Encoding specificity manipulations do affect retrieval from memory

In a recent article, P.A. Higham (2002) [Strong cues are not necessarily weak: Thomson and Tulving (1970) and the encoding specificity principle revisited. Memory &Cognition, 30, 67-80] proposed a new way to analyze cued recall performance in terms of three separable aspects of memory (retrieval, monitoring, and report bias) by comparing performance under both free-report and forced-report instructions. He used this method to derive estimates of these aspects of memory in an encoding specificity experiment similar to that reported by D.M. Thomson and E. Tulving (1970) [Associative encoding and retrieval: weak and strong cues. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 86, 255-262]. Under forced-report instructions, the encoding specificity manipulation did not affect performance. Higham concluded that the manipulation affected monitoring and report bias, but not retrieval. I argue that this interpretation of the results is problematic because the Thomson and Tulving paradigm is confounded, and show in three experiments using a more appropriate design that encoding specificity manipulations do affect performance in forced-report cued recall. Because in Higham's framework forced-report performance provides a measure of retrieval that is uncontaminated by monitoring and report bias it is concluded that encoding specificity manipulations do affect retrieval from memory.     

Encoding specificity in short-term memory for movement information: a comment on Lee and Hirota (1980)

Lee and Hirota (1980) claimed to provide evidence for the encoding specificity principle for movement information. I argue that their interpretations are confounded by methodological and theoretical factors. I further suggest that their findings are compatible with generation-recognition models of memory retrieval and thus, their study does not provide an adequate test for investigating encoding-retrieval relations. Finally, I discuss the problems and dangers of borrowing theoretical concepts from verbal domain and applying them indiscriminately to the motor domain.     

Variation in working memory capacity and episodic memory: Examining the importance of encoding specificity

In the present study, we examined the extent to which encoding specificity influences the relation between individual differences in working memory capacity (WMC) and episodic recall. Participants performed a paired associates cued recall task in which a rhyme or a semantic judgment was made during encoding. During recall participants were presented with the cue word along with either a rhyme or semantic cue. Across both rhyme and semantic conditions, encoding and retrieval conditions either matched or mismatched. When encoding and retrieval conditions matched, high WMC individuals outperformed low WMC individuals. When encoding and retrieval conditions mismatched, high and low WMC individuals performed equivalently. Importantly, this occurred because high WMC individuals were hurt more than low WMC individuals when conditions mismatched. These results demonstrate the importance of encoding specificity in the relation between WMC and episodic recall as well as of unifying prior work that has demonstrated that high WMC individuals are hurt more in some recall conditions than are low WMC individuals.     

Semantic effects in encoding specificity: A levels of processing approach

The semantic characteristics of study and retrieval contexts were varied in a cued recall paradigm. In the first experiment, ambiguous words (homographs) were modified at input and output by identical adjectives or by different adjectives reflecting either the same meaning or a different meaning. The results supported the principle of encoding specificity (Thomson & Tulving, 1970), but only for identical input and output cues; the results showed no facilitation of similar semantic context on recall. The second experiment used a depth-of-processing manipulation to show that the results predicted by a semantic interpretation of encoding specificity are obtainable, but only when subjects are induced to process deeply. The implications of these data for the generality of encoding specificity are discussed.     

Areas of concern and sources of advice for Israeli adolescents.

This study explored the concerns of Israeli adolescents, who grow up in a socially, politically, and economically highly stressed environment. Ninth- and eleventh-grade students (N = 1,645) completed a questionnaire in which they indicated three important problems they had recently experienced. Content analysis identified six major categories of concerns (listed in descending order of occurrence): studies and career, social "I," personal "I," existential issues, army or national service, and health and drugs. Younger adolescents were found to be more concerned with problems involving studies and career and with issues pertaining to the social "I"; older adolescents were more concerned with existential issues and army or national service. Boys were more concerned with existential issues, army or national service, studies and career, and the social "I." Girls were more concerned with issues pertaining to the personal "I." Three major sources of advice were identified: friends, parents, and brothers/sisters.     

