True and false memory in the absence of perceptual identification

Two experiments are reported in which, after attempting to identify a briefly flashed, masked test word, participants were asked to rate the likelihood that it had been presented in an earlier study list. Even when people were unable to identify such items, they demonstrated an ability to discriminate between those that were studied and those that were not studied; ratings given to studied items were significantly higher than ratings given to nonstudied items. This effect does not appear to be a data‐driven phenomenon. In Experiment 1 it was found when the presentation modality was changed from study to test. In Experiment 2 false memory for unidentified items that were related to studied items was shown.     

Odor recognition without identification

Odors are notoriously difficult to identify, yet an odor can often lead to a sense of recognition, despite an inability to identify it. In the present study, we examined this phenomenon using the recognition-withoutidentification paradigm. Participants studied either odor names alone or odor names that were accompanied by scratch-and-sniff stickers containing their corresponding scents. At test, the participants were presented with blank scratch-and-sniff stickers, half of which corresponded to items that were studied and half of which did not. The participants attempted to identify each test odor, as well as to rate the likelihood that it corresponded to a studied item. In addition, the participants indicated whether they were in a tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) state for a given odor’s name. Odor recognition without identification was found, but only when the participants had actually smelled the test odor at study; it was not found when the participants only studied odor names and were then tested with odors, suggesting that this effect is an episode-specific, perceptually driven phenomenon. Despite this difference, an overall TOT-attribution effect, whereby recognition ratings were higher during TOT states than during non-TOT states, was shown across conditions.     

Verifying visual properties in sentence verification facilitates picture recognition memory

According to the perceptual symbols theory (Barsalou, 1999), sensorimotor simulations underlie the representation of concepts. We investigated whether recognition memory for pictures of concepts was facilitated by earlier representation of visual properties of those concepts. During study, concept names (e.g., apple) were presented in a property verification task with a visual property (e.g., shiny) or with a nonvisual property (e.g., tart). Delayed picture recognition memory was better if the concept name had been presented with a visual property than if it had been presented with a nonvisual property. These results indicate that modality-specific simulations are used for concept representation.     

Auditory Long term Memory: Repetition Priming of Voice Recognition

Two experiments examined repetition priming in the recognition of famous voices. In Experiment 1, reaction times for fame decisions to famous voice samples were shorter than in an unprimed condition, when voices were primed by a different voice sample of the same person having been presented in an earlier phase of the experiment. No effect of voice repetition was observed for non-famous voices. In Experiment 2, it was investigated whether this priming effect is voice-specific or whether it is related to post-perceptual processes in person recognition. Recognizing a famous voice was again primed by having earlier heard a different voice sample of that person. Although an earlier exposure to that person's name did not cause any priming, there was some indication of priming following an earlier exposure to that person's face. Finally, earlier exposure to the identical voice sample (as compared to a different voice sample from the same person) caused a considerable bias towards responding 'famous'-i.e. performance benefits for famous but costs for nonfamous voices. The findings suggestthat (1) repetition priming invoice recognition primarily involves the activation of perceptual representations of voices, and (2) it is important to determine the conditions in which priming causes bias effects that need to be disentangled from performance benefits.     

The Effect of a Final Exam on Long-Term Retention

Testing on a final exam in a college course improved long-term retention over material that had not been tested on the final. Students from an upper level psychology course took a long-term retention test, four to five months after the end of the course. For half of the items, a related question had been on the final. For the remaining half, a related question had appeared on an earlier exam, but not the final. On the long-term retention test, percent correct was 79% when a related question had appeared on the final and 67% when a related question had not appeared on the final. These results have both theoretical and practical implications.     

Symptoms of prosopagnosia in intoxicated subjects.

