When are social judgments made? Evidence for the spontaneousness of trait inferences

Do people make trait inferences, even without intentions or instructions, at the encoding stage of processing behavioral information? Tulving's encoding specificity paradigm (Tulving & Thomson, 1973) was adapted for two recall experiments. Under memory instructions only, subjects read sentences describing people performing actions that implied traits. Later, subjects recalled each sentence under one of three cuing conditions: (a) a dispositional cue (e.g., generous), (b) a strong, nondispositional semantic associate to an important sentence word; or (c) no cue. Recall was best when cued by the disposition words. Subjects were unaware of having made trait inferences. Interpreted in terms of encoding specificity, these results indicate that subjects unintentionally made trait inferences at encoding. This suggests that attributions may be made spontaneously, as part of the routine comprehension of social events.     

Accessing integrated and nonintegrated propositional structures in memory

This paper investigates the access properties associated with different propositional structures. Two memory experiments are reported, in which the underlying structures of sentences were integrated or not. Some sentences tested had the same concept repeated across the propositions (integrated), whereas other sentences had no explicit repeated arguments (non-integrated). Accessibility to the memory traces of the sentences was manipulated through the acquisition and the testing conditions. In Experiment 1, subjects received either immediate or delayed recall tests, under free or cued conditions. Integrated sentences were recalled better than nonintegrated ones under conditions of high accessibility (immediate recall or delayed cued recall). In contrast, under the low-access condition (delayed free recall), nonintegrated sentences were recalled slightly better than the integrated ones. Experiment 2 confirmed and extended the results for delayed free recall. Here again, under conditions of low sentence access, nonintegrated sentences were recalled better. These results were interpreted according to theory dealing with the lag effect in list learning.     

Fear imagery and the startle-probe reflex

Blink reflexes to acoustic probes, heart rate, and subjective reports were studied during affective memory imagery. Thirty-six undergraduates memorized 6 pairs of neutral and fearful sentences. After learning each pair, they relaxed and listened to a series of uniform tones, one every 6 s. A change in tone pitch (higher or lower) cued recall of one of the two sentences. At the first cue tone, groups (n = 12) were under different instructions: (a) ignore the sentence and relax, (b) silently articulate the sentence, and (c) imagine the sentence content as a personal experience. At the second cue tone, all subjects performed the imagery task. Startle probes (50-ms, 95-dB white noise) were presented unpredictably during relaxation and recall trials. Probe blink reflexes were larger and cardiac rate faster at fear sentence recall than at neutral sentence recall or relaxation. For probe reflexes, this effect was greater for imagery than for nonsemantic recall tasks.     

A developmental study of facilitation by mnemonic instruction

First- and fourth-grade children, as well as adults, were given mnemonic instructions to image or to verbalize a sentence in order to study either a sentence or a noun pair provided aurally. Uninstructed control subjects also were included at each age level. A test of cued recall evaluated the amount of facilitation by mnemonic instruction in each of the groups. Both types of instruction enhanced children's memory, most notably when verbal pairs served as stimuli. However, whereas first graders under imagery instruction were inferior on pairs relative to sentence stimuli, fourth graders and adults recalled the two stimulus types equivalently. Also, whereas first graders performed at the same level on sentences and pairs under the verbalization instruction, fourth graders were superior on the pairs. These results indicate that greater requirements for subject-generated mediation to some degree penalized the younger subjects and benefited the older ones.     

Word associations are formed incidentally during sentential semantic integration

Sentential context facilitates the incidental formation of word associations (e.g., Prior, A., & Bentin, S. (2003). Incidental formation of episodic associations: the importance of sentential context. Memory and Cognition, 31(2), 306-316). The present study explored the mechanism of this effect. In two experiments, unrelated word pairs were embedded in coherent or semantically anomalous sentences. Anomalous sentences included either a local or a global anomaly. During an incidental study phase, participants performed a sentence categorization task. The strength of the incidental associations formed between two nouns jointly appearing in a sentence was probed by gauging their influence on subsequent paired-associate learning and cued recall in Experiment 1, and by assessing their associative priming effect in a subsequent unexpected explicit recognition test for single words in Experiment 2. In both experiments, significant associative memory was found for noun pairs studied in coherent sentences but not for those appearing in anomalous sentences, regardless of anomaly type. In a sentence rating task, global anomalies yielded less plausible sentences than local anomalies, however both types of anomalies were equally detrimental to the sentence integration process. We suggest that sentence constituents are incidentally associated during sentence processing, particularly as a result of sentence integration and the consolidation of a mental model.     

