The effect of response bias on recall performance, with some observations on processing bias

We explored Roediger and Payne's proposal that response bias does not affect recall performance and that it is therefore not necessary to control for response productivity in recall studies. Two initial experiments, contrary to expectation, corroborated Roediger and Payne's findings: Forced recall did not produce more correct recalls than free recall, even though forced recall produced substantially more false alarms than did free recall. However, in succeeding experiments involving pictorial and verbal stimuli, reliable response-bias effects on recall were demonstrated. The stimuli yielding response-bias effects were those associated with higher probabilities of being guessed by chance. In addition, some of the data suggest that processing-bias effects (differential retrieval effort) may be unintentionally induced by instructions and may significantly affect recall memory. Consequently, it is necessary to assess or to control response-bias effects and, possibly, processing-bias effects in recall experiments in which level of recall is of interest.     

Testing the exclusivity effect in location memory

There is growing literature exploring the possibility of parallel retrieval of location memories, although this literature focuses primarily on the speed of retrieval with little attention to the accuracy of location memory recall. Baguley, Lansdale, Lines, and Parkin (2006) found that when a person has two or more memories for an object's location, their recall accuracy suggests that only one representation can be retrieved at a time (exclusivity). This finding is counterintuitive given evidence of non-exclusive recall in the wider memory literature. The current experiment explored the exclusivity effect further and aimed to promote an alternative outcome (i.e., independence or superadditivity) by encouraging the participants to combine multiple representations of space at encoding or retrieval. This was encouraged by using anchor (points of reference) labels that could be combined to form a single strongly associated combination. It was hypothesised that the ability to combine the anchor labels would allow the two representations to be retrieved concurrently, generating higher levels of recall accuracy. The results demonstrate further support for the exclusivity hypothesis, showing no significant improvement in recall accuracy when there are multiple representations of a target object's location as compared to a single representation.     

An independent replication of the effectiveness of the cognitive interview

The cognitive interview developed by Geiselman and co-workers is a set of memory retrieval aids to enhance recall in memory tasks such as eyewitness reports. This research is a replication of the study of Geiselman, Fischer, Firstenberg, Hutton, Sullivan, Avetissian and Prosk (1984) with a German version of the cognitive interview. Twenty-nine subjects participated and saw a short film in an incidental learning situation. Approximately 6 days later the participants were questioned about one scene of the film. Fourteen subjects received the cognitive interview instructions and 15 were questioned without special instructions. First, subjects gave a written free report of the scene and subsequently answered more specific questions concerning details. The results clearly indicate that the cognitive interview enhances memory retrieval in free recall conditions but this effect is reduced to specific questions. The effects are discussed in terms of a possible underlying memory organization and the use of retrieval strategies.     

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.     

Memory for sentences: The subject superiority effect

Three experiments are reported on subject noun superiority in cued recall from S-V-O sentences. In Experiment I surface subjects were superior cues across a wide variety of conditions when the order of nouns/pronouns was matched in sentences and probes. The effect was less clear-cut in Experiment II, when cues and responses were confined to single key words.

The final experiment showed that cue superiority depends on the cue which subjects learn to use in retrieving information from sentences, and can be reversed by brief training. Several other aspects of the results, including a contrast in recall and recognition patterns, suggest that subject cue superiority results from the way subjects process remembered sentences rather than from memory trace structure. It is suggested that failure to control the utilisation of cues for memory retrieval may account for the sometimes elusive nature of the subject superiority effect.     

Pictorial priming and cued recall in Alzheimer's and Huntington's disease

A picture fragment test was used to compare the priming and cued recall performances of patients with Huntington's disease (HD), patients with dementia of the Alzheimer type (DAT), and neurologically intact normal control (NC) subjects. On the pictorial priming test, subjects were asked to say "the first thing you think of" when shown incompletely drawn pictures, half of which were previously exposed to the subject during an unrelated naming task. Normal controls and HD patients, but not DAT patients, demonstrated similar increases in their ability to identify fragmented versions of previously seen pictures relative to novel pictures. These results are consistent with the previously observed pattern of preserved and impaired verbal priming ability in HD and DAT patients, respectively. The NC subjects, as expected, also demonstrated better performance on the cued recall than on the priming version of the picture fragment test, whereas the HD patients evidenced the opposite relationship on these two tasks and DAT patients were found to be equally impaired on both tests. This finding provides further support for the notion that HD patients' memory impairment is characterized primarily by an inability to initiate systematic retrieval strategies.     

