Recognition latency for pictures and words as a function of encoded-feature similarity.

In separate trials of a same-different recognition task, a single target item presented as either a picture or a word was followed after a 30-sec delay by a single test item, either a picture or a word. Test items were either nominal matches for the target (same) or one of five related distractor items. Distractors were selected to resemble the target item on one of five dimensions: orthographic, acoustic, conceptual (functional or categorical), schematic (similar in shape), or neutral. Same-different reaction times were found to vary systematically as a function of depiction mode of target and/or test items and by distractor type. Verbally related distractors (orthographic and acoustic) produced longer reaction times when target or test items or both were presented as printed words. When target or test items were presented as pictures, schematic and conceptual distractors produced the longest rejection latencies.     

Recognition and recall by children and adults as a function of variations in memory encoding instructions

In four experiments Ss were instructed to learn a set of 40 words by producing implicit associative responses to each item (association instructions), by repeating items over and over (repetition instruction), or by using their own devices (neutral instructions). Experiment I showed that recognition memory (RM) accuracy was greatest under association instructions for adults and children and least under repetition instructions for children. The implications of these results for a frequency theory analysis for RM were discussed. Experiments II, III, and IV examined free recall (FR) as a function of encoding instructions at short (1 min) and long (either 90 min or 24 h) retention intervals. FR was worst under repetition instructions, with little overall difference between the association and neutral conditions. However, in Experiments III and IV, using school children, the neutral condition exceeded the others in FR after 90 min but not after 1 min.     

Confidence judgments in children's and adults' event recall and suggestibility

The present work investigated the role of children's and adults' metacognitive monitoring and control processes for unbiased event recall tasks and for suggestibility. Three studies were conducted in which children and adults indicated their degree of confidence that their answers were correct after (Study 1) and before (Study 2) answering either unbiased or misleading questions or (Study 3) forced-choice recognition questions. There was a strong tendency for overestimation of confidence regardless of age and question format. However, children did not lack the principal metacognitive competencies when these questions were asked in a neutral interview. Under misleading questioning, in contrast, children's monitoring skills were seriously impaired. Within each age group, better metacognitive differentiation was positively associated with recall accuracy in the suggestive interview.     

Physical and conceptual priming effects on picture and word identification

In the study phase of these experiments, subjects were asked to think of an item suggested by the omission in an incomplete sentence, and then look at a picture or word describing an item and say whether it was the same as theirs. In the test phase, they were asked to identify studied and nonstudied items presented briefly in either picture or word form. Subjects were then required to recall the words or pictures shown in the study phase. Experiment 1, with a within-subjects design, revealed that the studied pictures were identified more readily than studied words and nonstudied pictures. This indicates a physical priming effect. In word identification, studied words were identified more readily than nonstudied words; however, there was no difference between studied words and studied pictures, and the performance for studied pictures and nonstudied items were largely the same. The physical priming effect on picture identification was also shown in Experiment 2, with a between-subjects design. Different processing mechanisms in picture and word identification are discussed.     

The dissociation of repetition priming and recognition memory in language/learning-disabled children.

Recent research has found that the performance of learning-disabled and non-disabled children is dissociated on explicit and implicit tests of memory (Lorsbach & Worman, 1989). The current study further examined this phenomenon by comparing language/learning-disabled (L/LD) and nondisabled children (NLD) on tasks measuring primed picture-naming and item recognition. Included within the design of the experiment was the manipulation of both presentation format (pictures or words) and retention interval (immediate or 1 day). Children were initially presented with pictures and words. Performance was measured both immediately and following a 1-day retention interval on a picture naming task, an item recognition task, and a supplementary measure of memory for presentation format. The magnitude of facilitation associated with primed picture-naming was found to be independent of item recognition performance. In addition, the effects of population (L/LD and NLD) and retention interval (immediate test or 1 day) each produced dissociations between the magnitude of naming facilitation and item recognition performance. Results were discussed in terms of their implications for our understanding of the nature of memory difficulties in L/LD children.     

Differences and similarities in event recall and suggestibility between children and adults in Germany and the United States

Children (5-6 year olds, 7-8 year olds, 9-10 year olds) and adults from Germany and the United States were shown a brief video of a theft. One week later, participants were asked to give a free narrative of an observed event (free recall), followed either by sets of misleading or unbiased questions, and finally they were given a three-choice recognition question for each queried item. German participants of all ages had higher levels of correct free recall than did American participants. American adults and 9-10 year olds gave more correct responses to the open-ended unbiased questions than did their German counterparts. Germans of all ages made more correct responses to the misleading questions, whereas national differences, favoring the Germans, for incorrect response to misleading questions were restricted to the 5-6 year olds. National differences were interpreted as reflecting possible differences in strategic abilities, exposure to formal instruction, and the degree to which children experience self-directed, autonomous learning opportunities.     