Long-term memory in amnesia: cued recall, recognition memory, and confidence ratings

We explored what kind of information is acquired when amnesic patients are able to exhibit significant retention on tests of cued recall and recognition memory. Amnesic patients and control subjects attempted to learn sets of sentences. Memory for the last word in each sentence was tested after 1 hr in the case of the amnesic patients, or after 1 to 2 weeks in the case of (delayed) control subjects. Amnesic patients and (delayed) control subjects performed at similar levels on tests of cued recall and recognition memory. Amnesic patients were just as confident of their correct answers as were control subjects. However, amnesic patients were no more disadvantaged than control subjects when they were cued indirectly by presenting paraphrases of the original sentences. These findings demonstrate that the residual knowledge retained by amnesic patients can be as flexible, as accessible to indirect cues, and as available to awareness as the knowledge retained by (delayed) control subjects.     

Is there a memory for sentences?

A critical discussion of the model of sentence memory which enjoyed greatest popularity in the psycholinguistic research of the sixties, namely the model based on the deep-structure-plus-tag hypothesis of sentence memory, is presented together with the results of an experiment on prompted recall for sentences with various intervals after presentation and with two types of instructions. This experiment contributed to show that immediate memory for sentences can be affected by appropriate instructions, and that after a short time after presentation only the main semantic information of the sentences is recalled. An alternative model is presented, based on the notion of storage of the meaningful elements of the sentences in a rather abstract form, and of recall as a reconstructive process to produce new sentences. The results of two new experiments on sentence memory, the first a free and prompted recall experiment with children, the second a recognition memory study with adolescents, are then presented and discussed in relation to the model.     

Memory for common and bizarre stimuli: A storage-retrieval analysis

We tested the hypothesis that common stimuli are stored in memory better than bizarre stimuli are. Subjects memorized a series of noun pairs embedded within 20 common or bizarre sentences. By using a between-list design, free and cued recall, and intentional-learning instructions, we were able to obtain a commonness effect (i.e., a recall advantage for the common sentences). Riefer and Rouder’s (1992) multinomial processing-tree model for measuring storage and retrieval was applied to the data, which revealed that the recall advantage for common sentences was due to storage and not retrieval processes. We propose a two-factor theory: that common items are stored better in memory, but that bizarre items are retrieved better from memory. This storage-retrieval explanation does a good job of accounting for a number of findings associated with the bizarreness effect.     

Memory for the pragmatic implications of sentences

A sentence pragmatically implies another sentence when information in the first sentence leads the hearer to expect something that is neither explicitly stated nor necessarily implied by the original sentence. Thus,The safe-cracker put the match to the fuse pragmatically impliesThe safe-cracker lit the fuse. In a cued recall task with sentences containing pragmatic implications, 19% of the items were recalled correctly while 26% of the responses consisted of the pragmatic implications of the original sentences. The data were interpreted as demonstrating the strong interaction of the subjects’ long-term knowledge with the episodic memory for sentences task.     

Partial picture effects on children's memory for sentences containing implicit information

Two experiments were conducted examining the effects of partial picture adjuncts on young children's coding of information that was implied in sentences. In the two most critical conditions of these studies, subjects were presented sentences specifying a subject, an action, and a direct object with the instrument used to carry out the action not specified in the sentence (e.g., The workman dug a hole in the ground). Implicit-sentence-only subjects received only the sentences, whereas the implicit sentence + partial picture subjects also viewed a partial picture depicting the action in the sentence minus the implied instrument. The main hypothesis was that subsequent recall of the sentences given the implied instrument as a cue would be facilitated by the partial pictures provided at study, since they would lead the children to infer the instrument. That occurred with 6- to 7-year-old children, but not with preschool children. Consistent with the conclusion that the partial pictures prompted 6- to 7-year-olds to infer the instruments, implicit sentence + partial picture subjects recalled as much as subjects in two other conditions, one in which subjects were explicitly told the instruments at study and one in which subjects saw the instruments depicted in pictures at study. In contrast, preschool subjects who heard explicit sentences containing the instruments outperformed subjects who heard implicit sentences even when the implicit sentences were accompanied by pictures depicting the instruments. This failure of complete pictures to facilitate preschoolers' recall of information implied in sentences contrasts with the many demonstrations of prose learning facilitation when picture and sentence contents explicitly and completely overlap. In summary, there were developmental differences in whether (a) partial pictures significantly facilitated inferencing (and subsequent cued recall) and (b) complete pictures containing information not explicitly stated in sentences promoted cued recall of the sentences.     

