Focused memory search in fact retrieval

Several studies of fact retrieval have shown that the more facts a person learns about a concept, the longer it takes him or her to retrieve any of these facts. This result has been interpreted to mean that retrieval of a fact about a concept involves a search of all facts stored in memory with that concept. In the present study, it is suggested that retrieval involves not an unfocused search of all facts stored with a concept, but rather a focused memory search that examines relevant stored facts and ignores irrelevant information. This argument is supported by three experiments in which subjects first learned simple facts (e.g., “The banker likes horses”) and then made speeded true-false decisions for test probes le.g., “The banker likes elephants”). Specifically, results suggest that facts stored with a concept may be organized into subsets. For example, a person’s knowledge about Richard Nixon might be organized into subsets concerning Nixon’s resignation, his trips to China, his family, and so on. The data further suggest that a person attempting to retrieve a fact about a concept (e.g., the name of Nixon’s wife) may simply decide which subset is most likely to contain the desired fact (e.g., the subset concerning Nixon’s family) and search that subset. If the sought-for fact is found in this subset, the search process terminates. If, however, the desired information is not located, other subsets of facts may be searched before the retrieval attempt is given up. The notion that memory search focuses on relevant stored facts and ignores irrelevant information may help to explain why experts (i.e., people who know a large number of facts about a topic) do not experience great difficulty in retrieving facts in their areas of expertise.     

Memory retrieval and suppression: the inhibition of situation models

When people retrieve newly learned facts on a recognition test, they are often increasingly slowed by the number of other newly learned facts that have a concept in common with the probed fact. This is called the fan effect. Assuming that people are using situation models of the learned information, the author considers whether the inhibition of competing representations is one of the processes involved in the fan effect. Evidence was found for negative priming of related but irrelevant situation models, thus supporting the idea that the inhibition of highly related memory traces is used in long-term memory retrieval. As such, this is a form of retrieval-based inhibition.     

Tracing memory-structure activation during person judgments

The purpose of the reported research was twofold: (a) to introduce a procedure for measuring concept activation during memory-based decisions and (b) to employ the procedure to investigate memory-activation processes in social judgments. Recent research has focused on subjects' reliance on memory for earlier inferred categorizations as the basis for judgments about persons. However, subjects have also been shown to rely on memory for factual information when making such decisions. To more fully understand how social judgments are made, methods are needed that are capable of tracing concept activation during the judgment process. The present study introduces a procedure that relies on probe recognition speed as a measure of concept activation. The procedure is used to examine alternative models of how subjects activate categorical and event memory when making contemplative impression judgments (i.e., judgments that they have to justify). The results favor a dependent memory-activation model that hypothesizes subjects activate both facts and earlier categorizations that they have made about a person when making subsequent memory-based judgments. Memory-structure activation was dependent in that facts relevant to forming the early categorizations were more likely to be activated in the service of a judgment than category-irrelevant facts. Advantages and limitations of the probe procedure as a measure of memory-structure activation during decisions are discussed.     

The representation and integration in memory of spatial and nonspatial information

A series of experiments investigated whether people could integrate nonspatial information about an object with their knowledge of the object's location in space. In Experiments 1 and 3, subjects learned the locations of cities on a fictitious road map; in Experiments 2, 4, and 5, subjects were already familiar with the locations of buildings on a campus. The subjects then learned facts about the cities on the maps or the buildings on the campus. The question of interest was whether or not these nonspatial facts would be integrated in memory with the spatial knowledge. After learning the facts, subjects were given a location-judgment test in which they had to decide whether an object was in one region of the space or another. Knowledge integration was assessed by comparing levels of performance in two conditions: (a) when a city or a building name was primed by a fact about a neighboring city or building, and (b) when a city or a building name was primed by a fact about a distant city or building. Results showed that responses in Condition a were faster or more accurate, or both faster and more accurate, than responses in Condition b. These results indicate that the spatial and nonspatial information were encoded in a common memory representation.     

The role of elaborations in memory for prose

In two experiments, subjects read stories and were asked to make plausibility judgments about statements with respect to the stories. The inherent plausibility of the queried statements, the amount of attention subjects focused on information necessary for making a judgment, and the interval between presentation of the relevant story information and the test probe were varied orthogonally. The pattern of latencies obtained to make these judgments cast strong doubt on the notion that question answering is typically accomplished by searching for a single fact in memory. Rather, people seem to retrieve any relevant, available information and then use this to compute whether a statement seems true. The independent variables in these experiments can be interpreted according to whether they affect the retrieval or the judgment phase.     

Differential fan effect and attentional focus

As people study more facts about a concept, it takes longer to retrieve a particular fact about that concept. This fan effect (Anderson, 1974) has been attributed to competition among associations to a concept. Alternatively, the mental-model theory (Radvansky & Zacks, 1991) suggests that the fan effect disappears when the related concepts are organized into a single mental model. In the present study, attentional focus was manipulated to affect the mental model to be constructed. One group of participants focused on the person dimension of personlocation pairs, whereas the other group focused on the location dimension. The result showed that the fan effect with the focused dimension was greater than the fan effect with the nonfocused dimension, which is contrary to the mental-model theory. The number of associations with a concept is indeed crucial during retrieval, and the importance of the information seems to be accentuated with attentional focus.     

