Effects of study time and meaningfulness on environmental context-dependent recognition

In two experiments, we examined whether the size of place-context-dependent recognition decreased with study time and with the meaningfulness of the to-be-remembered materials. A group of 80 undergraduates intentionally studied a list of words in a short (1.5?s per item) or a long (4.0?s per item) study-time condition (Exp. 1). Another 40 undergraduates studied lists consisting of words and nonwords in the long-study-time condition (Exp. 2). After a short retention interval, recognition for the targets was tested in the same or in a different context. Context was manipulated by means of the combination of place, subsidiary task, and experimenter. Significant context-dependent recognition discrimination was found for words in the short-study-time condition (Exp. 1), but not in the long-study-time condition (Exps. 1 and 2). Significant effects were found as well for nonwords, even in the long-study-time condition (Exp. 2). These results are explained well by an outshining account: that is, by principles of outshining and encoding specificity.     

Concreteness and word production

Two experiments are reported that investigated the effect of concreteness on the ability to generate words to fit sentence contexts. When participants attempted to retrieve words from dictionary definitions in Experiment 1, abstract words were associated with more omissions and more alternates than were concrete words. These findings are consistent with the view that the semantic–lexical weights in the word production system are weaker for abstract than for concrete words. We found no evidence that greater competition from semantic neighbors was an additional reason why abstract words were harder to produce. Participants also reported more positive tip-of-the-tongue states (TOTs) when attempting to produce abstract words from their definitions, consistent with more phonological retrieval problems for abstract than for concrete words. In Experiment 2, participants attempted to generate words to fit into a sentence that described a specific event. The difference between the numbers of abstract and concrete words recalled was significantly smaller in the event condition than in the definition condition, and evidence no longer emerged of greater phonological retrieval failure for abstract words. Overall, the results are consistent with the view that the semantic–lexical weights, but not the lexical–phonological weights, are weaker for abstract than for concrete words in the word production system.     

The effects of interleaving versus blocking on foreign language pronunciation learning

Many studies have shown that students learn better when they are given repeated exposures to different concepts in a way that is shuffled or interleaved, rather than blocked (e.g., Rohrer Educational Psychology Review, 24, 355–367, 2012). The present study explored the effects of interleaving versus blocking on learning French pronunciations. Native English speakers learned several French words that conformed to specific pronunciation rules (e.g., the long “o” sound formed by the letter combination “eau,” as in bateau), and these rules were presented either in blocked fashion (bateau, carreau, fardeau . . . mouton, genou, verrou . . . tandis, verglas, admis) or in interleaved fashion (bateau, mouton, tandis, carreau, genou, verglas . . .). Blocking versus interleaving was manipulated within subjects (Experiments 1–3) or between subjects (Experiment 4), and participants’ pronunciation proficiency was later tested through multiple-choice tests (Experiments 1, 2, and 4) or a recall test (Experiment 3). In all experiments, blocking benefited the learning of pronunciations more than did interleaving, and this was true whether participants learned only 4 words per rule (Experiments 1–3) or 15 words per rule (Experiment 4). Theoretical implications of these findings are discussed.     

Adaptive memory: The survival-processing memory advantage is not due to negativity or mortality salience

Recent research has highlighted the adaptive function of memory by showing that imagining being stranded in the grasslands without any survival material and rating words according to their survival value in this situation leads to exceptionally good memory for these words. Studies examining the role of emotions in causing the survival-processing memory advantage have been inconclusive, but some studies have suggested that the effect might be due to negativity or mortality salience. In Experiments 1 and 2, we compared the survival scenario to a control scenario that implied imagining a hopeless situation (floating in outer space with dwindling oxygen supplies) in which only suicide can avoid the agony of choking to death. Although this scenario was perceived as being more negative than the survival scenario, the survival-processing memory advantage persisted. In Experiment 3, thinking about the relevance of words for survival led to better memory for these words than did thinking about the relevance of words for death. This survival advantage was found for concrete, but not for abstract, words. The latter finding is consistent with the assumption that the survival instructions encourage participants to think about many different potential uses of items to aid survival, which may be a particularly efficient form of elaborate encoding. Together, the results suggest that thinking about death is much less effective in promoting recall than is thinking about survival. Therefore, the survival-processing memory advantage cannot be satisfactorily explained by negativity or mortality salience.     