Two experiments were made to test whether a blood ethanol concentration of about 1 g ethanol per kg blood influences the ability to recognize faces which were shown 24 hours earlier. 18 subjects who saw the faces for the first time when sober and whose task it was to recognize the faces when under the influence of alcohol, recognized the faces significantly less frequently than controls. The controls saw the faces for the first time when sober and their task was to recognize the faces later when also in a sober state. When 20 sober subjects had to recognize faces which they had seen 24 hours earlier under the influence of alcohol, they recognized the faces significantly less frequently than controls. 18 subjects to whom visual forms were shown when under the influence of alcohol and who had to recognize these forms 24 hours later when sober again performed like subjects who had to recognize faces under identical experimental conditions. Subjects who saw the forms, however, in a sober state and who had to recognize these forms when intoxicated performed significantly better than subjects who had to recognize faces under identical experimental conditions. In additional experiments, it was shown that alcohol did not influence ability to compare simultaneously presented faces. Intoxicated subjects' reduced abilities to recognize faces is regarded as a symptom of prosopagnosia since it cannot be explained by a reduced ability to recognize forms or to compare faces.     

The Semantic Simon Effect

Three experiments are reported in which a semantic variant of the Simon paradigm was used. In Experiment 1, participants saw Dutch and English words that corresponded to names of animals (e.g. DOG) or occupations (e.g. TEACHER). Participants were instructed to respond by saying ANIMAL or OCCUPATION, depending on whether the presented word was a Dutch or English word (i.e. relevant stimulus feature) but irrespective of whether the word was the name of an animal or an occupation (i.e. irrelevant stimulus feature). Results showed that responses were facilitated when the correct response corresponded to the name of the semantic category of the presented word (e.g. saying 'ANIMAL' to DOG) compared to when it was the name of a different semantic category (e.g. saying 'OCCUPATION' to DOG), even though the semantic category of the presented word was irrelevant and had to be ignored. Category membership also influenced response times when letter case (upper- or lower-case: Experiment 2) and grammatical category (noun or adjective: Experiment 3) had to be determined in order to select a category label as a response. The semantic Simon effect offers a new tool that can be used to study automatic semantic processing.     

Integrating pictorial information across eye movements

Six experiments are reported dealing with the types of information integrated across eye movements in picture perception. A line drawing of an object was presented in peripheral vision, and subjects made an eye movement to it. During the saccade, the initially presented picture was replaced by another picture that the subject was instructed to name as quickly as possible. The relation between the stimulus on the first fixation and the stimulus on the second fixation was varied. Across the six experiments, there was about 100-130 ms facilitation when the pictures were identical compared with a control condition in which only the target location was specified on the first fixation. This finding clearly implies that information about the first picture facilitated naming the second picture. Changing the size of the picture from one fixation to the next had little effect on naming time. This result is consistent with work on reading and low-level visual processes in indicating that pictorial information is not integrated in a point-by-point manner in an integrated visual buffer. Moreover, only about 50 ms of the facilitation for identical pictures could be attributed to the pictures having the same name. When the pictures represented the same concept (e.g., two different pictures of a horse), there was a 90-ms facilitation effect that could have been the result of either the visual or conceptual similarity of the pictures. However, when the pictures had different names, only visual similarity produced facilitation. Moreover, when the pictures had different names, there appeared to be inhibition from the competing names. The results of all six experiments are consistent with a model in which the activation of both the visual features and the name of the picture seen on the first fixation survive the saccade and combine with the information extracted on the second fixation to produce identification and naming of the second picture.     

Event-related potentials and the phonological matching of picture names

Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded from one midline and three pairs of lateral electrodes while subjects determined whether a pair of sequentially presented pictures had rhyming or nonrhyming names. During the 1.56-sec interval between the two pictures, the slow ERP wave recorded over the left hemisphere was more negative-going than that over the right, especially at frontal electrodes. The ERPs evoked by the second picture differed as a function of whether its name rhymed with its predecessor. This difference, taking the form of increased negativity in ERPs to nonrhyming items, had an earlier onset and a greater magnitude at right than at left hemisphere electrodes. This pattern of ERP asymmetries is qualitatively similar to that found when words are rhyme-matched. It is therefore concluded that such asymmetries do not depend on the employment of orthographic material and may reflect some aspect(s) of the phonological processing of visually presented material.     