Face recognition: Effects of study to test maintenance and change of photographic mode and pose

Facial recognition performance was examined as a function of changes in the target between initial exposure (study) and a subsequent recognition test. Photographic mode (colour vs. black and white) was changed in Experiments 1 and 2 and pose (front vs. profile) was changed in Experiment 2. The predictions of three information quantity models and of encoding specificity were contrasted. The information hypotheses predict that colour photographs will be better recognized when presented in colour than in black and white; the more specific predictions differ depending on the modes at study and test. Encoding specificity predicts recognition performance will be better when study and test modes are the same. The results of Experiment 1 showed that performance was highest when pictures remained in the same mode from study to test, and decreased when the mode was changed. Change of mode was particularly detrimental when the faces were studied in black and white and tested in colour. Experiment 2 showed a pattern of results also in accord with encoding specificity. The photographic mode and pose effects did not interact. Change of pose had a greater effect than change of photographic mode. Experiment 2 did not replicate the transformation asymmetry found in Experiment 1. The results indicate that for facial recognition memory, change lowers recognition, but the magnitude of the effect depends on the kind of change.     

Transfer of Learning Across Cultural Practices

Although Baranes, Perry, and Stigler (this issue) address important aspects of the interplay between learning in school and out-of-school settings, I found the more intriguing issues linked to some unanalyzed presuppositions about the character of children's out-of-school mathematics and transfer of learning between settings. In the following commentary, I sketch some interpretive problems that arise when these issues are considered, and I point to the need for embedding the study in a larger conceptual framework.     

The moral status of animals and their use in research: a philosophical review.

In this article I offer a philosophical review of (1) leading theories of the moral status of animals, (2) pivotal theoretical issues on which more progress needs to be made, and (3) applications to the setting of animal research. Such an examination demonstrates, I believe, that the practical implications of leading theories converge far more than might be expected. In addition, I hope this review helps to clarify particularly troubling issues that remain so they can be treated adequately.     

Tests of the generality of the principle of encoding specificity

Two empirical tests of the principle of encoding specificity are reported. In Experiment I, the normative strength of the cues presented on the input and on the recall trial was varied factorially. To lessen the emphasis on strictly associative learning, only half the items were cued in each phase of the study-recall cycle. Recall was higher when the cues remained the same than when they changed. However, regardless of the condition of input cuing, strong output cues were substantially more effective than weak ones. In Experiment II, the to-be-remembered words were shown in the presence of weak cues on the input trial. Recognition in the context of strong extralist cues was compared with recall to the original input cues. On the test of cued recognition, the target words were either generated by the subjects as free associates or presented to them as items on a test constructed by the experimenter. Contrary to previous findings, recall was not found to be superior to recognition. The phenomena of cue-dependent forgetting that have been interpreted as evidence for the principle of encoding specificity appear to have limited generality.     

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.     

Critique of Sohlberg and Birgegard's (2003) report of persistent complex effects of subliminal psychodynamic activation messages

Silverman in 1983 held that the unconscious encoding of MOMMY AND I ARE ONE triggers a fantasy of symbiotic union with the good mother of early childhood. In contrast, later Sohlberg and Birgegard contended that MOMMY AND I triggers associations to similarity issues with mother, associations that may be influenced by the words following MOMMY AND I. Although their messages produce, lmost invariably, no reportable sensation, Sohlberg and Birgegard claimed strong evidence for the influence of such messages on perception, motivation, and memory, 10 ays poststimulation and suggestive evidence 4 mo. later. Their findings are not compelling evidence for these claims; and there is no evidence that any result was associated with the unconscious encoding of the psychodynamic meaning of a multiword message.     

Organisation and Recall in Verbal Tasks and in Subject-performed Tasks

In memory for subject-performed tasks (SPTs), subjects encode a list of simple action phrases (e.g. "lift the pen", "open the book") by performing these actions during learning. Performing tasks has proved to be a much more efficient type of encoding than verbal tasks (VTs), in which subjects only listen to the action phrases in order to memorise them. It is assumed that good item-specific encoding after SPTs plays an important role in the SPT effect. The role of relational encoding for the SPT effect is less clear, as is the question of whether SPT encoding is automatic or controlled. Two experiments were conducted to address these issues. Subjects learned lists which were categorically structured in VTs and SPTs, under focal attention or divided attention. The results indicated that relational encoding does not differ between VTs and SPTs, and that free recall is impaired in both cases by divided attention, more so in VTs than in SPTs. It is concluded that the SPT effect is primarily based on item-specific information rather than on relational information, and that VTs are more dependent than SPTs on active encoding.     