Storage and retrieval properties of dual codes for pictures and words in recognition memory.

Storage and retrieval properties of pictures and words were studied within a recognition memory paradigm. Storage was manipulated by instructing subjects either to image or to verbalize to both picture and word stimuli during the study sequence. Retrieval was manipulated by representing a proportion of the old picture and word items in their opposite form during the recognition test (i.e., some old pictures were tested with their corresponding words and vice versa). Recognition performance for pictures was identical under the two instructional conditions, whereas recognition performance for words was markedly superior under the imagery instruction condition. It was suggested that subjects may engage in dual coding of simple pictures naturally, regardless of instructions, whereas dual coding of words may occur only under imagery instructions. The form of the test item had no effect on recognition performance for either type of stimulus and under either instructional condition. However, change of form of the test item markedly reduced item-by-item correlations between the two instructional conditions. It is tentatively proposed that retrieval is required in recognition, but that the effect of a form change is simply to make the retrieval process less consistent, not less efficient.     

Aging and strategic retrieval processes: reducing false memories with a distinctiveness heuristic

The authors show that a strategic retrieval process--the distinctiveness heuristic--is a powerful mechanism for reducing false memories in the elderly. Individuals studied words, pictures, or both types of items and then completed a recognition test on which the studied items appeared once, whereas the new words appeared twice. After studying either pictures only or a mixture of pictures and words, both younger and older adults falsely recognized fewer repeated new words than did participants who studied words. Studying pictures provided a basis for using a distinctiveness heuristic during the recognition test: Individuals inferred that the absence of memory for picture information indicates that an item is "new."     

The effects of emotion on younger and older adults’ monitoring of learning

Age-related differences in memory monitoring appear when people learn emotional words. Namely, younger adults’ judgments of learning (JOLs) are higher for positive than neutral words, whereas older adults’ JOLs do not discriminate between positive versus neutral words. In two experiments, we evaluated whether this age-related difference extends to learning positive versus neutral pictures. We also evaluated the contribution of two dimensions of emotion that may impact younger and older adults’ JOLs: valence and arousal. Younger and older adults studied pictures that were positive or neutral and either high or low in arousal. Participants made immediate JOLs and completed memory tests. In both experiments, the magnitude of older adults’ JOLs was influenced by emotion, and both younger and older adults demonstrated an emotional salience effect on JOLs. As important, the magnitude of participants’ JOLs was influenced by valence, and not arousal. Emotional salience effects were also evident on participants’ free recall, and older adults recalled as many pictures as did younger adults. Taken together, these data suggest that older adults do not have a monitoring deficit when learning positive (vs. neutral) pictures and that emotional salience effects on younger and older adults’ JOLs are produced more by valence than by arousal.     

Knowing what to remember and forget: A developmental study of cue memory in intentional forgetting

These experiments are the first to investigate children’s encoding and use of information about a memory cue in Bjork’s (1972) intentional forgetting task. In Experiment 1, children in Grades 2, 4, and 6 and college students were given cues to either remember or forget after the presentation of each picture. Recall and recognition tests of pictures and cues followed. The procedure in Experiment 2 was identical to that in Experiment 1 except that the list of presentation pictures was altered for some children (Grades 3 and 4) and adolescents (Grades 8 and 9) so that remember and forget cues were associated with particular taxonomic categories. In Experiment 3, the testing component was modified so that children (Grades 2, 3, and 4) and college students were asked to recall only the cue associated with each picture. The results indicated that (1) children as young as second graders encode the cue associated with each picture, although to a lesser extent than do college students, (2) much improvement in intentional forgetting is still occurring during adolescence, (3) only adults adequately cluster their recall by cue, (4) associating remember and forget cues with items from different categories does not increase the differentiation between cues, and (5) eliminating picture recall and recognition has minimal effects on the magnitude of cue judgments. These results suggest that children’s difficulties on intentional forgetting tasks stem, at least in part, from their poorer encoding of information about whether an item should be remembered or forgotten.     

The effects of contrastive encoding of semantic information on children's memory for words

The effect of context-sensitive contrastive encoding of semantic item information at input on children's memory for words is examined. In two experiments, second and fifth graders and college adults were presented with word triplets varying in categorical relatedness. Each triplet contained a target item (eg., canary) that was highly related (hawk, eagle, canary), moderately related (goose, swan, canary), or unrelated (river, lake, canary) to the other triplet members. Subjects were required to either isolate and remember the odd target word (oddity encoding) or simply read and remember the word identified by the experimenter (read encoding). Both recall and recognition were tested. The results showed that recall and recognition varied as a function of decision difficulty in isolating the target members. Developmental differences in both absolute retention levels and the patterns associated with decision difficulty were maximized in the read and minimized in the oddity encoding condition. This suggests that children differ from adults in the degree to which they perform distinctive contrastive encoding of item specific information at input, and that retention varies as a result.     

