Item-Cued Directed Forgetting of Related Words and Pictures in Children and Adults: Selective Rehearsal Versus Cognitive Inhibition

The main purpose of this study was to compare the relative importance of selective rehearsal and cognitive inhibition in accounting for developmental changes in the directed-forgetting paradigm developed by R. A. Bjork (1972). In two experiments, children in Grades 2 and 5 and college students were asked to remember some words or pictures and to forget others when items were categorically related. Their memory for both items and the associated remember or forget cues was then tested with recall and recognition. Fifth graders recognized more of the forget-cued words than college students did. The pattern of results suggested that age differences in rehearsal and source monitoring (i.e., remembering whether a word had been cued remember or forget) were better explanatory mechanisms for children's forgetting inefficiencies than retrieval inhibition was. The results are discussed in terms of a multiple process view of inhibition.     

Item-cued directed forgetting of related words and pictures in children and adults: selective rehearsal versus cognitive inhibition

The main purpose of this study was to compare the relative importance of selective rehearsal and cognitive inhibition in accounting for developmental changes in the directed-forgetting paradigm developed by R. A. Bjork (1972). In two experiments, children in Grades 2 and 5 and college students were asked to remember some words or pictures and to forget others when items were categorically related. Their memory for both items and the associated remember or forget cues was then tested with recall and recognition. Fifth graders recognized more of the forget-cued words than college students did. The pattern of results suggested that age differences in rehearsal and source monitoring (i.e., remembering whether a word had been cued remember or forget) were better explanatory mechanisms for children's forgetting inefficiencies than retrieval inhibition was. The results are discussed in terms of a multiple process view of inhibition.     

Interactive visual imagery and memory search for words and pictures

In a short-term recognition memory experiment with words, subjects: (1) subvocally rehearsed the words, (2) generated a separate visual image for each word, (3) generated an interactive scene with such images, or (4) composed a covert sentence using the words in the memory set. Contrary to Seamon's (1972) results in a similar study, a serial memory search was found in all conditions, instead of the simultaneous scan which was expected when items were combined in interactive images. In a second study with pictures as stimuli, subjects who generated imaginal interactions between separate pictures, viewed interacting pictures, or viewed separate pictures also showed a serial search, i.e., longer RTs were obtained when more stimuli were held m memory. Since interactive imagery facilitated performance in an unexpected paired-associate task with memory set stimuli, one can argue that subjects actually processed or generated such interactions. It was suggested that memory search might not be simultaneous in tasks where the test stimulus constitutes only part of a memory image.     

Instructional effects in the use of the mnemonic keyword method for learning German nouns and their grammatical gender

The use of the mnemonic keyword method involves (a) the formation of an orthographic link between the form of a foreign word and that of a physically similar word in one's mother tongue (i.e. the keyword), and (b) the formation of a semantic link between the referent of the foreign word and that of the keyword. In a variation of this study method, English-speaking learners were asked to study the grammatical gender of German nouns by substituting the concepts of a woman, a man, and an inanimate object for the feminine, masculine, and neuter genders, respectively. This more concrete representation of gender was then to be incorporated to an interactive image along with the referent of the keyword and that of the German noun. The three experiments reported in this paper yielded four main results: (a) instructing learners to recode the gender tag and to include its representation into an interactive mental image along with the referent of the German noun facilitated the recall of genders: (b) the facilitating effect of imagery instructions on the recall of genders was obtained only if the English translation was recalled; (c) the probability of correctly reporting the gender given that the English translation was not recalled was higher than the baseline for guessing if the learners were instructed to encode the gender before the translation, otherwise it was consistently near the baseline: and (d) in contrast with prior studies with French-speaking subjects, the modified keyword method did not always enhance the recall of the familiar translation equivalents. The discussion bears mainly on the factors that might account for the difficulty of detecting a consistent keyword advantage in the recall of the familiar translation.     

Factors affecting the learning of foreign language vocabulary: Imagery keyword mediators and phonological short-term memory

In order to investigate the cognitive processes involved in learning Foreign Language (FL) vocabulary, this study evaluates different methods of instruction. It demonstrates that keyword techniques are effective for receptive learning but that repetition is a superior strategy for learning to produce the foreign word. Performance is optimal when learners combine both strategies. The nature of the keyword is crucial--whereas imageable noun keywords promote learning, verb keywords actually impede it. A theoretical analysis of the roles of phonological short-term memory, imagery, and lexical factors in FL vocabulary learning is presented.     