Retrieval of Episodic Information From Memory: Comparisons Among 3- and 4-Year-Olds, 7- and 8-Year-Olds,and Adults

Young children's and adults' recall of episodic information was explored in 4 experiments. The task required participants to recall a target noun presented as the last item of a 4-noun string of related (either categorically or thematically) or unrelated words. Providing all 3 preceding nouns or a subset of them cued recall. Experiment 1 found that 7- and 8-year-old children's recall was better with pictures as opposed to text, and children showed performance equal to adults with thematically related pictorial stimuli. Using pictorial stimuli, Experiment 2 showed that the number of cues present at retrieval affected 7- and 8-year-olds' recall. Experiments 3 and 4 tested recall of episodic information in 3- and 4-year-olds using pictorial stimuli. The results suggested that young children also have access to episodic information in memory and the number of cues present at retrieval influenced recall. The findings are discussed in the context of children's memory for events.     

Encoding information for future action: Memory for to-be-performed tasks versus memory for to-be-recalled tasks

What is the nature of the representation underlying memory for future tasks such as calling the doctor or buying milk? If this representation consists of a verbal instruction that is translated into action at the time of retrieval, then memory should be better when tested via verbatim recall of the instruction than when tested via actual performance. Three experiments rejected this possibility, indicating better memory for a perform mode of report than for a recall mode of report. This was true in Experiment 1 in which subjects saw a series of verbal instructions (e.g., “move the eraser,” “lift the cup,” “touch the ashtray”), with advance information regarding the mode of report required during testing. In Experiment 2, the advance cue was valid only in 75% of the trials. Memory depended more heavily on the expected mode of report thanon the actual mode ofreport, suggesting that the perform superiority is due to processes that occur during encoding. In Experiment 3, subjects learned 20 phrases depicting minitasks were remembered by subjects tested via performance than by subjects tested via verbatim recall. A second part of Experiment 3 also indicated superior memory when a perform test was expected, regardless of which mode of report was actually required. The results were compared with the finding that subject-performed tasks are better remembered thanare their verbal instructions, which suggeststhat the representation underlying memory for future assignments-may-take advantage of the imaginal-enactive properties ofthe envisagedacts. Other possible differences between memory for to-be-recalled tasks and memory for to-be-performed tasks are discussed.     

Conversational remembering: Story recall with a peer versus for an experimenter

This research investigated the role social context plays in determining the content and organization of remembered information. As a manipulation of social context, subjects talked about a short story either with another subject (dyads) or for an experimenter (experimenter-tested). In addition, the instructions were manipulated: Subjects were asked about their memory of the story or their personal reactions to it. Regardless of instructions, the dyad subjects spoke more about their evaluations of the story, included more comments linking the story to a larger knowledge frame (metacomments), and more often used remembered details to support their positions. In contrast, the experimenter-tested subjects more often included story details and interpretations in narrative accounts of the story. The dyad subjects included in their recalls information that is part of story memory but seldom evidenced by single subjects remembering for an experiment. Thus conversational remembering often relies on a nonnarrative retrieval strategy. Regardless of social context, personal reaction instructions led to more meta-comments and evaluations, and less narrative than memory instructions. The organization and content of non-narrative conversational remembering may be explained by the dual demands of conforming to conversational rules and of establishing social bonds through self-revealing comments.     

Remembering ads: The effects of encoding strategies,retrieval cues,and emotional response

This study uses the encoding specificity principle ( Tulving & Thomson, 1973 ) and the distinction between episodic and semantic knowledge to test predictions about the effects of processing goals and retrieval cues on memory for emotional and neutral TV commercials. Subjects viewed five emotional and five neutral ads embedded in programming. Encoding instructions asked subjects to either (a) evaluate each product or (b) “just watch” as they viewed the ads. Retrieval cues were either the opening scene of each ad (executional cue) or the product category (categorical cue). Both recall and response-time measures were used to index ad memory-trace accessibility. The results showed that when encoding and retrieval conditions were compatible (evaluation instructions with categorical cue, and just-watch instructions with executional cue) ad memory traces were retrieved more rapidly than when encoding and retrieval conditions were incompatible. In addition, subjects who “just watched” emotional ads were able to retrieve those ad memory traces more rapidly when given an executional cue compared to a categorical cue, whereas subjects who evaluated neutral ads at encoding recalled more ads, and retrieved them more rapidly, when given a categorical cue compared to an executional cue. Finally, we show that searching memory first with an executional cue and then with a product-category cue leads to an increase in ad recall for both emotional and neutral ads, whereas searching first with a categorical cue and then with an executional cue leads to a decrease in ad recall for neutral ads.     