Strength cues and blocking at test promote reliable within-list criterion shifts in recognition memory

In seven experiments, we explored the potential for strength-based, within-list criterion shifts in recognition memory. People studied a mix of target words, some presented four times (strong) and others studied once (weak). In Experiments 1, 2, 4A, and 4B, the test was organized into alternating blocks of 10, 20, or 40 trials. Each block contained lures intermixed with strong targets only or weak targets only. In strength-cued conditions, test probes appeared in a unique font color for strong and weak blocks. In the uncued conditions of Experiments 1 and 2, similar strength blocks were tested, but strength was not cued with font color. False alarms to lures were lower in blocks containing strong target words, as compared with lures in blocks containing weak targets, but only when strength was cued with font color. Providing test feedback in Experiment 2 did not alter these results. In Experiments 3A–3C, test items were presented in a random order (i.e., not blocked by strength). Of these three experiments, only one demonstrated a significant shift even though strength cues were provided. Overall, the criterion shift was larger and more reliable as block size increased, and the shift occurred only when strength was cued with font color. These results clarify the factors that affect participants’ willingness to change their response criterion within a test list.     

Boundaries of semantic distraction: Dominance and lexicality act at retrieval

Three experiments investigated memory for semantic information with the goal of determining boundary conditions for the manifestation of semantic auditory distraction. Irrelevant speech disrupted the free recall of semantic category- exemplars to an equal degree regardless of whether the speech coincided with presentation or test phases of the task (Experiment 1), and this occurred regardless of whether it comprised random words or coherent sentences (Experiment 2). The effects of background speech were greater when the irrelevant speech was semantically related to the to-be-remembered material, but only when the irrelevant words were high in output dominance (Experiment 3). The implications of these findings in relation to the processing of task material and the processing of background speech are discussed.     

Foreign accent strength and listener familiarity with an accent codetermine speed of perceptual adaptation

We investigated how the strength of a foreign accent and varying types of experience with foreign-accented speech influence the recognition of accented words. In Experiment 1, native Dutch listeners with limited or extensive prior experience with German-accented Dutch completed a cross-modal priming experiment with strongly, medium, and weakly accented words. Participants with limited experience were primed by the medium and weakly accented words, but not by the strongly accented words. Participants with extensive experience were primed by all accent types. In Experiments 2 and 3, Dutch listeners with limited experience listened to a short story before doing the cross-modal priming task. In Experiment 2, the story was spoken by the priming task speaker and either contained strongly accented words or did not. Strongly accented exposure led to immediate priming by novel strongly accented words, while exposure to the speaker without strongly accented tokens led to priming only in the experiment’s second half. In Experiment 3, listeners listened to the story with strongly accented words spoken by a different German-accented speaker. Listeners were primed by the strongly accented words, but again only in the experiment’s second half. Together, these results show that adaptation to foreign-accented speech is rapid but depends on accent strength and on listener familiarity with those strongly accented words.     

Interference of spoken word recognition through phonological priming from visual objects and printed words

Three cross-modal priming experiments examined the influence of preexposure to pictures and printed words on the speed of spoken word recognition. Targets for auditory lexical decision were spoken Dutch words and nonwords, presented in isolation (Experiments 1 and 2) or after a short phrase (Experiment 3). Auditory stimuli were preceded by primes, which were pictures (Experiments 1 and 3) or those pictures’ printed names (Experiment 2). Prime–target pairs were phonologically onset related (e.g., pijl–pijn, arrow–pain), were from the same semantic category (e.g., pijl–zwaard, arrow–sword), or were unrelated on both dimensions. Phonological interference and semantic facilitation were observed in all experiments. Priming magnitude was similar for pictures and printed words and did not vary with picture viewing time or number of pictures in the display (either one or four). These effects arose even though participants were not explicitly instructed to name the pictures and where strategic naming would interfere with lexical decision making. This suggests that, by default, processing of related pictures and printed words influences how quickly we recognize spoken words.     

Age-of-acquisition effects in delayed picture-naming tasks

We report two experiments that explored the linguistic locus of age-of-acquisition effects in picture naming by using a delayed naming task that involved only a low proportion of trials (25 %) while, for the large majority of the trials (75 %), participants performed another task—that is, the prevalent task. The prevalent tasks were semantic categorization in Experiment 1a and grammatical-gender decision in Experiments 1b and 2. In Experiment 1a, in which participants were biased to retrieve semantic information in order to perform the semantic categorization task, delayed naming times were affected by age of acquisition, reflecting a postsemantic locus of the effect. In Experiments 1b and 2, in which participants were biased to retrieve lexical information in order to perform the grammatical gender decision task, there was also an age-of-acquisition effect. These results suggest that part of the age-of-acquisition effect in picture naming occurs at the level at which the phonological properties of words are retrieved.     

