Availability and accessibility of information in the semantic memory of retarded and nonretarded adolescents

The availability of semantic information in storage and the accessibility of that information for retrieval were studied in retarded and nonretarded adolescents. In Experiment 1, 40 normal and 40 CA-equivalent (mean, 15 years) retarded subjects were required to retrieve information from semantic categories as well as to judge whether specific items were members of a given category. The results showed large IQ group differences on the retrieval task which could not be wholly accounted for by the items available in storage. Experiment 2 was designed as an attempt to remediate this retrieval deficit by introducing an organized retrieval plan consisting of subcategory cues. This organization facilitated retrieval as long as it was experimentally provided. Retrieval returned to its original level, however, when the cues were withdrawn. It was concluded that retarded persons had an accessibility deficit in addition to an availability deficit; one aspect of this accessibility deficit involved the failure to use spontaneously mnemonic strategies that were consistent with the semantic organization.     

Effects of text structure on the impact of heard news

In two experiments, audio re-recordings of texts transcribed from television newscasts were presented to independent groups, one group in each case hearing a ‘bulletin’ with original text structures (as broadcast), the other with key stories revised in accord with story-grammar notions and restoring chronological sequence in the narrative. In Experiment 1 the middle item in a three-story bulletin was subjected to text structure manipulation. After hearing the bulletin, subjects were questioned on information in the texts. In Experiment 2, subjects heard two stories with original or restructured text. In addition to being tested for retention they also rated for bias and quality of writing. Text restructuring improved learning in both studies, especially of information central to the main points of stories. In Experiment 2, such text revision also affected judgements of bias without altering assessment of writing quality. It is suggested that attention to assuring more coherent story structures in newscast texts could counter the problems of poor comprehension and perceived bias on the part of audiences which result from current production priorities and practices.     

Optimal learning strategies and their spontaneous use: The importance of task-appropriate processing

College students were given three verbal learning tasks to perform, with some subjects instructed to use a particular verbal or imaginal encoding strategy for all three tasks and other subjects not instructed to use any particular strategy. It was found that the relative effectiveness of the assigned encoding strategies varied as a function of the learning task. In addition, “uninstructed” subjects, for the most part, spontaneously employed strategies that produced recall comparable to that observed for subjects assigned the most effective strategy for a particular learning task. In Experiment 2, subjects were instructed to perform a different encoding strategy for each learning task. Subjects who were assigned the strategies in a “task-appropriate” fashion recalled more, in general, than subjects who were assigned the same strategies paired with the learning tasks in a haphazard fashion. Subjects not instructed to use a particular strategy again demonstrated relatively high recall and were found to vary processing across learning tasks. It was concluded that optimal learning for a range of tasks can require deployment of several semantic/elaborative strategies in a task-appropriate fashion. Furthermore, mature learners seem to spontaneously utilize semantic and imaginal strategies and do so task appropriately.     

Effects of discrete emotions on young children's suggestibility

Two experiments investigated the effects of sadness, anger, and happiness on 4- to 6-year-old children's memory and suggestibility concerning story events. In Experiment 1, children were presented with 3 interactive stories on a video monitor. The stories included protagonists who wanted to give the child a prize. After each story, the child completed a task to try to win the prize. The outcome of the child's effort was manipulated in order to elicit sadness, anger, or happiness. Children's emotions did not affect story recall, but children were more vulnerable to misleading questions about the stories when sad than when angry or happy. In Experiment 2, a story was presented and emotions were elicited using an autobiographical recall task. Children responded to misleading questions and then recalled the story for a different interviewer. Again, children's emotions did not affect the amount of story information recalled correctly, but sad children incorporated more information from misleading questions during recall than did angry or happy children. Sad children's greater suggestibility is discussed in terms of the differing problem-solving strategies associated with discrete emotions.     

The generality of the levels of processing hypothesis: An application to memory for chess positions

The generality of the levels of processing approach to memory was tested by using chess positions rather than words as stimuli. Experiment 1 compared recall following semantic orienting instructions (find the best move and determine which side has the advantage), formal orienting instructions (determine the number of pieces on light squares and the number of pieces on dark squares), and intentional learning instructions using 19 novice chess players as subjects. Formal orienting instructions produced poorer recall than did either semantic orienting or intentional learning instructions, which yielded similar levels of retention. These results were replicated in Experiment 2 with 16 tournament chess players. Chess rating correlated with recall .82 under semantic orienting instructions but only —.15 under formal orienting instructions. It was concluded that the levels of processing framework has applicability outside the area of verbal learning.     