Pictorial encoding effects and memory confusions in the Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm: evidence for the activation of spontaneous imagery

The purpose of the experiments reported in this paper was to examine the possible role of spontaneous imagery and list-specific cues on pictorial encoding effects induced by the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) task. After viewing pictures and words referring to thematically related materials, by way of a picture/word source-judgement task, participants were asked to remember the way in which these materials were presented. Participants reported "seeing" pictures of items that were presented as words, an effect predicted by the imaginal activation hypothesis in its suggestion that incidental images experienced during encoding will later be mistaken as memories for pictures. Whether participants made the same picture misattributions on related lures (or non-presented related items) depended on the way in which the lures' respective thematic lists were experienced during encoding (Experiments 1 and 2), pointing to the effects of list-specific cues in picture/word judgements. These findings have intriguing implications for interpretations of picture-encoding effects induced by the DRM task. The findings also speak to the use of DRM false-memory rates when marshalling evidence against the use of imagery in applied settings.     

Pictorial encoding effects and memory confusions in the Deese–Roediger–McDermott paradigm: Evidence for the activation of spontaneous imagery

The purpose of the experiments reported in this paper was to examine the possible role of spontaneous imagery and list-specific cues on pictorial encoding effects induced by the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) task. After viewing pictures and words referring to thematically related materials, by way of a picture/word source-judgement task, participants were asked to remember the way in which these materials were presented. Participants reported “seeing” pictures of items that were presented as words, an effect predicted by the imaginal activation hypothesis in its suggestion that incidental images experienced during encoding will later be mistaken as memories for pictures. Whether participants made the same picture misattributions on related lures (or non-presented related items) depended on the way in which the lures’ respective thematic lists were experienced during encoding (Experiments 1 and 2), pointing to the effects of list-specific cues in picture/word judgements. These findings have intriguing implications for interpretations of picture-encoding effects induced by the DRM task. The findings also speak to the use of DRM false-memory rates when marshalling evidence against the use of imagery in applied settings.     

Imagery encoding and false recognition errors: Examining the role of imagery process and imagery content on source misattributions

Imagery encoding effects on source-monitoring errors were explored using the Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm in two experiments. While viewing thematically related lists embedded in mixed picture/word presentations, participants were asked to generate images of objects or words (Experiment 1) or to simply name the items (Experiment 2). An encoding task intended to induce spontaneous images served as a control for the explicit imagery instruction conditions (Experiment 1). On the picture/word source-monitoring tests, participants were much more likely to report "seeing" a picture of an item presented as a word than the converse particularly when images were induced spontaneously. However, this picture misattribution error was reversed after generating images of words (Experiment 1) and was eliminated after simply labelling the items (Experiment 2). Thus source misattributions were sensitive to the processes giving rise to imagery experiences (spontaneous vs deliberate), the kinds of images generated (object vs word images), and the ways in which materials were presented (as pictures vs words).     

Reasoning about the referent of a picture versus reasoning about the picture as the referent: An effect of visual realism

Research on picture perception and picture-based problem solving has generally considered the information that enables one to “see” and think about a picture’s subject matter. However, people often reason about a picture or representation as the referent itself. The question addressed here is whether pictorial features themselves help determine when one reasons about the referent of an image, as with an engrossing movie, and when one reasons about the image in its own right, as with abstract art. Two experiments tested the hypothesis that pictures with relatively high fidelity to their referents lead people to think about those referents, whereas pictures with relatively low fidelity lead people to think about the picture as a referent. Subjects determined whether marks on the bottom and top boards of an open hinge would meet if the hinge were closed. Accuracy and latency results indicated that subjects who saw realistic displays simulated the physical behavior of the hinge through analog imagery. In contrast, subjects who saw schematic displays tended to reason about static features of the display such as line lengths and angles. The results demonstrate that researchers must be cautious when generalizing from reasoning about diagrammatic materials to reasoning about the referents themselves.     

