Memory & Cognition

Greene, Robert

doi: 10.3758/BF03198497pmid: 2017031

Substantial recency effects are found in immediate serial recall of auditory items. These recency effects are greatly reduced when an irrelevant auditory stimulus (a stimulus suffix) is presented. A number of accounts that have been proposed to explain these phenomena assume that auditory items are susceptible to masking or overwriting in memory. Later items overwrite earlier items, leading to an advantage for the last item, unless it is masked by a suffix. This assumption is called into question by evidence that presenting list items in two voices has no beneficial effect in immediate serial recall. In addition, it is shown that suffix effects on both terminal and preterminal list items are influenced by the physical similarity of the suffix to the terminal item and not by the physical similarity of the suffix to preterminal items.

Shaw, Geraldine; Bekerlan, D.

doi: 10.3758/BF03198499pmid: 2017034

MRC Applied Psychology Unit, Cambridge, England The purpose of this study was to determine whether hypermnesia (improved net recall over time) can be differentially affected by manipulating the nature of tasks performed during the intervals between successive recall trials. In Experiment 1, all subjects were asked to imaginally encode separate words and were tested three times for recall. The control group (no interpolated task) produced the hypermnesia effect. Both groups performing interpolated tasks showed sig-nificantly lower recall. A second experiment was conducted in order to replicate these results and to examine the effects of intertest rehearsal on hypermnesia. In Experiment 2, subjects were asked to encode pairs of words using interactive-imagery instructions. Six different interpolated task conditions were employed, varying in the degree to which subsystems of working memory were used. Groups performing imaginai interpolated tasks showed no hypermnesia, whereas those performing nonimaginal tasks did. These findings suggest that access to working memory (see Baddeley, 1986) is not necessary for hypermnesia.

Petten, Cyma; Kutas, Marta

doi: 10.3758/BF03198500pmid: 2017035

Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded as subjects read semantically meaningful, syntactically legal but nonsensical and random word strings. The constraints imposed by formal sentence structure alone did not reduce the amplitude of the N400 component elicited by open-class words, whereas semantic constraints did. Semantic constraints also eliminated the word-frequency effect of a larger N400 for low-frequency words. Responses to closed-class words exhibited reduced N400 amplitudes in syntactic and congruent sentences, indicating that formal sentence structure placed greater restrictions on closed-class words than it did on open-class words. However, unlike the open-class results, the impact of sentence context on closed-class words was stable across word positions, suggesting that these syntactic constraints were applied only locally. A second ERP component, distinct from the N400, was elicited primarily by congruent closed-class words.

doi: 10.3758/BF03198502pmid: N/A

Rubin, David; Stoltzfus, Ellen; Wall, Kirsten

doi: 10.3758/BF03198491pmid: 2017026

Undergraduates were asked to generate a name for a hypothetical new exemplar of a category. They produced names that had the same numbers of syllables, the same endings, and the same types of word stems as existing exemplars of that category. In addition, novel exemplars, each consisting of a nonsense syllable root and a prototypical ending, were accurately assigned to categories. The data demonstrate the abstraction and use of surface properties of words.

Dark, V.

doi: 10.3758/BF03198501pmid: N/A

Jolicoeur, Pierre; Ingleton, Margaret

doi: 10.3758/BF03198493pmid: 2017027

Subjects decided whether two dots were on the same curve or on different curves in patterns consisting of two curves and two dots in displays that had an exposure duration of 200 msec or that remained in view until the subjects’ response. The overall size of the patterns was varied by a factor of two. Furthermore, across experiments, we manipulated the predictability of the size of the pattern on a particular trial. On half of the trials, the two dots were on the same curve; across these trials, the distance between the dots, along the curve, was manipulated systematically while the Euclidean distance between the dots was held- constant. On the other half of the trials, the two dots were on different curves. The time to respondsame increased monotonically as curve distance between the dots increased, suggesting that subjects mentally traced the curve. in order to perform the task. The absolute size of the pattern had little or no effect on the response times, indicating that it was curve distance relative to the overall pattern size, rather than absolute distance, that controlled response times. Furthermore, expectancies about pattern size had essentially no effect on performance. Taken together, the results suggest that the rate of tracing is determined by various stimulus properties that covary with the overall size of the pattern on which tracing takes place, such as the distance between the traced curve and nearby distractor curves, or the curvature of the traced curve.

Bäckman, Lars

doi: 10.3758/BF03198496pmid: 2017030

Two experiments were performed to investigate the effects of prior knowledge on recognition memory in young adults, younger old adults, 76-year-olds, and 85-year-olds. In Experiment 1, we examined episodic recognition of dated and contemporary famous persons presented as faces, names, and faces plus names. In Experiment 2, four types of faces were presented for later recognition: dated familiar, contemporary familiar, old unfamiliar, and young unfamiliar. The results of both experiments showed that young adults performed better with contemporary than with dated famous persons, whereas the reverse was true for all groups of older adults. In addition, the data of Experiment 2 indicated that (1) young adults showed better recognition for young than for old unfamiliar faces, (2) younger old adults performed better with old than with young unfamiliar faces, and (3) the two oldest age groups showed no effect of age of face. These results suggest that the ability to utilize rich semantic knowledge to improve episodic memory is preserved in very old age, although the aging process may be associated with deficits in the ability to utilize prior knowledge to support memory when the underlying representation lacks semantic and contextual features. The overall data pattern was discussed in relation to the notion that, with increasing adult age, there is an increase in the level of cognitive support required to enhance episodic remembering.

Deakin, Janice; Allard, Fran

doi: 10.3758/BF03198498pmid: 2017032

The present studies extend skilled-memory theory to a domain involving the performance of motor sequences. Skilled figure skaters were better able than their less skilled counterparts to perform short skating sequences that were choreographed, rather than randomly constructed. Expert skaters encoded sequences for performance very differently from the way in which they encoded sequences that were verbally presented for verbal recall. Tasks interpolated between sequence and recall showed no significant influence on recall accuracy, implicating long-term memory in skating memory. There was little evidence for the use of retrieval structures when skaters learned the brief sequences used throughout these studies. Finally, expert skaters were able to judge the similarity of two skating elements faster than less skilled skaters, indicating a faster access to semantic memory for experts. The data indicate that skaters show many of the same skilled-memory characteristics as have been described in other skill domains involving memorization, such as digit span and memory for dinner orders. Correspondence should be addressed to Janice M. Deakin,

Jones, Mari; Ralston, Jacqueline

doi: 10.3758/BF03198492pmid: 2017033

Two experiments were carried out to investigate the roles of joint accent structure and familiarity in delayed recognition of relatively long tonal melodies. Melodic themes of target melodies were defined by correlating contour-related pitch accents with temporal accents (accent coupling) during an initial familiarization phase. Later, subjects gave recognition responses to key-transposed versions of the target melodies as well as to decoys withsame anddifferent contour accent patterns. In Experiment 1, all to-be-recognized melodies occurred both in an original rhythm, which preserved accent coupling, and in a new rhythm, which did not. Listeners were best at distinguishing targets fromdifferent decoys, especially in the original rhythm. In Experiment 2, the familiarity of target tunes and the rhythmic similarity in recognition were varied.Similar rhythms preserved accent coupling, whereasdissimilar rhythms did not. Listeners were most adept in distinguishing familiar targets fromdifferent decoys (Experiment 2A), particularly when they appeared in novel but similar rhythms. However, insimilar rhythm conditions, listeners also frequently mistooksame decoys for targets. With less familiar targets (Experiment 2B), these effects were attenuated, and performance showed general effects of pitch contour.