Encoding specificity in the recall of pictures and words in children and adults

In this study, the modality of the retrieval cues (pictures or words) was varied in a cued recall task to determine how second and fourth grade children and college adults encode words (Experiment 1) and pictures (Experiment 2). According to the assumptions of the encoding specificity principle, cue modality should affect recall only to the degree to which subjects focus on modality specific (sensory) rather than nonmodality specific (semantic) information in stimuli. In both experiments, the results showed progressively smaller encoding specificity effects with increasing age. To ensure that differences in encoding activity were responsible for these effects, comparisons were made of recall patterns under intentional learn conditions, and under incidental conceptual and sensory orienting conditions. The recall patterns of the children in the conceptual orienting condition were similar to the adult patterns in the learn condition, and the adult recall patterns in the sensory orienting conditions were similar to those of the children in the learn conditions. These results suggest that there are developmental differences in encoding the sensory and semantic information in stimuli that may result from differences in the efficiency with which the semantic information in stimuli is processed. The results suggest that young children typically encode stimuli in a fashion that stresses the sensory aspects of the stimuli, and that recall suffers as a result.     

When Subjectivism Matters

Abstract: In this article I consider when the question of whether entities exist subjectively (only in the minds of subjects) or objectively (in themselves, independently of the minds of subjects) is important, both theoretically and practically. I argue that when it comes to the metaphysics underlying three types of moral questions, broadly conceived, the subjectivity question does not matter practically, although it is widely thought to matter. Subjectivism does not matter in these moral questions in the same way(s) it matters in some nonmoral metaphysical issues. The moral questions I consider are the meaning of life, normative ethics, and the free‐will problem. The nonmoral issues I address are the existence of God, the traditional mind/body problem, and personal identity. I explain the difference by noting that certain metaphysical issues on the fact side of the fact/value distinction impinge on persons' lives more prominently than do the metaphysics behind the three moral questions.     

Specificity of auditory implicit and explicit memory: Is perceptual priming for environmental sounds exemplar specific?

Previous research (Stuart & Jones, 1995) has suggested that identification of environmental sounds may be mediated by abstract sound recognition units. This article reports the results of four repetition priming experiments that find evidence to the contrary. Participants attempted to identify environmental sounds from the initial sound stems (Experiments 1 and 2) or when the sounds were embedded in white noise (Experiments 3 and 4). Repetition of an identical exemplar sound led to more priming than did exposure to a different exemplar, provided that the perceptual difference between the two different exemplars was sufficiently large. Such an exemplar specificity effect was independent of the depth of prior encoding. A similar exemplar specificity effect was also found in explicit stem-cued recall (Experiments 1 and 2) and recognition (Experiment 3). Depth of encoding dissociated performance on tests of repetition priming and explicit memory. These results suggest that a significant amount of specific information is remembered, both implicitly and explicitly, to characterize individual exemplars of a sound category.     

Semantic knowledge as a determinant of developmental differences in recall

Two experiments examined the possible role of children's semantic knowledge and their ability to encode it in a cued-recall test. Performance of children aged 7, 10, and 13 was observed in encoding specificity tasks, which used homographs as the to-be-remembered words (TBRs).In Experiment I, children of all ages performed better when the output cue words prompted similar meanings to the input cues, than when output and input meanings were incompatible. In Experiment II, all children were required to recall identical items, but younger children, owing to lack of knowledge, were unable to encode pairs comprising input and TBR words incompatibly with output cues. In such circumstances, younger subjects outperformed older subjects. When input and output cues were incompatible for all ages, recall increased with age, possibly due to older childrens' using more effective retrieval strategies.The findings indicate that semantic encoding influenced recall performance at each age. This suggests that age differences in memory are due to differences in the amount of semantic knowledge a child possesses for encoding and cuing and not to capacity differences.     

