The influence of culture on children’s immediate and delayed retrieval

Culture shapes children’s memories. However, scant attention has been given to the influence of culture on specific memory stages. Thus, we conducted two controlled experiments to examine cultural differences in memory recall at immediate and delayed retrieval phases. In Studies 1 and 2 (n = 217), 7- to 10-year-old Chinese and Euro-Canadian children watched a story involving both social- and individual-focused scenarios. Participants then recalled the story immediately afterwards (Study 1) and 5–7 days later (Studies 1 and 2). Findings reveal that Chinese children accurately reported more details from the social-focused events than did their Euro-Canadian counterparts in the immediate interview, and this result was replicated after a delay in both studies. Moreover, as expected, within-country comparisons showed that Euro-Canadian children had better memory for individual- than for social-focused events in both studies. Chinese children, however, showed better memory for social- than for individual-focused events only in the immediate interview in Study 1; their delayed retrieval was not affected by event focus. These findings reveal that cultural variations in memory are evident in both immediate and delayed retrieval. Implications for future research are discussed.     

The week after: Do the effects of imagined contact last over time?

The vast majority of studies assessing the prejudice reduction properties of imagined contact have focused so far on the immediate effects of the intervention. In an attempt to contribute to the literature examining the long‐term effects of imagined contact, the two studies reported in this paper tested the immediate and long‐term effects of imagined contact on outgroup attitudes, intergroup anxiety, and behavioral intentions in Experiment 1, and also on contact self‐efficacy in Experiment 2. Both studies were conducted in a context of entrenched intergroup conflict, Cyprus. The results supported the effectiveness of imagined contact in eliciting more positive attitudes, lower levels of anxiety, more positive behavioral intentions, and higher contact self‐efficacy when these were measured immediately after contact. However, evidence for the endurance of these effects was systematically found only for outgroup attitudes and intergroup anxiety. While these results speak to the ability of imagined contact to lead to long‐term changes in important and commonly studied intergroup outcomes, lack of consistent evidence regarding its ability to yield lasting changes on variables pertaining to intended behavior toward the outgroup compose a challenge for the intervention.     

Changes in driver celeration behaviour over time: Do drivers learn from collisions?

Although it is well known that drivers’ accident risk changes with experience, it has never been specified exactly how this comes about in terms of changes of behaviour, or what features of their experiences are important for this change. One possibility is that drivers learn from their collision involvement, and change their behaviour after such events, as some studies indicate. However, relative accident involvement tends to be very stable over time, which indicates the opposite. Repeated measurements of celeration (speed change) behaviour of bus drivers were compared between two groups; drivers without accidents within the measurement period (about 3 years), and drivers with at least one crash. For the crash group, there was a steady decline in their celeration values over time, but this was not related to their crashes. A similar reduction was also present for the non-crash sample. The results would seem to be in agreement with the theory of accident proneness; there exist stability in driver behaviour over time, despite accident involvement. However, this stability is relative within the sample, and not absolute. The reduction in celeration values for both groups over time would seem to indicate that drivers learn from their experiences in general, but not specifically from accidents. The present study seems to indicate that daily experience of driving situations is the strongest factor for changes in driving behaviour.     

Do attributions change over time when the actor's behavior is hedonically relevant to the perceiver?

The tendency for observers to overattribute others' behavior to dispositional variables and, correspondingly, to underestimate the importance of situational variables has been well documented. Yet, the strength of this so-called fundamental attribution error has been challenged by J. M. Burger (1991), who showed that this bias disappeared over time. But does time cause an attribution shift when the other's behavior is negative and hedonically relevant to the observer (e.g., the former is attacked by the latter)? In an exploratory study, the authors showed that even in this case, attributions to dispositional variables tended to diminish overtime.     