Gender in the Gym: Evaluation Concerns as Barriers to Women’s Weight Lifting

Four studies examined why women appear to be less likely than men to lift weights, despite the documented health benefits. An archival analysis (“Study 1”) pointed to a cultural dissociation between women and strength-related exercise goals. Furthermore, a study of women in a university in the mid-Atlantic United States who envisioned lifting weights in public expressed greater evaluation concerns than those who envisioned doing aerobic exercise (“Study 2”); moreover, greater evaluation concerns seemed to deter them from weight lifting. These findings helped to shed light upon gender-differentiated patterns of gym equipment use (“Study 3a”) and reports of psychological discomfort in gyms (“Study 3b”). This work begins to illuminate the sociocultural context of women’s avoidance of certain types of exercise.     

Language statistics explain the spatial–numerical association of response codes

The spatial–numerical association of response codes (SNARC) has shown that parity judgments with participants’ left hands yield faster response times (RTs) for smaller numbers than for larger numbers, with the opposite result for right-hand responses. These findings have been explained by participants perceptually simulating magnitude on a mental number line. In three RT experiments, we showed that the SNARC effect can also be explained by language statistics. Participants made parity judgments of number words (Exp. 1) and Arabic numerals (Exp. 2). Linguistic frequencies of the number words and numbers mirrored the SNARC effect, explaining aspects of processing that a perceptual simulation account could not. In Experiment 3, we investigated whether high- and low-frequency nonnumerical words would also elicit a SNARC-like effect. Again, RTs were faster for high-frequency words for left-hand responses, with the opposite result for right-hand responses. These results demonstrate that what has only been attributed to perceptual simulation should also be attributed to language statistics.     

Time-compressed spoken word primes crossmodally enhance processing of semantically congruent visual targets

Findings from three experiments support the conclusion that auditory primes facilitate the processing of related targets. In Experiments 1 and 2, we employed a crossmodal Stroop color identification task with auditory color words (as primes) and visual color patches (as targets). Responses were faster for congruent priming, in comparison to neutral or incongruent priming. This effect also emerged for different levels of time compression of the auditory primes (to 30 % and 10 % of the original length; i.e., 120 and 40 ms) and turned out to be even more pronounced under high-perceptual-load conditions (Exps. 1 and 2). In Experiment 3, target-present or -absent decisions for brief target displays had to be made, thereby ruling out response-priming processes as a cause of the congruency effects. Nevertheless, target detection (d') was increased by congruent primes (30 % compression) in comparison to incongruent or neutral primes. Our results suggest semantic object-based auditory–visual interactions, which rapidly increase the denoted target object’s salience. This would apply, in particular, to complex visual scenes.     

Top-down constraint on recognition memory

Can recognition memory be constrained “at the front end,” such that people are more likely to retrieve information about studying a recognition-test probe from a specified target source than they are to retrieve such information about a probe from a nontarget source? We adapted a procedure developed by Jacoby, Shimizu, Daniels, and Rhodes (Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 12:852–857, 2005) to address this question. Experiment 1 yielded evidence of source-constrained retrieval, but that pattern was not significant in Experiments 2, 3, and 4 (nor in several unpublished pilot experiments). In Experiment 5, in which items from the two studied sources were perceptibly different, a pattern consistent with front-end constraint of recognition emerged, but this constraint was likely exercised via visual attention rather than memory. Experiment 6 replicated both the absence of a significant constrained-retrieval pattern when the sources did not differ perceptibly (as in Exps. 2, 3 and 4) and the presence of that pattern when they did differ perceptibly (as in Exp. 5). Our results suggest that people can easily constrain recognition when items from the to-be-recognized source differ perceptibly from items from other sources (presumably via visual attention), but that it is difficult to constrain retrieval solely on the basis of source memory.     