Memory for metaphor by nonfluent bilinguals

The purpose of this study was to investigate memory for metaphors by nonfluent bilinguals under different orientation conditions. In Experiment 1 beginning bilinguals were asked to either (1) translate into English the figurative meanings of metaphors in the second language (L2); (2) translate into English the literal meanings of these same metaphorical sentences; (3) translate these metaphorical sentences into English-no specific instructions as how to translate given; (4) translate into English a similar list of nonmetaphorical sentences; (5) copy in L2 the list of metaphorical sentences; or (6) copy in L2 the list of nonmetaphorical sentences. Subjects' memory for these sentences was measured on a cued recall test. In Experiment 2 monolingual subjects did language tasks similar to conditions 1, 5, and 6 in Experiment 1. In both experiments, recall was best in the first condition and worst in the fifth condition. In Experiment 1 recall was also poorer in the second condition than in the other translation conditions. The implication is that the task for this condition requires subjects to process materials in a counterintuitive manner.     

Long-term memory for speaker’s voice and source location

One hundred and twenty-eight subjects tried to recall 20 simple sentences that for some subjects were presented in two different voices or were presented from two loudspeakers on different sides of the room. In addition, some subjects were instructed to remember not only the sentences, but also their voice and location attributes. Intentional instructions for location resulted in poorer recall of the sentences, but intentional instructions for voice did not. The voice attribute seemed to be automatically coded under both intentional and incidental instructions for remembering the attribute, whereas the location attribute seemed to require cognitive processing in addition to that required for encoding the meaning of the sentence. A test for clustering by voice in recall was done to determine if the evidence for automatic ceding of voice was merely an artifact resulting from better recall because of organization. However, no clustering was found. The ideas that speaker's voice and sentence meaning were processed in parallel by different hemispheres of the brain and that the connotation of the voice influenced the meaning of each sentence were offered as two possible explanations of the results.     

How automatic are social judgments?

Do people infer personality dispositions automatically when they encode behavior? Tulving's encoding-specificity paradigm was adapted to test three operational indicants of automatism: absence of intention, of interference from other mental activity, and of awareness. Recruited for a digit-recall study, subjects read sentences describing actions during the retention interval of either an easy or a difficult digit recall task. Later, sentence recall was cued by (a) disposition cues, (b) strong semantic associates to the sentence actor, or (c) words representing the gist of the sentence, or (d) sentence recall was not cued. Awareness was measured immediately after the last sentence was read. Disposition-cued recall was higher than (b) or (d) and was unaffected by digit recall difficulty. Awareness of making dispositional inferences was only weakly correlated with disposition-cued recall. Results suggest that disposition inferences occurred at encoding, without intention, without interference by differential drain on processing capacity, and with little awareness. Thus, making dispositional inferences seems to be largely, but not entirely, automatic.     

Concreteness and relational effects on recall of adjective-noun pairs.

Extending previous research on the problem, we studied the effects of concreteness and relatedness of adjective-noun pairs on free recall, cued recall, and memory integration. Two experiments varied the attributes in paired associates lists or sentences. Consistent with predictions from dual coding theory and prior results with noun-noun pairs, both experiments showed that the effects of concreteness were strong and independent of relatedness in free recall and cued recall. The generally positive effects of relatedness were absent in the case of free recall of sentences. The two attributes also had independent (additive) effects on integrative memory as measured by conditionalized free recall of pairs. Integration as measured by the increment from free to cued recall occurred consistently only when pairs were high in both concreteness and relatedness. Explanations focused on dual coding and relational-distinctiveness processing theories as well as task variables that affect integration measures.     