Eye movements during long-term pictorial recall

We investigated eye movements during long-term pictorial recall. Participants performed a perceptual encoding task, in which they memorized 16 stimuli that were displayed in different areas on a computer screen. After the encoding phase the participants had to recall and visualize the images and answer to specific questions about visual details of the stimuli. One week later the participants repeated the pictorial recall task. Interestingly, not only in the immediate recall task but also 1 week later participants looked longer at the areas where the stimuli were encoded. The major contribution of this study is that memory for pictorial objects, including their spatial location, is stable and robust over time.     

Exploring the superadditive effects of scent and pictures on verbal recall: An extension of dual coding theory

This research extends the dual coding theory of memory retrieval (Paivio 1969, 2007) beyond its traditional focus on verbal and pictorial information to olfactory information. We manipulate the presence or absence of olfactory and pictorial stimuli at the time of encoding (study 1) or retrieval (study 2) and measure the impact on verbal recall. After a time delay, scent enhances recall of verbal information, and scent-based retrieval cues potentiate the facilitative effect of pictures on recall. These results cannot be attributed merely to increased elaboration at the time of exposure.     

Generality of a strength model for three conditions of repeated recall

A Markovian model of repeated recall is presented that is based on four memory processes: (a) a presentation increment that strengthens the memory trace of a word when the word is shown to a subject, (b) a recall increment that strengthens the trace when the subject successfully recalls the word, (c) a cueing decrement that weakens the trace as contextual cues for retrieving a word change over successive trials of attempted recall, and (d) a sampling rule that translates the strength of a memory trace into a probability of recall. Mathematically, the model predicts the relative frequencies of the recall patterns that are defined by sequences of recalls and forgets for individual words over trials. According to the model, the recallability of a word depends on its state, which is a function of (a) whether the word has been recalled for the first time, and if so, then (b) how many consecutive forgets of the word immediately precede the current trial, (c) how many successful recalls of the word have accumulated, and (d) how many previous trials of attempted recall have elapsed. Paradigms that were well described by the model were (a) no reminding, in which words were presented once and then recalled repeatedly without additional presentations; (b) restricted reminding, in which words were presented before each trial of attempted recall up to their first successful recall but not thereafter; and (c) complete reminding, in which all words were presented befor each attempted recall, whether previously recalled or not. Differences in recall among these conditions were explained in terms of differences in values of the model's parameters.     

Learning 10000 pictures

Four experiments are reported which examined memory capacity and retrieval speed for pictures and for words. Single-trial learning tasks were employed throughout, with memory performance assessed by forced-choice recognition, recall measures or choice reaction-time tasks. The main experimental findings were: (1) memory capacity, as a function of the amount of material presented, follows a general power law with a characteristic exponent for each task; (2) pictorial material obeys this power law and shows an overall superiority to verbal material. The capacity of recognition memory for pictures is almost limitless, when measured under appropriate conditions; (3) when the recognition task is made harder by using more alternatives, memory capacity stays constant and the superiority of pictures is maintained; (4) picture memory also exceeds verbal memory in terms of verbal recall; comparable recognition/recall ratios are obtained for pictures, words and nonsense syllables; (5) verbal memory shows a higher retrieval speed than picture memory, as inferred from reaction-time measures. Both types of material obey a power law, when reaction-time is measured for various sizes of learning set, and both show very rapid rates of memory search.

From a consideration of the experimental results and other data it is concluded that the superiority of the pictorial mode in recognition and free recall learning tasks is well established and cannot be attributed to methodological artifact.     

Working Memory: Activation Limitations on Retrieval

Two experiments which require subjects to hold a digit span while solving an equation and then recall the digit span are performed. The size of the memory span and the complexity of the equation are manipulated as well as whether the subject is required to substitute items from the digit span for constants in the equation. As either task (digit span recall or equation solving) gets more complex there are performance decrements (accuracy or latency) not only in that task but also in the other task. It is also shown that the majority of the errors are misretrievals. These results are consistent with the proposal that working memory load has its impact on retrieval from memory. These results are fit by the ACT-R theory (Anderson, 1993) which assumes that there is a limit on source activation and that this activation has to be divided between the two tasks. As either task increases in complexity there is less activation for retrieval of information from declarative memory. Subjects’ misretrievals of associatively related information could be predicted by assuming a partial matching process in ACT-R.     