Subjective qualities of memories associated with the picture superiority effect in schizophrenia

Patients with schizophrenia (n = 24) matched with 24 normal subjects were presented with both words and pictures. On a recognition memory task, they were asked to give remember, know, or guess responses to items that were recognized on the basis of conscious recollection, familiarity, or guessing, respectively. Compared with normal subjects, patients exhibited a lower picture superiority effect selectively related to remember responses. Unlike normal subjects, they did not exhibit any word superiority effect in relation to guess responses; this explains why the overall picture superiority effect appeared to be intact. These results emphasize the need to take into account the subjective states of awareness when analyzing memory impairments in schizophrenia.     

Referential communication abilities of learning-disabled, language-learning-disabled, and normal school-age children

Past research in referential communication has indicated normally developing children show developmental progression in ability to communicate a specific referent to a listener. In one paradigm subjects were given lists of word-pairs in which one member of each pair was designated as the referent. It was shown that communicating about referents found in word-pairs associated in some way was more difficult than communicating about referents in dissimilar word-pairs. The present study extended this methodology to learning-disabled children. Learning-disabled, language-learning-disabled, and normally achieving children were asked to communicate about 30 pictured referents on three different tasks. On Tasks 1 and 2 each subject was asked to give a clue for the referent that would distinguish it from the other picture. Stimuli for Task 1 were 30 pairs of pictures that were related in some way and the stimuli for Task 2 were 30 pairs of unrelated pictures. Task 3 required the subjects to evaluate the adequacy of the examiner's clues for Task 1 stimuli. The disabled subjects were matched to the normally achieving subjects on the basis of receptive vocabulary age. Few differences were noted among the groups' performances on these referential communication tasks. Implications include the importance of vocabulary and concept development to referential communication.     

Knowledge and ability factors underlying simple learning by accretion

In this study, the relationships between simple learning by accretion and various cognitive ability variables were explored. Computerized tests of five sources of individual differences were administered to a sample of 714 Air Force recruits, along with a trigram-English word paired-associate task, which was presented as a foreign language vocabulary learning task. Subjects were assigned at random to one of three groups: control, semantic elaboration, or interactive imagery. Subjects in the semantic elaboration group were instructed to generate sentences to link the trigram and word in a memorable way. Subjects in the interactive imagery group were given the additional instruction of visualizing the generated sentence. Trigrams (CVCs) varied in meaningfulness across the two lists of eight pairs in the task. Results showed that meaningfulness and strategy had the expected main effects on learning and that strategy interacted with verbal knowledge in initial learning so that learners with more knowledge benefitted more than learners with less knowledge edge. Regression analyses showed that a representative measure from each proposed source made a significant unique contribution to the explained variance in paired-associate learning.     

Grammatical class effects in relation to normal and aphasic sentence processing

Agrammatic, Broca's aphasic patients, Wernicke's aphasic patients, and neurologically intact control subjects were asked to detect target letters in prose passages and in a scrambled word passage. The targets were embedded, in some instances, in content words (open-class vocabulary items), and in other instances, in function words (closed-class vocabulary items). With respect to the prose passages, both the control subjects and Wernicke's aphasic patients were more apt to notice target letters when they appeared in the open-class items than when in closed-class items; by contrast, the agrammatic Broca's patients showed no vocabulary class detection difference. The Wernicke's patients were not entirely normal, however: Whereas the normal subjects showed a much smaller vocabulary class effect for letter detection in the scrambled condition, the Wernicke's maintained the pattern they had shown in the prose condition. These and other findings obtained on the letter cancellation task are discussed in relation to lexical access mechanisms geared to sentence parsing.     

Assessment and selection of paired associate strategies: A developmental study

First, third, and fifth graders who had been instructed to use an interaction strategy and a repetition strategy on two separate paired associate tasks were asked on which task they had remembered better and why. Subjects were then given another paired associate task and told they could use any way they wanted to remember. Memory performance was better when the interaction strategy was used than when the repetition strategy was used. A significant majority of third and fifth graders correctly judged which task they had performed better on, and the number of subjects doing so increased with grade. Only among fifth graders, did the majority of subjects explain their judgments by referring to the use of the interaction strategy. Use of the interaction strategy on Task 3 did not increase with grade but was shown by a significant majority of first and fifth graders. Use of the interaction strategy on Task 3 was more frequent among subjects who referred to the use of the interaction strategy in explaining their choice of their more successful task than among those who did not.     