Witnessing postevents does not change memory traces,but can affect their retrieval

The results of three experiments suggest that a memory trace for an event is not altered by witnessing similar events, but that postevents can interfere with its retrieval. On an immediate recall test, details from an original story (e.g. wrench) were recalled less often if a subsequent story mentioned a ‘screwdriver’ than if it did not. The interference effect occurred if people were asked to recall details fromboth stories (tool —— ——), but not if people were asked to recall primarily from the first story. Thus, the interference effect in immediate recall was averted if the target trace could be activated selectively (Experiments 1a and 1b). A more general interference effect was found after a day. Fewer targets from the original story were recalled if the second story was presented just before the test than if both stories occurred a day earlier. Thus, the second story interfered with recall only if it emphasized contextual retrieval cues that did not match the trace for the targets (Experiment 2). Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A Novel Demonstration of Enhanced Memory Associated with Emotional Arousal

The relationship between emotional arousal and long-term memory is addressed in two experiments in which subjects viewed either a relatively emotionally neutral short story (presented as a brief slide show) or a closely matched but more emotionally arousing story and were tested for retention of the story 2 weeks later. Experiment 1 provides essential replication of the results of Heuer and Reisberg (1990) and illustrates the common interpretive problem posed by the use of different stimuli (slides) in the neutral versus emotional stories. In Experiment 2, identical slides (and sequence) were used in both the neutral and arousal stores. Two different stories were created by varying the narration that accompanied each slide. In both experiments, subjects who viewed the arousal story both experienced a greater emotional reaction to the story than did the subjects who viewed the neutral story, and subsequently exhibited enhanced memory for the story. Subjects in Experiment 2 who viewed the arousal story also recalled more slides than did the subjects who viewed the neutral story. This effect was greatest for story phase 2, the phase in which the emotional slide narration occurred. Because this enhanced retention of the story slides cannot be explained by any differences in the slides themselves, the results provide new evidence to support the contention that emotional arousal influences long-term memory in normal human subjects.     

Analogical problem solving

The use of an analogy from a semantically distant domain to guide the problemsolving process was investigated. The representation of analogy in memory and processes involved in the use of analogies were discussed theoretically and explored in five experiments. In Experiment I oral protocols were used to examine the processes involved in solving a problem by analogy. In all experiments subjects who first read a story about a military problem and its solution tended to generate analogous solutions to a medical problem (Duncker's “radiation problem”), provided they were given a hint to use the story to help solve the problem. Transfer frequency was reduced when the problem presented in the military story was substantially disanalogous to the radiation problem, even though the solution illustrated in the story corresponded to an effective radiation solution (Experiment II). Subjects in Experiment III tended to generate analogous solutions to the radiation problem after providing their own solutions to the military problem. Subjects were able to retrieve the story from memory and use it to generate an analogous solution, even when the critical story had been memorized in the context of two distractor stories (Experiment IV). However, when no hint to consider the story was given, frequency of analogous solutions decreased markedly. This decrease in transfer occurred when the story analogy was presented in a recall task along with distractor stories (Experiment IV), when it was presented alone, and when it was presented in between two attempts to solve the problem (Experiment V). Component processes and strategic variations in analogical problem solving were discussed. Issues related to noticing analogies and accessing them in memory were also examined, as was the relationship of analogical reasoning to other cognitive tasks.     

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.     

Can survival processing enhance story memory? Testing the generalizability of the adaptive memory framework

Research from the adaptive memory framework shows that thinking about words in terms of their survival value in an incidental learning task enhances their free recall relative to other semantic encoding strategies and intentional learning (Nairne, Pandeirada, & Thompson, 2008). We found similar results. When participants used incidental survival encoding for a list of words (e.g., "Will this object enhance my survival if I were stranded in the grasslands of a foreign land?"), they produced better free recall on a surprise test than did participants who intentionally tried to remember those words (Experiment 1). We also found this survival processing advantage when the words were presented within the context of a survival or neutral story (Experiment 2). However, this advantage did not extent to memory for a story's factual content, regardless of whether the participants were tested by cued recall (Experiment 3) or free recall (Experiments 4-5). Listening to a story for understanding under intentional or incidental learning conditions was just as good as survival processing for remembering story content. The functionalist approach to thinking about memory as an evolutionary adaptation designed to solve reproductive fitness problems provides a different theoretical framework for research, but it is not yet clear if survival processing has general applicability or is effective only for processing discrete stimuli in terms of fitness-relevant scenarios from our past.     