Is reading ability related to activation dumping speed? Evidence from immediate repetition priming

In parallel processing models, residual activity constitutes noise that must be dumped, and fast dumping is associated with efficient processing. Subjects performed a continuous lexical decision task with repetitions (Experiments 1 and 2). Efficient readers (who had high comprehension and vocabulary scores) showed smaller repetition priming than did inefficient readers, but mostly at Lag 0 (equivalent to 3-sec stimulus onset asynchrony [SOA]). Experiment 3 manipulated the empty interrepetition interval. It was found that reading ability was negatively related to repetition priming mostly when the SOA was 3 sec, but less so when it was 2 or 4 sec. Experiment 4 failed to find similar reading ability differences when the task was continuous recognition. The findings are interpreted as showing that efficient readers managed to dump residual activity related to subsemantic information in less than 3 sec, whereas inefficient readers required 3–4 sec.     

Do sex and perception of immediate stress affect optimism?

The purpose was to assess differences in mean optimism scores of men and women of low immediate stress (23 men, 28 women) and high immediate stress (11 men, 34 women). Using factorial analysis of variance, mean differences on the Coping Resources Inventory, Cognitive Domain, were not significant for sex, immediate stress, or their interaction.     

Children's recall and the cognitive interview: do the positive effects hold over time?

Most studies investigating how the Cognitive Interview affects children's recall have employed short retention intervals (a week or less). In our study children (10–11 years old) saw a film picturing an extraordinary performance by a professional fakir. Half of the children were interviewed after seven days (n = 24) and the other half after six months (n = 25). At each test session, half were interviewed according to the Cognitive Interview (CI), and half according to the Structured Interview (SI). We found that: (a) the children in the CI condition recalled significantly more correct information than the children in the SI condition (both after seven days and after six months), and (b) the children interviewed after seven days recalled significantly more correct information, and less confabulations, compared to the children interviewed after six months. The results suggest that the CI can be used as an investigative tool both after short and long retention intervals. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Is retrieval the key? Metamemory judgment and testing as learning strategies

Re-reading is the most common learning strategy, albeit not a very efficient one. Testing is highly efficient, but not perceived by students as a learning strategy. Prospective judgment-of-learning (JOL) reflect the learner's impression of subsequently being able to retrieve the ongoing learning in a cued-recall task. Estimating JOL involves attempting to retrieve the information, as in testing. The few studies that have explored the potential mnemonic benefit of JOL have yielded contradictory results. Our aim was to compare JOL and testing with re-study and to examine the impact of these strategies according to the relative difficulty of the material (cue-target association strength) in two experiments. After a first encoding phase, participants re-studied, provided JOL, or took a test. Forty-eight hours later, they participated in a final cued-recall test, during which their confidence level judgments were collected. The main result was that delayed JOL behaved in the same way as testing, and both yielded better performances than re-study when material was of moderate difficulty. The easy or very difficult material revealed no differences between these strategies. JOL is proposed as an alternative to testing when faced with difficult material.     

Divided attention during encoding and retrieval: differential control effects?

Previous studies have shown that divided attention (DA) during retrieval has little effect on recall of episodic memories, although DA during encoding has a large detrimental effect. One possible reason for this asymmetry is that stimulus presentation at encoding is under experimenter control, whereas retrieval operations and responses are under participant control. This experiment tested this possibility by presenting paired-associate word lists for learning and recall, either at a fixed 4-s rate or at a rate controlled by the participant. The results showed that the higher recall levels for DA at retrieval than for DA at encoding held under all combinations of experimenter and participant control. The implications of these results for a fuller understanding of encoding and retrieval processes are discussed.     

Do adolescent symptomatology and family environment vary over time with fluctuations in paternal alcohol impairment?