The properties of retrieval cues constrain the picture superiority effect

In three experiments, we examined why pictures are remembered better than words on explicit memory tests like recall and recognition, whereas words produce more priming than pictures on some implicit tests, such as word-fragment and word-stem completion (e.g., completing -l-ph-nt or ele----- as elephant). One possibility is that pictures are always more accessible than words if subjects are given explicit retrieval instructions. An alternative possibility is that the properties of the retrieval cues themselves constrain the retrieval processes engaged; word fragments might induce data-driven (perceptually based) retrieval, which favors words regardless of the retrieval instructions. Experiment 1 demonstrated that words were remembered better than pictures on both the word-fragment and word-stem completion tasks under both implicit and explicit retrieval conditions. In Experiment 2, pictures were recalled better than words with semantically related extralist cues. In Experiment 3, when semantic cues were combined with word fragments, pictures and words were recalled equally well under explicit retrieval conditions, but words were superior to pictures under implicit instructions. Thus, the inherently data-limited properties of fragmented words limit their use in accessing conceptual codes. Overall, the results indicate that retrieval operations are largely determined by properties of the retrieval cues under both implicit and explicit retrieval conditions.     

Optimal recall in early and late adulthood

Mäntylä & Nilsson (1983) recently presented a striking empirical phenomenon demonstrating a practically perfect recall of verbal materials encountered at one single trial and without specific instructions to learn the items. The purpose of the study to be presented in this article was to investigate whether older adults are capable of performing at the same high level of recall as younger adults did in the Mäntylä & Nilsson study. Type of instructions and number of retrieval cues were included in the experimental design, in addition to the age factor. Although the results indicated a superior memory performance of younger adults as compared to older adults, the latter group of subjects demonstrated an extremely high level of recall as well. Both age groups showed quite similar recall patterns in the sense that no interaction effects between the age factor and the other independent variables were obtained. The data were discussed relative to qualitatively and quantitatively based explanations of age differences in memory.     

A retrieval-based approach to eliminating hindsight bias

Individuals exhibit hindsight bias when they are unable to recall their original responses to novel questions after correct answers are provided to them. Prior studies have eliminated hindsight bias by modifying the conditions under which original judgments or correct answers are encoded. Here, we explored whether hindsight bias can be eliminated by manipulating the conditions that hold at retrieval. Our retrieval-based approach predicts that if the conditions at retrieval enable sufficient discrimination of memory representations of original judgments from memory representations of correct answers, then hindsight bias will be reduced or eliminated. Experiment 1 used the standard memory design to replicate the hindsight bias effect in middle-school students. Experiments 2 and 3 modified the retrieval phase of this design, instructing participants beforehand that they would be recalling both their original judgments and the correct answers. As predicted, this enabled participants to form compound retrieval cues that discriminated original judgment traces from correct answer traces, and eliminated hindsight bias. Experiment 4 found that when participants were not instructed beforehand that they would be making both recalls, they did not form discriminating retrieval cues, and hindsight bias returned. These experiments delineate the retrieval conditions that produce—and fail to produce—hindsight bias.     

A comparison of two techniques for reducing context-dependent forgetting

Recall is poorer when tested in a new environment than when tested in the original learning context. Two techniques for reducing this context-dependent forgetting were compared. One technique involved instructing subjects to recall their learning room(s), and the other attempted to establish multiple environmental retrieval cues by presenting lists in multiple rooms rather than all in the same room. Subjects were given three word lists to study in one or three rooms. All subjects were given a free-recall test in a new room, and half were asked to use remembered environmental context (EC) information to facilitate word memory. Multiple input contexts benefited only subjects who were uninstructed in the use of EC cues. Subjects given EC-recall instructions, however, recalled somewhat less in the three-room condition than in the one-room condition. The facilitative effects of the two techniques were not additive: EC-recall instructions benefited only one-room subjects. The results suggest that both EC-recall instructions and multiple learning contexts induce subjects to use contextual retrieval cues that are otherwise not spontaneously utilized, and that the greater the number of context cues stored in memory, the less accessible those cues become.