Effects of encoding instructions and retrieval cuing on recall in Korsakoff patients

The relationship between the depth of encoding a word and its subsequent recall, either cued or noncued, was investigated in this study. In Experiment 1, Korsakoff subjects and alcoholic controls were shown a categorized word list under one of three different encoding instructions: (1) nonsemantic, that is, detecting the presence or absence of the letter “e” in each word, (2)semantic, that is, assigning words to their correct taxonomic category, and (3) no encoding instructions. Semantic encoding instructions resulted in higher recall for both diagnostic groups than the other instructions. In Experiment 2, subjects were again assigned to one of the three encoding instructions as in Experiment 1, but all groups received cues (category labels) at the time of recall. Cuing increased recall for all but the group receiving instructions to encode nonsemantically. Experiment 3 was a replication of the previous experiments. The results indicated that Korsakoff subjects were capable of encoding semantically without specific instructions to do so but were impaired in the ability to generate retrieval cues at the time of recall.     

Strategies for learning proper names: expanding retrieval practice,meaning and imagery

Name learning strategies including retrieval practice, semantic associations and imagery were compared in laboratory‐based and real‐life experiments. Experiments 1 and 2 studied expanding retrieval practice and a semantic association strategy as memory improvement techniques for learning proper names. Participants either retrieved or restudied names on the same, expanding schedule. After a short, filled interval, cued recall of names was about 250% better following retrieval than restudy and 200% better with than without semantic associations. Together, the techniques improved recall by 300–400%. In Experiment 3, retrieval practice was compared with an imagery mnemonic for name learning under real‐life social conditions: Participants sought to learn the names of people they met at a party. Retrieval practice produced 50% higher recall after 24–72 hours but the imagery mnemonic was no more effective than non‐directed instructions to learn names. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Text comprehension in aphasia

The semantic and pragmatic strategies in the comprehension of spoken texts are investigated in four subgroups of aphasic patients and in normal and brain-damaged controls. Short texts of similar linguistic structure were read to the subjects, who were required to choose the picture, from a multiple choice set of five, that was appropriate to the story. Besides a picture showing the main event of the story, one picture depicted the literal sense of a metaphorical comment, and the others misrepresented semantic functions expressed in the text. With respect to these types of responses, both aphasics and controls exhibited the same pattern of reaction. It is concluded that the redundancy of texts makes up for the difficulties aphasics have in comprehending isolated words and sentences.     

Semantic and visual memory codes in learning disabled readers

Two experiments investigated whether learning disabled readers' impaired recall is due to multiple coding deficiencies. In Experiment 1, learning disabled and skilled readers viewed nonsense pictures without names or with either relevant or irrelevant names with respect to the distinctive characteristics of the picture. Both types of names improved recall of nondisabled readers, while learning disabled readers exhibited better recall for unnamed pictures. No significant difference in recall was found between name training (relevant, irrelevant) conditions within reading groups. In Experiment 2, both reading groups participated in recall training for complex visual forms labeled with unrelated words, hierarchically related words, or without labels. A subsequent reproduction transfer task showed a facilitation in performance in skilled readers due to labeling, with learning disabled readers exhibiting better reproduction for unnamed pictures. Measures of output organization (clustering) indicated that recall is related to the development of superordinate categories. The results suggest that learning disabled children's reading difficulties are due to an inability to activate a semantic representation that interconnects visual and verbal codes.     