This study tested whether adolescent internalizing problems, externalizing problems, heavy alcohol use, fathers' parenting, and family conflict varied over time with fluctuations in fathers' alcohol impairment and also whether children of recovered alcoholic fathers differed from children of nonalcoholic fathers. Fathers and adolescent children (N = 267 families) were interviewed in 3 annual assessments. Results showed that adolescent symptomatology and the family environment did not vary over time as a function of different trajectories of paternal alcohol impairment. However, children of recovered alcoholic fathers exhibited more symptomatology than did children of nonalcoholic fathers. Even though paternal alcoholism has remitted in these families, children of recovered alcoholic fathers might remain on a general higher risk trajectory relative to children of nonalcoholic fathers.     

Do internals speed less and externals speed more to cope with the death anxiety?

Past research has showed that mortality salience (MS) increases reckless driving and speeding when the individual perceives driving to be relevant to his or her self-esteem. We claimed that drivers’ control orientations also play a significant role in the relationship between MS and speeding. We hypothesized that both a general desirability of control and traffic locus of control (T-LOC) would moderate the effect of MS on speeding. We tested our hypothesis using an online experiment on a sample of 208 young male drivers. Participants were exposed to either mortality or dental pain salience, and they filled out desirability of control, T-LOC, and self-report speeding measures. The results showed that, for individuals with low desirability of control, MS increased preferred speed and decreased intention to comply with speed limit and the percentage of time complied with the speed limit on urban roads with 50 km/h speed limit. For individuals with high desirability of control, on the other hand, MS increased intention to comply with the speed limit on rural roads and percentage of the time complied with the speed limit on both urban and rural roads. In contrast, the interaction between MS and T-LOC showed that an external T-LOC is positively associated with both intention to comply and the percentage of the time complied with the speed limits only on rural roads with 90 km/h.     

Do updating tasks involve updating? Evidence from comparisons with immediate serial recall

Updating tasks require participants to process a sequence of items, varying in length, and afterwards to remember only a fixed number of the elements of the sequence; the assumption being that participants actively update the to-be-recalled list as presentation progresses. However recent evidence has cast doubt on this assumption, and the present study examined the strategies that participants employ in such tasks by comparing the serial position curves found in verbal and visuo-spatial updating tasks with those seen in standard serial recall tasks. These comparisons showed that even when the same number of items are presented or recalled, participants perform less well in an updating than a serial recall context. In addition, while standard serial position effects were observed for serial recall, marked recency and reduced or absent primacy effects were seen in updating conditions. These findings suggest that participants do not typically adopt a strategy of actively updating the memory list in updating tasks, but instead tend to wait passively until the list ends before trying to recall the most recently presented items.     

Do updating tasks involve updating? Evidence from comparisons with immediate serial recall

Updating tasks require participants to process a sequence of items, varying in length, and afterwards to remember only a fixed number of the elements of the sequence; the assumption being that participants actively update the to-be-recalled list as presentation progresses. However recent evidence has cast doubt on this assumption, and the present study examined the strategies that participants employ in such tasks by comparing the serial position curves found in verbal and visuo-spatial updating tasks with those seen in standard serial recall tasks. These comparisons showed that even when the same number of items are presented or recalled, participants perform less well in an updating than a serial recall context. In addition, while standard serial position effects were observed for serial recall, marked recency and reduced or absent primacy effects were seen in updating conditions. These findings suggest that participants do not typically adopt a strategy of actively updating the memory list in updating tasks, but instead tend to wait passively until the list ends before trying to recall the most recently presented items.     

Expediting arithmetic automaticity: Do inefficient computation methods induce spontaneous testing effects?

Before achieving arithmetic automaticity (direct answer recall), learners self-compute answers or use calculators/tables. Mechanisms supporting arithmetic automaticity are of interest because automaticity predicts math achievement and employment outcomes. Future recall is enhanced when, during study, learners attempt to recall the to-be-learned information (“testing effect”). However, learners may not attempt retrieval when another strategy is available (computation, re-reading). We expected learners to more frequently attempt recall when the alternative strategy was inefficient. Participants learned novel arithmetic problems, and could recall answers (if able) or use a computation method, which varied by condition: (i) self-computation; (ii) calculator-computation; and (iii) using a calculator with scrambled keys. Final recall ability was highest after the condition with the most inefficient non-retrieval method (scrambled calculator). We assumed recall attempts preceded computation, but also considered parallel execution. As evidence against parallel retrieval, answer recall rarely interrupted computation (mental/calculator) after it began. Thus, learners should make pre-emptive recall attempts.     