Unblocking memory through directed forgetting

The ability to remember an item can be blocked, or negatively primed, by exposure to related items. For example, ALLERGY is less likely to be generated given the word fragment A_L_ _GY if one is first exposed to ANALOGY. We examined whether this memory blocking effect is influenced by list-method directed forgetting. A total of 144 participants learned two lists of items, each consisting of words that were designed to negatively prime performance on a subsequent word fragment completion task. Participants who were told to forget List 1 before learning List 2 suffered significantly less memory blocking owing to the negative primes from List 1 than participants who were told to remember List 1. These results suggest that directed forgetting can modify the memory blocking effect by affecting the accessibility of information in memory.     

In defence of keyword experiments: a reply to Gruneberg's commentary

Gruneberg (1998) argues that our findings (e.g. Wang and Thomas, 1992; Thomas and Wang, 1996) that the keyword method of foreign language learning leads to poorer long‐term retention than rote rehearsal when the delay interval is manipulated between subjects is uninteresting because, in a natural setting, students would normally be tested soon after study. In reply, we assert that our data are internally valid and inform us with respect to the nature of the underlying causal relationship. Specifically, our experimental findings lead us to conclude that the imagery‐based encodings of the keyword method are very fragile and unlikely to be retrievable after a delay unless frequently rehearsed. Also, another consequence of the difficulty of retrieving keyword images is that translation time is slower for keyword learners than for learners who rote rehearse. We argue that design and implementation of language instruction programmes is most likely to be successful when educators understand the underlying causal factors. Consequently, informed debate on the effectiveness of a learning strategy can only proceed with evidence gathered from both experimental and real‐world settings. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Are pictures good for learning new vocabulary in a foreign language? Only if you think they are not

The current study explored whether new words in a foreign language are learned better from pictures than from native language translations. In both between-subjects and within-subject designs, Swahili words were not learned better from pictures than from English translations (Experiments 1-3). Judgments of learning revealed that participants exhibited greater overconfidence in their ability to recall a Swahili word from a picture than from a translation (Experiments 2-3), and Swahili words were also considered easier to process when paired with pictures rather than translations (Experiment 4). When this overconfidence bias was eliminated through retrieval practice (Experiment 2) and instructions warning participants to not be overconfident (Experiment 3), Swahili words were learned better from pictures than from translations. It appears, therefore, that pictures can facilitate learning of foreign language vocabulary--as long as participants are not too overconfident in the power of a picture to help them learn a new word.     

Imagery rating and recall in congenitally blind subjects.

Imagery ratings, incidental free recall, and intentional free recall of a group of young congenitally blind adults living in an institute for the blind and of control group were compared. Words to be rated and recalled belonged to three categories: (a) high-imagery words whose referents can be sensorially experienced also by the blind; (b) high-imagery words whose referents cannot be experienced; and (c) low-imagery words. In the control group, both ratings of imagery and recall were affected by the category to which the word belonged. For the blind group the category of the word affected only the ratings of imagery which still assumed a peculiar form since words in category b received extremely low ratings. It is concluded that the blind can evaluate the imagery value of a word, but that their recall is not affected by the level of its imagery value. Therefore, the imagery value really seems to describe, as Paivio asserts, the susceptibility of an item to being coded in a specific visuo-imaginal way, which is more available for sighted than for blind people.     

Is knowledge base development a necessary and sufficient condition for memory development?

The hypothesis that knowledge base development is an important condition for memory development was tested in two experiments. In Experiment 1 subjects from grades K, 6, and college participated in an incidental learning task where they analyzed words according to one of four featural systems: physical, acoustic, semantic, and imagery. Large developmental differences in recall were found in the imagery and semantic conditions, small differences were observed in the acoustic conditions, and no developmental differences were found in the physical condition. Experiment 2 involved presenting college students and third graders words either from categories highly salient to third graders, e.g., cartoons, games, etc., or from corresponding Battig and Montague categories generated by college students. Free recall and clustering performances showed significant interactions, with third graders superior on the third-grade salient items, and college students superior on Battig and Montague items.     

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

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