文本阅读过程中跨文本背景信息激活与整合研究

研究文本阅读过程中跨文本背景信息激活与整合模式。实验1探讨被试在阅读分为两个故事的每篇材料时,后面故事的信息能否通过共振激活前面故事的信息;实验2进一步验证读者是否将分为两个故事的材料作为一个文本来阅读。结果表明,被试是将分为两个故事的材料作为两个文本来阅读,并且阅读后一个故事时可以跨文本激活前一个故事的信息。本研究证实了跨文本的共振激活,深化了O’brien等人的研究。     

成员关系对协作提取成绩的影响

当人们与搭档组成社会群体一起协作讨论某些已经发生的事件或经验时, 该社会群体中的成员关系对协作提取成绩的影响仍不明确。本研究通过两项实验, 分别使用语词词单和情景故事作为实验材料, 考察成员关系(包括关系类型和关系时长)对协作提取成绩的影响。研究结果表明, 当记忆的材料为语词词单时, 青年陌生组出现了协作抑制; 而当记忆的材料为情景故事时, 青年夫妻和老年夫妻组均出现了协作促进。此外, 老年夫妻在协作提取情景故事的过程中使用的有效交流策略更多, 且这些有效交流策略的使用与更高的协作提取成绩有关。该结果支持了具有长时亲密关系的老年夫妻之间的“交互记忆系统”对协作促进的关键作用, 为理解成员关系对协作提取成绩的影响提供了全面的证据。     

Retrieving texts from an external store: the effects of an explanatory context and of semantic fit between text and address

Summary External-information storage may reduce the load on human memory. But if information is preserved in an external store the task of retrieving information from that store puts new demands on memory. This creates a trade-off between internal and external storage. One of the prerequisites for external retrieval is learning an address. In this study, the trade-off between internal and external retrieval is exemplified by contrasting the memorization of written texts with the memorization of addresses under which these texts are stored in a computer file. In Experiment 1 Ss were tested for the retention of addresses. In Experiment 2 they were tested for the retention of texts, but had the choice between memorizing the texts and memorizing an address under which the texts were available. Independent variables were the availability of an explanatory context, and the semantic fit between address and text. An explanatory context improved address learning in Experiment 1 and unaided recall in Experiment 2. It did not influence the utilization of addresses as tested in Experiment 2. The semantic fit between address and text had a considerable impact on both the learning and the utilization of addresses. Whereas some subjects were assigned standard addresses, others generated their own addresses. Self-generated addresses had effects similar to standard addresses selected for high semantic fit. It is suggested that learning an external address involves an internal representation of the material stored under that address.     

Metamemory for narrative text

In this experiment, we investigated metamemory for narrative text passages. Subjects read two stories and made memory predictions for the idea units in one and rated the importance of ideas in the other. Half of the subjects were asked to recall the story immediately after reading the passages and half were asked to recall 1 week later; half received passages with single inconsistent idea units and half received passages with corresponding consistent idea units. All subjects made confidence judgments about the accuracy of their recall. Subjects’ prediction ratings were related to recall, as shown by significant prediction accuracy quotients. Importance ratings were related to recall on the delayed test but not on the immediate test. Memory prediction ratings predicted recall better than did importance ratings. The absolute level of memory predictions did not differ with delay, but subjects did give higher confidence judgments on an immediate than on a delayed test. Subjects recalled the inconsistent idea better than the consistent idea for one story but not for the other. For both stories, subjects predicted that they would remember the inconsistent ideas better, suggesting that they have avon Restorff-type view, rather than a schema view, of memory. We conclude that subjects can predict their memory for the idea units in narrative text.     

Transfer of conditioned appetitive stimuli to conditioned aversive excitatory and inhibitory stimuli

The transfer of Pavlovian appetitive stimuli to Pavlovian aversive stimuli was examined in three experiments. In Experiment 1, rats received appetitive (Ap) conditioning designed to establish a flashing-light stimulus as either a CS+, CSo, or CS? for food, or to maintain it as a novel stimulus for US-alone subjects. Then, the stimulus was employed as a signal for weak shock in conditioned-emotional-response (CER) training. Both acquisition and extinction results showed that the ApCS+ facilitated and the ApCS? retarded aversive excitatory conditioning relative to the ApCSo and US-alone controls. Experiment 2 replicated the findings of Experiment 1 with both a moderate and a severe shock in CER training. In Experiment 3, different groups received the same appetitive conditioning as before, but to a flashing-light stimulus which was then employed as a signal for no shock in CER training. The ApCS? facilitated and the ApCS+ retarded aversive inhibitory conditioning relative to ApCSo and US-alone controls. Collectively, these findings establish that, in Pavlovian conditioning, transfer of an appetitive CS to an aversive excitor or inhibitor is facilitated by maintaining the initial conditioning contingency.     

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.