Emotion, directed forgetting, and source memory

We investigated the role of emotion on item and source memory using the item method of directed forgetting (DF) paradigm. We predicted that emotion would produce source memory impairment because emotion would make it more difficult to distinguish between to-be-remembered (R items) and to-be-forgotten items (F items) by making memory strength of R and F items similar to each other. Participants were presented with negatively arousing, positively arousing, and neutral pictures. After each picture, they received an instruction to remember or forget the picture. At retrieval, participants were asked to recall both R and F items and indicate whether each item was an R or F item. Recall was higher for the negatively arousing than for the positively arousing or neutral pictures. Further, DF occurred for the positively arousing and neutral pictures, whereas DF was not significant for the negatively arousing pictures. More importantly, the negatively arousing pictures, particularly the ones with violent content, showed a higher tendency of producing misattribution errors than the other picture types, supporting the notion that negative emotion may produce source memory impairment, even though it is still not clear whether the impairment occurs at encoding or retrieval.     

An Event-Related Potential Study of Item Recognition Memory in Children and Adults

The purpose of this study was to contrast children's event-related potentials (ERPs) with those of adults in an item recognition memory task. Four-year-old children and adults were presented with pictorial images, one half of which had been previously shown, and were asked to indicate whether each picture had been seen before. In both samples, an old-new effect was found in the ERP, namely that responses to correctly recognized old pictures elicited more positive-going ERPs than responses to correctly rejected new pictures. However, there were differences between adults' and children's ERPs with respect to the asymmetric scalp distribution and the time course of the old-new difference. In adults, the ERP differences between old and new pictures were bilateral, whereas in children the differences had a tendency to be stronger over the right hemisphere. In addition, children's ERP effects for correct discrimination between old and new pictures began around 400 to 500 msec later than it did in adults. The similarities and differences between the child and adult findings are discussed in terms of developmental changes in cognitive abilities that may be mirrored through corresponding changes in ERPs.     

感知觉加工与概念加工对联结记忆中图片优势效应的影响

本研究采用联结再认范式考察联结记忆中感知觉水平和概念加工程度对图片优势效应的影响。实验1通过呈现清晰或模糊的词语或图片对操纵了感知觉水平,结果发现只有在清晰条件下图片优势效应才会出现;实验2则在模糊条件下通过要求被试想象两个项目之间的关系操纵了概念加工程度,结果发现在有概念加工条件下,出现了图片优势效应。研究结果表明：（1）降低的感知觉水平会导致联结记忆中的图片优势效应消失;（2）对模糊项目对进行概念加工会使联结记忆中出现图片优势效应。     

Whose picture is this? Children's memory for item and source information

Children aged 3½ to 6½ years viewed pictures of common objects presented either once or three times on one of two consecutive days. A different hand puppet was used to present the pictures on each day, providing both perceptual and temporal cues to source. At test, old (studied) and new (non‐studied) pictures were presented for item recognition and source identification. Results showed that both item and source accuracy were higher for older (M = 5; 9 years) than younger children (M = 4; 6 years). Significant interactions between Age and Day of study were found for both item and source accuracy. For younger children, accuracy was higher for pictures studied on Day 1 than Day 2 (significant for source identification but not item recognition), whereas older children showed the opposite pattern: Higher accuracy for Day 2 than Day 1 (significant for item recognition but not source identification). Results are interpreted with respect to proactive interference and response bias. The utility of signal detection theory measures in determining the basis of age differences in performance of source identification is discussed.     

The effects of specific and categorical orienting on children's incidental and intentional memory for pictures and words

This study examines the effects of differences in the encoding of specific and categorical information on second graders' (7 years; 7 months), fifth graders' (10; 6), and college adults' cued recall for cue-target picture and word pairs. The cues at retrieval were either same-modal (P-P and W-W) or cross-modal (P-W and W-P) as the cues presented in acquisition, and acquisition encoding was either incidental or intentional and constrained by orienting questions or unconstrained. The most important results were that both picture and word recall varied with the encoding of both specific and categorical information and that children differed from adults in the encoding of both kinds of information in both incidental and intentional encoding conditions. In addition, both children and adults showed congruency effects for pictures and words that were greater for specific than for categorical orienting questions. The results suggest that differences in the encoding of both specific and categorical attribute information contribute to developmental recall differences independently of encoding intent and stimulus modality.     