Partial knowledge in a tip-of-the-tongue state about two- and three-word proper names

Participants in this study attempted to name 44 famous people in response to reading biographical information about them. Half of the celebrities had names that contained two words (e.g., Gwyneth Paltrow and Sean Penn), and half of them had names containing three words (e.g., Catherine Zeta Jones and Billy Bob Thornton). Half of the names had previously been judged to be of high familiarity (e.g., Gwyneth Paltrow), and half were of lower familiarity (e.g., Billy Bob Thornton). The results showed that when in a tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) state, the participants were able to estimate at above-chance rates whether a celebrity’s name comprised two or three words. Accurate information about the number of words was not available to the participants unless they were in a TOT state or had already named the person. Attempts to identify celebrities whose name had three elements were associated with an increased number of TOTs, relative to celebrities whose name had two units, but there was no difference in the number of don’t know responses for names containing two or three words. Calculations based on Gollan and Brown (2006) suggested that having three names impaired the phonological but not the semantic stage of lexical retrieval, whereas low familiarity impaired both semantic and phonological retrieval stages.     

Hume and Kant on the social contract

Conclusion In this lecture I have attempted to survey the main points of contention between Hume and Kant with respect to their treatment of social or original contract theory. I have tried to show that their conflicts, running as they do to the heart of each thinker's moral philosophy, are very deep indeed. If nothing else, they show the conceptual dependence of social and political philosophy upon moral philosophy and were worth exploring at least for that reason. I have not, of course, said anything about the most important question of all: which, if either, of the two theories is true? Pehaps we can begin an exploration of that question together.A lecture presented at the David Hume Bicentennial Symposium, University of Arizona, September 17, 1976. An earlier version of the lecture was presented to the Department of Philosophy, Loyola University (Chicago), in 1975. The lecture was also presented at the 1977 meeting of the Hume Society, University of Virginia, October 29, 1977.     

The “BIG BIRD” of the “YELLOW YOUNG” man: Do nontarget properties cascade?

This study investigated whether in speech production object properties flow in a cascaded manner or whether cascaded processing is restricted to the object's identity. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants saw pictured objects and had to state either their size (GRAND or PETIT—meaning big and small) or their name. The size of the objects varied as a function of the way they were presented on the computer screen (Experiment 1) or their real size in the world (Experiment 2). In Experiment 3, faces of young and old men were coloured in yellow or in green. The task was to name either the colour (JAUNE or VERT, meaning yellow and green, respectively) or the age (JEUNE or VIEUX, meaning young and old, respectively) of the face. In Experiments 1 and 2, no reliable effects of phonological relatedness (“GORILLE–grand”—a big gorilla) were found on the object-naming latencies. However, size-naming latencies were shorter when the adjective shared the initial phoneme of the picture name (i.e., “GRAND–gorille”) than when it did not (i.e., “GRAND–dinosaure”—saying “big” in response to a big dinosaur). In Experiment 3, phonological overlap did not affect colour naming latencies, or age naming latencies. Overall, these findings strongly suggest that cascaded processing is restricted to the object's identity in conceptually driven naming tasks.     

Concurrent processing of words and their replacements during speech

Two picture naming experiments, in which an initial picture was occasionally replaced with another (target) picture, were conducted to study the temporal coordination of abandoning one word and resuming with another word in speech production. In Experiment 1, participants abandoned saying the initial name, and resumed with the name of the target picture. This triggered both interrupted (e.g., Mush- …scooter) and completed (mushroom …scooter) productions of the initial name. We found that the time from beginning naming the initial picture to ending it was longer when the target picture was visually degraded than when it was intact. In Experiment 2, participants abandoned saying the initial name, but without resuming. There was no visual degradation effect, and thus the effect did not seem to be driven by detection of the stopping cue. These findings demonstrate that planning a new word can begin before the initial word is abandoned, so that both words can be processed concurrently.     

Extrafoveal processing of objects in a naming task: Evidence from word probe experiments

In two experiments, we investigated the processing of extrafoveal objects in a double-object naming task. On most trials, participants named two objects; but on some trials, the objects were replaced shortly after trial onset by a written word probe, which participants had to name instead of the objects. In Experiment 1, the word was presented in the same location as the left object either 150 or 350 msec after trial onset and was either phonologically related or unrelated to that object name. Phonological facilitation was observed at the later but not at the earlier SOA. In Experiment 2, the word was either phonologically related or unrelated to the right object and was presented 150 msec after the speaker had begun to inspect that object. In contrast with Experiment 1, phonological facilitation was found at this early SOA, demonstrating that the speakers had begun to process the right object prior to fixation.     

