, Kang, and Roediger (2009) that congruity (or fit) between target items and processing tasks might contribute, at least partly, to the mnemonic advantages typically produced by survival processing. In their research, no significant survival advantages were found when words were preselected to be highly congruent or incongruent with a survival and control (robbery) scenario. Experiments 1a and 1b of the present report show that survival advantages, in fact, generalize across a wide set of selected target words; each participant received a unique set of words, sampled without replacement from a large pool, yet significant survival advantages remained. In Experiment 2, we found a significant survival advantage using words that had been preselected by Butler et al. to be highly unrelated (or irrelevant) to both the survival and control scenarios. Experiment 3 showed a significant survival advantage using word sets that had been preselected to be highly congruent with both scenarios. Finally, Experiment 4 mixed congruent and incongruent words in the same list, more closely replicating the design used by Butler et al., and a highly reliable main effect of survival processing was still obtained (although the survival advantage for the congruent words did not reach conventional levels of statistical significance). Our results suggest that the null effects of survival processing obtained by Butler et al. may not generalize beyond their particular experimental design. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Creativity and the need for associative novelty.

Based on J. P. Houston and S. A. Mednick's experiment (see record 1963-06699-001), the differential reinforcing properties of associative novelty were assessed for high-creative and low-creative Ss. 80 undergraduates, the top and bottom 26% of a pool of 156 Ss who had taken the Remote Associates Test (RAT), participated in a 2*4 factorial experiment. The independent variables were creativity, measured by the RAT, and type of reinforcement of nouns; the dependent variable was the number of nouns chosen over blocks of 40 trials. Each S saw 180 cards with 2 words, a noun and a nonnoun, typed on each card. If S chose the nonnoun, E responded with its most common associate. If S chose the noun, E responded with a very common associate, a moderately common associate, a very uncommon associate, or a similar-sounding word, depending on the experimental condition. Neither main effect of creativity nor type of reinforcement was significant (p > .05); only the effect of trials was significant (p     

Explaining category interference effects in associative memory.

Two studies with 220 undergraduates investigated the effects of categorization on the acquisition and long-term retention of AB word pairs using modeling techniques that factor the contributions of various storage and retrieval factors. In Exp I, each S memorized 1 of the 4 basic types of lists: unrelated cues/unrelated targets, categorized cues/unrelated cues, unrelated cues/categorized targets, and categorized cues/categorized targets. Ss in Exp II memorized 24-item AB lists to criterion. Acquisition data showed that there was a crossover interaction such that the effects of increasing the degree of cue or target relatedness depended on the nature of the comparison items. In contrast with the results of previous studies, the effects were larger when categorization was manipulated on the target side of AB pairs than when it was manipulated on the cue side. The degree of categorization affected retrieval difficulty but not storage difficulty. Long-term retention data indicated that, contrary to the acquisition data, the effects of categorization on retention were uniformly positive. Categorization decreased the amount of forgetting primarily by reducing the rate at which traces were lost from memory (storage failure) during the retention interval. Results are discussed in terms of modern unitary-trace theories of associative memory. (French abstract) (29 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Some phenomena of associative learning in honeybees.

Two experiments present data on extinction in 111 free-flying honeybees previously reinforced for landing on distinctively colored and scented targets. A variety of phenomena familiar from the study of vertebrate learning, such as the overlearning-extinction effect, the partial reinforcement effect, overshadowing, summation, and conditioned inhibition, are described, and their significance is considered. (27 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Retrieval constraints on associative elaborations.

This research investigated the role of associative elaborations on free- and cued-recall performance. Elaboration was manipulated by having subjects pronounce an associatively related word that could be integrated into an activated episodic trace following sentence-encoding operations on the target concept. In Experiments 1 and 2, free recall was facilitated when the word was related to the sentence context of the target encoding compared to when it was related only to the target, or both the target and the context. The target-related conditions did not differ from an unrelated control condition for positive response encodings. This same pattern held for cued recall when the sentence frame context was provided as the retrieval cue (Experiment 1). However, Experiment 2 showed that if the elaborating word was provided as a cue for the target, then recall was highest when it was related to both the target and its context or only to the target. The results are discussed in terms of retrieval constraints on associative elaborations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

On paradigm shifts.

Three points of issue raised by E. M. Segal and R. Lachman's (see record 1972-22033-001) article on paradigm shifts in psychology are discussed: (1) that scientists are more concerned with a paradigm than a world view, (2) the criteria for identifying scientific revolution, and (3) the demise of stimulus-response behaviorism. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Role of the amygdala complex in early olfactory associative learning.

Although olfactory associative conditioning in newborn rats produces marked structural and functional changes in the olfactory bulb, recent evidence suggests that extrabulbar circuits must be involved in storing these early memories. The present experiments examined the role of the amygdala complex on early olfactory learning. Bilateral amygdala lesions or sham lesions were performed on Postnatal Day (PN) 5. On PN6, pups were trained in a standard classical conditioning paradigm associating odor with tactile stimulation. Behavioral testing on PN7 revealed that amygdala lesions blocked odor preferences but had no effect on conditioned behavioral activation. Similar sized neocortical lesions did not impair odor preferences. Importantly, amygdala lesion effects on learned odor preferences could be reversed by extensive overtraining. These results suggest that the amygdala complex plays a critical role in modulating associative learning as early as the 1st postnatal week in the rat. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of repetition on associative recognition in young and older adults: Item and associative strengthening.

Young and older adults studied word pairs and later discriminated studied pairs from various types of foils including recombined word-pairs and foil pairs containing one or two previously unstudied words. We manipulated how many times a specific word pair was repeated (1 or 5) and how many different words were associated with a given word (1 or 5) to tease apart the effects of item familiarity from recollection of the association. Rather than making simple old/new judgments, subjects chose one of five responses: (a) Old-Old (original), (b) Old-Old (rearranged), (c) Old-New, (d) New-Old, (e) New-New. Veridical recollection was impaired in old age in all memory conditions. There was evidence for a higher rate of false recollection of rearranged pairs following exact repetition of study pairs in older but not younger adults. In contrast, older adults were not more susceptible to interference than young adults when one or both words of the pair had multiple competing associates. Older adults were just as able as young adults to use item familiarity to recognize which word of a foil was old. This pattern suggests that recollection problems in advanced age are because of a deficit in older adults' formation or retrieval of new associations in memory. A modeling simulation provided good fits to these data and offers a mechanistic explanation based on an age-related reduction of working memory. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Attentional and error-correcting associative mechanisms in classical conditioning.

R. A. Rescorla (2000, Rescorla, 2001, Rescorla, 2002) reported that the associative changes undergone by 2 conditioned stimuli that are reinforced or not reinforced in compound depend on their initial associations. The results contradict the predictions of simple error-correction models but can be explained by models that incorporate a “constrained” error-correction rule. A model of classical conditioning presented by N. A. Schmajuk, Y. Lam, and J. A. Gray (1996) suggests that attentional mechanisms, acting during both compound training and testing, have an important role in producing those results. Moreover, the model suggests that those attentional mechanisms might obscure the evaluation of the associative changes undergone by the conditioned stimuli during compound training. Two experiments that differentiate our model from competing theories are proposed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)