Is there evidence for automatic processing of spatial and color attributes present in pictures and words?

The current experiment studies evidence for automatic processing of color and spatial dimensions present in matched pictures and words. Subjects studied four lists of either line drawings or matched words that varied in color (red or green) and position (left or right side), under one of four encoding conditions. Subjects were instructed to encode (1) only the item, (2) the item and its color, 13) the item and its position, or (4) the item and both color and position. All subjects participated in an unexpected final recognition task in which item recognition and recall for both attributes, regardless of original encoding instructions, we:re examined. Color memory appeared to be effortful for both pictures and words, as it was at chance level unless subjects were specifically instructed to encode the information. Position was most poorly recalled when subjects attended only to item information, but memory for this dimension was well above chance in all encoding conditions. The position of the line drawings was better recalled than the position of the words. The implications of these results for Hasher and Zacks’ (1979) model of automatic processes is discussed.     

Episodic encoding and recognition of pictures and words: role of the human medial temporal lobes

In the present PET study, we examined brain activity related to processing of pictures and printed words in episodic memory. Our goal was to determine how the perceptual format of objects (verbal versus pictorial) is reflected in the neural organization of episodic memory for common objects. We investigated this issue in relation to encoding and recognition with a particular focus on medial temporal-lobe (MTL) structures. At encoding, participants saw pictures of objects or their written names and were asked to make semantic judgments. At recognition, participants made yes-no recognition judgments in four different conditions. In two conditions, target items were pictures of objects; these objects had originally been encoded either in picture or in word format. In two other conditions, target items were words; they also denoted objects originally encoded either as pictures or as words. Our data show that right MTL structures are differentially involved in picture processing during encoding and recognition. A posterior MTL region showed higher activation in response to the presentation of pictures than of words across all conditions. During encoding, this region may be involved in setting up a representation of the perceptual information that comprises the picture. At recognition, it may play a role in guiding retrieval processes based on the perceptual input, i.e. the retrieval cue. Another more anterior right MTL region was found to be differentially involved in recognition of objects that had been encoded as pictures, irrespective of whether the retrieval cue provided was pictorial or verbal in nature; this region may be involved in accessing stored pictorial representations. Our results suggest that left MTL structures contribute to picture processing only during encoding. Some regions in the left MTL showed an involvement in semantic encoding that was picture specific; others showed a task-specific involvement across pictures and words. Together, our results provide evidence that the involvement of some but not all MTL regions in episodic encoding and recognition is format specific.     

Source memory that encoding was self-referential: the influence of stimulus characteristics

Decades of research suggest that encoding information with respect to the self improves memory (self-reference effect, SRE) for items (item SRE). The current study focused on how processing information in reference to the self affects source memory for whether an item was self-referentially processed (a source SRE). Participants self-referentially or non-self-referentially encoded words (Experiment 1) or pictures (Experiment 2) that varied in valence (positive, negative, neutral). Relative to non-self-referential processing, self-referential processing enhanced item recognition for all stimulus types (an item SRE), but it only enhanced source memory for positive words (a source SRE). In fact, source memory for negative and neutral pictures was worse for items processed self-referentially than non-self-referentially. Together, the results suggest that item SRE and source SRE (e.g., remembering an item was encoded self-referentially) are not necessarily the same across stimulus types (e.g., words, pictures; positive, negative). While an item SRE may depend on the overall likelihood the item generates any association, the enhancing effects of self-referential processing on source memory for self-referential encoding may depend on how embedded a stimulus becomes in one’s self-schema, and that depends, in part, on the stimulus’ valence and format. Self-relevance ratings during encoding provide converging evidence for this interpretation.     

Selective deficits in episodic feeling of knowing in ageing: A novel use of the general knowledge task

Failure to recall an item from memory can be accompanied by the subjective experience that the item is known but currently unavailable for report. The feeling of knowing (FOK) task allows measurement of the predictive accuracy of this reflective judgement. Young and older adults were asked to provide answers to general knowledge questions both prior to and after learning, thus measuring both semantic and episodic memory for the items. FOK judgements were made at each stage for all unrecalled responses, providing a measure of predictive accuracy for semantic and episodic knowledge. Results demonstrated a selective effect of age on episodic FOK resolution, with older adults found to have impaired episodic FOK accuracy while semantic FOK accuracy remained intact. Although recall and recognition measures of episodic memory are equivalent between the two age groups, older adults may have been unable to access contextual details on which to base their FOK judgements. The results suggest that older adults are not able to accurately predict future recognition of unrecalled episodic information, and consequently may have difficulties in monitoring recently encoded memories.