Memory Errors Reveal a Bias to Spontaneously Generalize to Categories

Much evidence suggests that, from a young age, humans are able to generalize information learned about a subset of a category to the category itself. Here, we propose that—beyond simply being able to perform such generalizations—people are biased to generalize to categories, such that they routinely make spontaneous, implicit category generalizations from information that licenses such generalizations. To demonstrate the existence of this bias, we asked participants to perform a task in which category generalizations would distract from the main goal of the task, leading to a characteristic pattern of errors. Specifically, participants were asked to memorize two types of novel facts: quantified facts about sets of kind members (e.g., facts about all or many stups) and generic facts about entire kinds (e.g., facts about zorbs as a kind). Moreover, half of the facts concerned properties that are typically generalizable to an animal kind (e.g., eating fruits and vegetables), and half concerned properties that are typically more idiosyncratic (e.g., getting mud in their hair). We predicted that—because of the hypothesized bias—participants would spontaneously generalize the quantified facts to the corresponding kinds, and would do so more frequently for the facts about generalizable (rather than idiosyncratic) properties. In turn, these generalizations would lead to a higher rate of quantified‐to‐generic memory errors for the generalizable properties. The results of four experiments (N = 449) supported this prediction. Moreover, the same generalizable‐versus‐idiosyncratic difference in memory errors occurred even under cognitive load, which suggests that the hypothesized bias operates unnoticed in the background, requiring few cognitive resources. In sum, this evidence suggests the presence of a powerful bias to draw generalizations about kinds.     

Context, categorization, and recall: The “change-of-standard” effect

A psycholinguistically based conception of the relation among context, categorization, and memory is tested by examining what happens to people's memory of an object when the object is initially categorized in terms of the context in which it appears, but, when the object is later recalled, this context is no longer salient. Subjects read about the sentencing decisions of a target trial judge in the context of other trial judges who consistently gave either higher sentences or lower sentences than the target judge. As predicted, subjects tended to categorize the target judge as “lenient” in the former, harsh context condition, and as “harsh” in the latter, lenient context condition. A week later, subjects read about the sentencing decisions of some additional judges, and then recalled the sentencing decisions of the target judge they had read about the week before. Across the two sessions, either a harsh, moderate, or lenient category norm for judges' sentencing decisions was established by having subjects read about decisions that involved either high, medium, or low sentences, respectively. The results indicated that subjects recalled the target judge's decisions by interpreting their prior categorization of his behavior in terms of the category norm established across the two sessions rather than the original context. Thus, subjects who were exposed to the same target in the same circumstances, and initially categorized the target in the same way, nevertheless remembered his behavior differently if their category norm was different at the moment of recall. Other types of “change of standard” and their implications for human judgment and memory are discussed.     

Memory accessibility shapes explanation: Testing key claims of the inherence heuristic account

People understand the world by constructing explanations for what they observe. It is thus important to identify the cognitive processes underlying these judgments. According to a recent proposal, everyday explanations are often constructed heuristically: Because people need to generate explanations on a moment-by-moment basis, they cannot perform an exhaustive search through the space of possible reasons, but may instead use the information that is most easily accessible in memory (Cimpian & Salomon 2014a, b). In the present research, we tested two key claims of this proposal that have so far not been investigated. First, we tested whether—as previously hypothesized—the information about an entity that is most accessible in memory tends to consist of inherent or intrinsic facts about that entity, rather than extrinsic (contextual, historical, etc.) facts about it (Studies 1 and 2). Second, we tested the implications of this difference in the memory accessibility of inherent versus extrinsic facts for the process of generating explanations: Does the fact that inherent facts are more accessible than relevant extrinsic facts give rise to an inherence bias in the content of the explanations generated (Studies 3 and 4)? The findings supported the proposal that everyday explanations are generated in part via a heuristic process that relies on easily accessible—and often inherent—information from memory.     

Prospective object search in dogs: mixed evidence for knowledge of <Emphasis Type="Italic">What</Emphasis> and <Emphasis Type="Italic">Where</Emphasis>

We investigated whether two dogs that had been specially trained to retrieve objects by their names were able to integrate information about the identity (What) as well as the location (Where) of those objects so that they could plan their search accordingly. In a first study, two sets of objects were placed in two separate rooms and subjects were asked to retrieve the objects, one after the other. Both dogs remembered the identity of the objects as they reliably retrieved the correct objects. One of the dogs was also able to integrate information about the object’s location as he chose the correct location in which the object had been placed. Further investigation of the second dog’s behavior revealed that she followed a more stereotyped search strategy. Despite this variation in performance, this study provides evidence for the memory of What and Where in a domestic dog and shows the prospective use of such information in a search task.     