编码与提取干扰对内隐和外显记忆的非对称性影响

以往研究表明在外显记忆中,编码与提取加工存在着非对称性,但在内隐记忆中,二者的关系并不明确,因此实验采用“学习-再认”范式,考察在编码或提取中分别附加的干扰任务对词汇判断或再认产生的影响。结果证实编码与提取干扰对内隐或外显记忆都具有非对称性的影响,但又存在着差异,即编码干扰会导致随后外显记忆成绩显著减少,而提取干扰对其影响较小,相反,编码干扰对随后内隐测验中启动效应的影响较小,但提取干扰会破坏启动效应,从而为内隐记忆和外显记忆的分离提供了进一步的证据     

To and from philosophy — Discussions with Gödel and Wittgenstein

I propose to sketch my views on several aspects of the philosophy of mathematics that I take to be especially relevant to philosophy as a whole. The relevance of my discussion would, I think, become more evident, if the reader keeps in mind the function of (the philosophy of) mathematics in philosophy in providing us with more transparent aspects of general issues. I shall consider: (1) three familiar examples; (2) logic and our conceptual frame; (3) communal agreement and objective certainty; (4) the transcommunal universality of mathematics; (5) the big jump to the potential infinite; (6) the reconciliation of local creation with the hypothesis of discovery; (7) Platonism as realism plus conceptualism; (8) foundational studies and mathematical practice; and (9) the decomposition of philosophical disagreements. The views of Gödel and Wittgenstein are emphasized in order to add specificity to the discussions.     

Perceptual specificity and implicit auditory priming in older and younger adults.

Age differences in perceptual specificity for implicit auditory priming were examined in 3 experiments. All 3 experiments began with a study phase during which participants rated words based on perceptual (shallow encoding) or semantic (deep encoding) attributes. After the study phase, participants were asked to identify filtered versions of repeated and new words (implicit test) and then to make old/new recognition judgments (explicit test). In contrast to earlier findings (D. L. Schacter, B. Church, & D. M. Osowiecki, 1994), older and younger adults were equally sensitive to study-to-test changes in speaking rate (Experiment 1), fundamental frequency (Experiment 2), and voice (Experiment 3). Explicit memory, in contrast, was significantly poorer for older adults but was minimally affected by changes in surface features. Findings from the study are discussed with respect to their implications for establishing the mechanisms mediating perceptual specificity and for their importance in understanding age-related changes in implicit memory.     

In the eye of the beholder? Universality and cultural specificity in the expression and perception of emotion

Do members of different cultures express (or “encode”) emotions in the same fashion? How well can members of distinct cultures recognize (or “decode”) each other's emotion expressions? The question of cultural universality versus specificity in emotional expression has been a hot topic of debate for more than half a century, but, despite a sizeable amount of empirical research produced to date, no convincing answers have emerged. We suggest that this unsatisfactory state of affairs is due largely to a lack of concern with the precise mechanisms involved in emotion expression and perception, and propose to use a modified Brunswikian lens model as an appropriate framework for research in this area. On this basis we provide a comprehensive review of the existing literature and point to research paradigms that are likely to provide the evidence required to resolve the debate on universality vs. cultural specificity of emotional expression. Applying this fresh perspective, our analysis reveals that, given the paucity of pertinent data, no firm conclusions can be drawn on actual expression (encoding) patterns across cultures (although there appear to be more similarities than differences), but that there is compelling evidence for intercultural continuity in decoding, or recognition, ability. We also note a growing body of research on the notion of ingroup advantage due to expression “dialects,” above and beyond the general encoding or decoding patterns. We furthermore suggest that these empirical patterns could be explained by both universality in the underlying mechanisms and cultural specificity in the input to, and the regulation of, these expression and perception mechanisms. Overall, more evidence is needed, both to further elucidate these mechanisms and to inventory the patterns of cultural effects. We strongly recommend using more solid conceptual and theoretical perspectives, as well as more ecologically valid approaches, in designing future studies in emotion expression and perception research.