How do young children’s spatio-symbolic skills change over short time scales?

Three experiments were designed to examine how experience affects young children's spatio-symbolic skills over short time scales. Spatio-symbolic reasoning refers to the ability to interpret and use spatial relations, such as those encountered on a map, to solve symbolic tasks. We designed three tasks in which the featural and spatial correspondences between a map and its referent (a model) were systematically manipulated using a map-model paradigm. We explored how 2.5- to 5-year-olds learn to map spatial arrays when both identical and unique correspondences coexist (Experiment 1), when featural cues are absent (Experiment 2), and when object and location similarities are contradictory, thereby making both featural and spatial mapping strategies distinct (Experiment 3). Although younger children have a stronger tendency to focus on object (or featural) cues, even 2.5-year-olds can appreciate a symbol beyond the level of object similarity. With age, children are increasingly capable of learning to use spatio-relational mapping and of discovering a spatio-symbolic mapping strategy to solve more challenging map use tasks over short time scales.     

Movement and lexical access: Do noniconic gestures aid in retrieval?

The production of meaningful gestures has been claimed to enhance lexical access. However, the possibility that meaningless movements also improve retrieval has been largely ignored despite evidence that all types of movements increase with dysfluency. To examine this issue, we conducted two experiments to determine whether movements in general would improve lexical access in a tip–of–thetongue (TOT) paradigm. TOT states were induced by presenting definitions of rare words that participants were then asked to recall. Participants who were required to tap at their own pace while retrieving words obtained significantly higher resolution rates than those who were immobile. Thus, movement does not have to be semantically related to the lexical item in order to aid in retrieval. However, tapping did not improve lexical access in all retrieval tasks. In a lexical retrieval task that relied more on executive abilities (letter fluency), participants who tapped retrieved fewer words than those who were immobile. The fact that movement enhanced lexical access only when retrieval depended on the automatic spread of activation suggests that facilitation may occur because of the activation of neural areas common to both speech and movement.     

Do the global advantage and interference effects covary?

The global precedence hypothesis has been operationally defined as a faster or earlier processing of the global than of the local properties of an image (global advantage) and as interference by processing at the global level with processing at the local level (global interference). Navon (1977) proposed an association between the global advantage and interference effects. Other studies have shown a dissociation between the two effects (e.g., Lamb & Robertson, 1988). It seems that the controversy in previous research resulted from not equalizing the eccentricities of global and local properties. In the present study, the eccentricities of the two levels were equalized by using stimuli with all their elements located along their perimeters. The results of the first experiment demonstrated that although the global level was identified faster than the local level in both the central and the peripheral locations of the visual field (global advantage), the pattern of global interference varied across the visual field. Consistency of global and local levels increased the speed of processing of the local level displayed at the center of the visual field but slowed down the processing of that level at peripheral locations. The results of Experiment 2 demonstrated that it was most likely that the variation in the pattern of global interference was determined by the variable of eccentricity, rather than by the sizes of the global and local levels.     

Do self-fulfilling prophecies accumulate, dissipate, or remain stable over time?

The authors examined whether self-fulfilling prophecies accumulate, dissipate, or remain stable over time by using data from more than 500 6th- through 12th-grade students in public school math classes. The authors used multiple regression analyses to assess the extent to which teacher perceptions predicted students' final math marks and standardized math-test scores from 6th through 12th grade. Control variables included 5 measures of student motivation and 2 measures of previous achievement. The results were consistent with both the dissipation and stability hypotheses. Implications for understanding the extent to which social perception creates social reality and the role of expectations in social problems are discussed.