Philosophical parrhesia as aesthetics of existence

According to some interpreters, Foucault's encounter with the Greek and Roman ethics led him to reconsider his earlier work and to turn away from politics. Drawing mostly from Foucault's last and hitherto unpublished lecture course, this paper argues that Foucault's turn to ethics should not be interpreted as a turn away from his previous work, but rather as its logical continuation and an attempt to resolve some of the outstanding questions. I argue that the 1984 lectures on parrhesia should be interpreted as Foucault's philosophical apology, as an attempt to defend himself against the charges of moral and epistemological nihilism, which were raised in response to his earlier work. In his last lectures, the Nietzschean Foucault somewhat surprisingly describes his earlier work as authentic Socratic philosophy and as ethical practice of freedom. In the conclusion, I assess the plausibility of Foucault's apology and speculate in which direction his work might have developed, had it not been cut off by his death.     

What’s in a name? Lexical knowledge drives infants’ visual preferences in the absence of referential input

Seventeen-month-old infants were presented with pairs of images, in silence or with the non-directive auditory stimulus ‘look!’. The images had been chosen so that one image depicted an item whose name was known to the infant, and the other image depicted an image whose name was not known to the infant. Infants looked longer at images for which they had names than at images for which they did not have names, despite the absence of any referential input. The experiment controlled for the familiarity of the objects depicted: in each trial, image pairs presented to infants had previously been judged by caregivers to be of roughly equal familiarity. From a theoretical perspective, the results indicate that objects with names are of intrinsic interest to the infant. The possible causal direction for this linkage is discussed and it is concluded that the results are consistent with Whorfian linguistic determinism, although other construals are possible. From a methodological perspective, the results have implications for the use of preferential looking as an index of early word comprehension.     

True and false memory in the absence of perceptual identification

Two experiments are reported in which, after attempting to identify a briefly flashed, masked test word, participants were asked to rate the likelihood that it had been presented in an earlier study list. Even when people were unable to identify such items, they demonstrated an ability to discriminate between those that were studied and those that were not studied; ratings given to studied items were significantly higher than ratings given to nonstudied items. This effect does not appear to be a data-driven phenomenon. In Experiment 1 it was found when the presentation modality was changed from study to test. In Experiment 2 false memory for unidentified items that were related to studied items was shown.     

On patients' disclosure of parents' and siblings' names during treatment

The patient's spontaneous disclosure of a parent's name is frequently associated with appearance of core conflicts, especially genetic and transference themes of incest, other oedipal derivatives, and separation anxiety. Using a parent's first name has the unconscious implication of incest, since one is doing something which one's other parent but not oneself is allowed to do. In some primitive cultures, saying aloud the names of one's parents was strictly forbidden. Disclosing a parent's name to the analyst may parallel the developmental step during childhood when the patient learned the parent had a first name. The child's acquisition of language, including proper names, fosters object constancy and the internalization of the parents, from whom language is learned. For patients who do not usually refer to a sibling by name, disclosure of the sibling's name may also reflect the concurrent emergence of central conflicts. In particular, such disclosure may accompany associations about an earlier closeness with the sibling giving way to subsequent estrangement. Naming the sibling may also mark an intensification of a sibling transference to the analyst.     

Interpreting the texts of nature and culture: A reply to Jahoda

In his Tajfel Memorial lecture Gustav Jahoda (1986) proposes that experimental findings infrequently reflect natural laws of human action, but are reflections of cultural conventions. In developing his arguments he finds it useful to criticize a number of my earlier ideas (Gergen, 1982). The present paper demonstrates that this critique is not only misguided, but that if the implications of my earlier work had been properly elaborated neither the argument for cultural convention nor general laws could be adequately sustained. Because of the non-objective character of behavioural interpretation, neither of these positions can be empirically warranted. Their justification is more properly considered in ethical, or ideological terms.