Memory for previous recall: a comparison of free and cued recall

Case studies of individuals who claimed to have recovered previously repressed memories of abuse during situations that involved memory cueing revealed that some individuals had discussed abuse with others during an earlier time period. Termed the ‘forgot‐it‐all‐along’ effect, this phenomenon has legal implications for statutes of limitations. Two experiments provide evidence for differences between free recall and more directed (recognition or cued recall) test conditions in the accuracy of memories for previous recall. Participants more often erred by claiming they had not previously remembered recognized (Experiment 1) or cued (Experiment 2) sentences than freely recalled sentences, and this difference was obtained even when the number of remembered sentences was equivalent across conditions (Experiment 2). These studies document that memory for previous recollection is less accurate for cued memories even when remembered events do not produce feelings of shock or surprise. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Recency effects in direct and indirect memory tasks

In three experiments, subjects learned two lists under incidental conditions and were then given either a part-word or a word (extralist associate) cue. Each cue was related to one word in each list. Half the subjects were given production instructions (an indirect memory test), and half were given cued recall instructions (a direct memory test). When the interval between List 2 and the test was shortened, recency effects were found for part-word cues for both cued recall and production instructions. Little or no recency effects were found with word cues. These results are incompatible with a simple distinction between the types of memory trace or information that are tapped by direct as opposed to indirect memory tasks. Possible causes for the recency effect and for the difference between word and part-word cues are discussed.     

Incidental formation of episodic associations: The importance of sentential context

The influence of relevant semantic context on the incidental formation of episodic associations between words was probed in two experiments. In Experiment 1, we examined the influence of associations formed incidentally between unrelated words presented either in isolation or embedded in a sentential context on subsequent explicit paired-associate leaning tested by cued recall. The results of Experiment 1 showed that the cued-recall rate of words studied in sentential context was higher than that of words co-occurring in isolated pairs. A subsequent single-items recognition test showed equal item memory for words studied in sentences than for words studied in isolated pairs, suggesting that the sentential context effect in cued recall indeed reflected stronger associations between paired words rather than better memory for single words. In Experiment 2, we ruled out memory for the entire sentence as an alternative explanation for the results of Experiment 1. We suggest two possible mechanisms to account for this advantage: First, pairs embedded in a sentence undergo semantic elaboration that might lead to the incidental formation of an association between them. Second, words embedded in a sentence enjoy the conjoint activation of compatible semantic features, a fact that may also facilitate the formation of an episodic association between them. The implications of these results for computational models using word representations based on co-occurrence data are discussed.     

Memory for non-native language: The role of lexical processing in the retention of surface form

Research on memory for native language (L1) has consistently shown that retention of surface form is inferior to that of gist (e.g., Sachs, 1967). This paper investigates whether the same pattern is found in memory for non-native language (L2). We apply a model of bilingual word processing to more complex linguistic structures and predict that memory for L2 sentences ought to contain more surface information than L1 sentences. Native and non-native speakers of English were tested on a set of sentence pairs with different surface forms but the same meaning (e.g., “The bullet hit/struck the bull's eye”). Memory for these sentences was assessed with a cued recall procedure. Responses showed that native and non-native speakers did not differ in the accuracy of gist-based recall but that non-native speakers outperformed native speakers in the retention of surface form. The results suggest that L2 processing involves more intensive encoding of lexical level information than L1 processing.     

The effects of cueing and constraint instructions on children's free recall performance

The performance of nursery school children was investigated in two experiments involving cued and constrained free recall. Under constrained instructions, subjects were required to recall items by category. Under cued instructions subjects could recall items in any order they wished but the organized nature of the lists was identified and subjects were told that they would remember more if they recalled things from the same category together. No effects of cueing instructions were obtained in either Experiment I or Experiment II. Constrained recall instructions led to enhanced recall and category clustering. However, the beneficial effects were not maintained on later trials with the same list or on a transfer list when the constraints on recall were dropped. In addition, the introduction of constrained recall instructions had identical effects whether they were introduced early or late in practice. The results were discussed in terms of the influences of variables which affect the subjects' use of retrieval strategies and the development of memory.     

The effect of forced recall on illusory recollection in younger and older adults

The effect of an initial forced recall test on later recall and recognition tests was examined in younger and older adults. Subjects were presented with categorized word lists and given an initial test under standard cued recall instructions (with a warning against guessing) or forced recall instructions (that required guessing); subjects were later given a cued recall test for the original list items. In 2 experiments, initial forced recall resulted in higher levels of illusory memories on subsequent tests (relative to initial cued recall), especially for older adults. Older adults were more likely to say they remembered rather than knew that forced guesses had occurred in the original study episode. The effect persisted despite a strong warning against making errors in Experiment 2. When a source monitoring test was given, older adults had more difficulty than younger adults in identifying the source of items they had originally produced as guesses. If conditions encourage subjects to guess on a first memory test, they are likely to recollect these guesses as actual memories on later tests. This effect is exaggerated in older adults, probably because of their greater source monitoring difficulties. Both dual process and source monitoring theories provide insight into these findings.