Animates are better remembered than inanimates: further evidence from word and picture stimuli

In three experiments, we showed that animate entities are remembered better than inanimate entities. Experiment 1 revealed better recall for words denoting animate than inanimate items. Experiment 2 replicated this finding with the use of pictures. In Experiment 3, we found better recognition for animate than for inanimate words. Importantly, we also found a higher recall rate of “remember” than of “know” responses for animates, whereas the recall rates were similar for the two types of responses for inanimate items. This finding suggests that animacy enhances not only the quantity but also the quality of memory traces, through the recall of contextual details of previous experiences (i.e., episodic memory). Finally, in Experiment 4, we tested whether the animacy effect was due to animate items being richer in terms of sensory features than inanimate items. The findings provide further evidence for the functionalist view of memory championed by Nairne and coworkers (Nairne, 2010; Nairne & Pandeirada, Cognitive Psychology, 61:1–22, 2010a, 2010b).     

The effects of healthy aging on the mnemonic benefit of survival processing

A number of studies have shown that information is remembered better when it is processed for its survival relevance than when it is processed for relevance to other, non-survival-related contexts. Here we conducted three experiments to investigate whether the survival advantage also occurs for healthy older adults. In Experiment 1, older and younger adults rated words for their relevance to a grassland survival or moving scenario and then completed an unexpected free recall test on the words. We replicated the survival advantage in two separate groups of younger adults, one of which was placed under divided-attention conditions, but we did not find a survival advantage in the older adults. We then tested two additional samples of older adults using a between- (Exp. 2) or within- (Exp. 3) subjects design, but still found no evidence of the survival advantage in this age group. These results suggest that, although survival processing is an effective encoding strategy for younger adults, it does not provide the same mnemonic benefit to healthy elders.     

Domain familiarity as a cue for judgments of learning

Students differ in how much they already know about topics within and across their courses. Few studies, however, have examined the relationship between participants’ levels of knowledge across topics (i.e., their “domain familiarity”) and their learning of information from those topics, their study choices related to those topics, and their subjective self-assessments of their learning about the topics. As such, in two studies we had participants (Study 1, college students; Study 2, Mturk workers) rank their domain familiarity for several to-be-studied domains (e.g., chemistry, history), rate their efficacy and interest in those domains, study and make judgments of learning (JOLs) for facts from each domain, and finally complete a short-answer test over those facts. Participants’ efficacy and interest ratings for the topics were linearly related to their topic rankings, as were their recall of and JOLs for facts from those domains. Although the JOLs were consistently overconfident, they were more overconfident for better-known than for lesser-known topics. Participants’ study times were not related to their topic rankings (Studies 1 and 2), but participants did use domain familiarity to strategically decide which domains to restudy before the test (Study 2). Participants typically chose to restudy their least-familiar topics, but chose to restudy their best-known topic under extremely limited restudy conditions. As a whole, the results suggest that participants effectively use their domain familiarity as a basis for their JOLs and restudy choices, but to some extent overuse this factor to assess their learning, and underuse it to guide initial study.     

Words translated in sentence contexts produce repetition priming in visual word comprehension and spoken word production

Previous research with words read in context at encoding showed little if any long-term repetition priming. In Experiment 1, 96 Spanish–English bilinguals translated words in isolation or in sentence contexts at encoding. At test, they translated words or named pictures corresponding to words produced at encoding and control words not previously presented. Repetition priming was reliable in all conditions, but priming effects were generally smaller for contextualized than for isolated words. Repetition priming in picture naming indicated priming from production in context. A componential analysis indicated priming from comprehension in context, but only in the less fluent language. Experiment 2 was a replication of Experiment 1 with auditory presentation of the words and sentences to be translated. Repetition priming was reliable in all conditions, but priming effects were again smaller for contextualized than for isolated words. Priming in picture naming indicated priming from production in context, but the componential analysis indicated no detectable priming for auditory comprehension. The results of the two experiments taken together suggest that repetition priming reflects the long-term learning that occurs with comprehension and production exposures to words in the context of natural language.     

Asymmetric binding in serial memory for verbal and spatial information

As the number of studies showing that items can be retained as bound representations in memory increases, researchers are beginning to investigate how the different features are bound together. In the present study, we examined the relative importances of the verbal and spatial features in serial memory for visual stimuli. Participants were asked to memorize the order of series of letters presented visually in different locations on the computer screen. The results showed that manipulating the phonological similarity of the letters affected recall of their spatial locations, but that increasing the complexity of the spatial pattern had no effect on recall of the letters. This finding was observed in both order reconstruction (Exps. 1 and 2) and probe serial recall (Exps. 3 and 4), suggesting that verbal–spatial binding in serial memory for visual information is asymmetric.