Retrieval of propositional information from long-term memory

Three experiments are reported in which subjects learn propositions like A hippie is in the park. The experiments manipulate the number of such propositions involving a particular person (e.g., hippie) or a particular location (e.g., park). After learning the material, subjects are asked to judge whether particular probe propositions are from the study set. Times to make these judgments about probe propositions increase with the number of study propositions involving the person or location used in the probe proposition. A model is presented which assumes a subject simultaneously accesses memory from all concepts in a probe proposition and serially searches through all study propositions involving each concept. Search of memory terminates as soon as one search process from a concept finds the probe proposition or exhausts the study propositions attached to that concept.     

EVIDENCE FOR RELATIONAL-CODING IN CONCEPT FORMATION,AND A NOTE ON THE EFFECTS OF FEEDBACK*

The purpose of the present paper was to determine whether people encode relations among component features in experience, or whether they simply encode the occurrence of features separately as independent cues. This has become a major issue in theories of concept-formation at the present time. It is suggested in this paper that two problems have particularly obstructed a clear resolution of the issue. The first is a consistent failure to check to what extent training materials actually contain relations among features, before results are declared in favour of a particular model. The second is the use, hitherto, of only informal methods of analysing such relations, where they exist, and of predicting from them the structure of the concept. This paper describes an expression for measuring the overall relations among feature-variables in concept training materials. It also introduces a methodology, using log-linear models, for predicting concept structures on the basis of those relations. An experiment combined these methods to assess whether subjects abstracted relations among features, or whether they abstracted independent cues. A subsidiary aim was to assess how feedback, based on independent-cue information, during learning, affected the construction of the concept. The results came out strongly in favour of relational-coding and there was some evidence that feedback based on independent-cues retarded concept formation.     

Situation models,propositions, and the fan effect

According to theories of language comprehension, people can construct multiple levels of representation: the surface form, the propositional text base, and the situation model. In this study, I looked at how the referential nature of memory probes affects the experience of retrieval interference. All the subjects memorized sentences about objects in locations (e.g., “The potted palm is in the hotel”). When memory probes were sentences and, therefore, referential and most closely associated with the situation model level, no interference was observed during retrieval for information that could be integrated into a common situation model. In contrast, interference was observed in such cases when the memory probes were concept pairs (POTTED PALM-HOTEL) and hence not directly referential. This is interpreted to mean that nonreferential memory probes involve surface form and text base representations more than do referential sentence probes.     

Improving metacognitive accuracy: How failing to retrieve practice items reduces overconfidence

People often exhibit inaccurate metacognitive monitoring. For example, overconfidence occurs when people judge that they will remember more information on a future test then they actually do. The present experiments examined whether a small number of retrieval practice opportunities would improve participants’ metacognitive accuracy by reducing overconfidence. Participants studied Lithuanian–English paired associates and predicted their performance on an upcoming memory test. Then they attempted to retrieve one or more practice items (or none in the control condition) and made a second prediction. Experiment 1 showed that failing to retrieve a single practice item lead to improved subsequent performance predictions – participants became less overconfident. Experiment 2 directly manipulated retrieval failure and showed that again failure to retrieve a single practice item significantly improved subsequent predictions, relative to when participants successfully retrieved the practice item. Finally, Experiment 3 showed that additional retrieval practice opportunities reduced overconfidence and improved prediction accuracy.     

Knowing our Reasons: Distinctive Self-Knowledge of Why We Hold Our Attitudes and Perform Actions

This paper argues that subjects at least sometimes learn why they hold an attitude or perform an action in a distinctive first-personal way, i.e., they learn of those facts in a manner that mere observers cannot. Subjects have this first-personal self-knowledge in virtue of first-personal self-knowledge of the reasons for which they hold an attitude or perform an action—their motivating reasons. This paper focusses on one’s reasons for holding an attitude. So, it is not just that subjects have distinctive access to the fact that they, say, believe that q; they also have distinctive access to the fact that they believe that p for the reason that p. I argue for this position contra the prevailing orthodoxy. Philosophers and psychologists often deny that subjects have distinctive access to why they hold their attitudes. Indeed, even many of those who claim that subjects can use a special method to learn that they have a given attitude deny that this method provides knowledge of why one holds that attitude.     

Values and Science: An Argument for Why They Cannot Be Separated

A distinction between facts and values is often assumed when people in the modern West talk about science. The biologist Stephen Gould, for example, famously argued that religion covers questions of meaning and moral value, but science deals with empirical facts. This paper challenges the traditional fact/value distinction by questioning the presuppositions about science upon which it depends. It begins by describing the origins of the fact/value distinction in the Scientific Revolution and then gives three reasons for the inseparability of facts and values in scientific inquiry, drawing upon themes from the “practice turn” in recent scholarship on the sciences.     

Memory for memory

Participants read short passages and 1 day later they answered questions via telephone about the passages (text facts) and about the experimental session (event facts). They were telephoned again 6 weeks later and answered the same questions about text and event facts. They also answered new questions about whether they remembered the answers they had given in the initial telephone interview (recall for prior memory performance). Although participants accurately remembered the majority of past memory successes, they were poor at remembering past memory failures. After being provided with the correct answer and tested again, the participants' performance improved somewhat, especially for memory failures. This suggests that some errors in recalling past forgetting might have been due to correctly remembering the answer previously given, but failing to realize that it had been wrong. These findings have implications for a variety of situations in which people are queried about past memory performance.