Test-expectancy and semantic-organization effects in recall and recognition

Two experiments examined whether people expecting recall are, compared with people expecting recognition, more likely to form associations between semantically related words in a list of to-be-remembered words. People were induced to expect either a recall or a recognition test on a critical list that included three conditions of semantic organization. Words in the unrelated (U) condition were semantically unrelated to all other words on the list, whereas words in the two related conditions were semantically related to one other list word. In the related-spaced (R-S) condition, the two related words appeared in input positions separated by 5-11 other items, whereas in the related-massed (R-M) condition, they appeared in adjacent input positions. Different groups received either an expected or unexpected recall (Experiment 1) or recognition (Experiment 2) test on the critical list. In both recall and recognition, (l) people expecting recall did better than those expecting recognition, (2) memory was worst for U words, next best for R-S words, and best for R-M words, and (3) the test-expectancy and semantic-organization effects were additive. A standardizedz-score measure of category dependency in memory indicated that (1) people expecting recall were not more likely than those expecting recognition to form interitem associations between the related words and (2) recognition was category dependent, but less so than recall. Within the framework of Anderson and Bower’s (1972, 1974) theory, these data indicate that, compared with people expecting recognition, those expecting recall are not more likely to form interitem associations by tagging more pathways connecting semantically related nodes but, rather, are more likely to tag the nodes themselves. The implications that semantic-organization effects in recognition have for the Anderson-Bower theory were also discussed.     

The role of imagery in recognition memory for sentences

The effects of sentence imageability were examined in a test of continuous recognition memory following meaningful orienting tasks which emphasized verbal or imagery encoding. The results showed that distractors changed in syntactic form were more accurately identified for abstract than for concrete sentences, while memory for meaning was equally accurate for both sentence types. The orienting task manipulation did not affect this pattern of results. These data extend previous reports (Begg and Paivio 1969) by demonstrating qualitative differences in memory for concrete and abstract sentences when full comprehension of the stimulus material is required. The results are consistent with the dual coding hypothesis (Paivio 1971) but not with propositional models of memory (Anderson and Bower 1973).     

Models for within-proposition representation tested by cued recall

A model is presented to account for the data from incremental cuing experiments that have been carried out to identify the representation of propositions in memory. In such experiments subjects first learn a list of sentences and are afterward cued for recall with words from the learned sentences. The model proposed distinguishes between a memory structure and stimulus and response processes. The all-or-none tendency in the data is captured by a Gestalt-like memory code. The model is compared with the stochastic theory of Anderson and Bower and the fragmentation hypothesis of Jones.     

Remembering environmental sounds: The role of verbalization at input

Two experiments investigated the role of verbalization in memory for environmental sounds. Experiment i extended earlier research (Bower & Holyoak, 1973) showing that sound recognition is highly dependent upon consistent verbal interpretation at input and test. While such a finding implies an important role for verbalization, Experiment 2 suggested that verbalization is not the only efficacious strategy for encoding environmental sounds. Recognition after presentation of sounds was shown to differ qualitatively from recognition after presentation of sounds accompanied with interpretative verbal labels and from recognition after presentation of verbal labels alone. The results also suggest that encoding physical information about sounds is of greater importance for sound recognition than for verbal free recall, and that verbalization is of greater importance for free recall than for recognition. Several alternative frameworks for the results are presented, and separate retrieval and discrimination processes in recognition are proposed.     

Episodic Memory in Adult Age and Effects of Sibship Size and Birth Order: Longitudinal Data

This study examined the effects of sibship size and birth order on episodic memory performance in adulthood and old age. Participants were 1,141 healthy individuals aged 35–80 years, who took part in a longitudinal project on age, health, and memory. Episodic memory measurements over a 5-year interval included tests of recognition (recognition of faces, family names, first names, and nouns) and tests of recall (free recall of sentences, free recall and cued recall of nouns, and recall of activities). Results showed significant effects for both recall and recognition, that is, the smaller the sibship size is for an individual and the earlier born, the better memory performance. These results demonstrate that the effects of sibship size and birth order previously shown in children and adolescents (Belmont and Marolla, Science 182:1096–1101, 1973; Zajonc and Markus, Psych Rev 82:74–88, 1975; Zajonc, Am Psychol 56:490–496, 2001) are robust over time and hold over a large adult range.     

Word associations are formed incidentally during sentential semantic integration

Sentential context facilitates the incidental formation of word associations (e.g., Prior, A., & Bentin, S. (2003). Incidental formation of episodic associations: the importance of sentential context. Memory and Cognition, 31(2), 306-316). The present study explored the mechanism of this effect. In two experiments, unrelated word pairs were embedded in coherent or semantically anomalous sentences. Anomalous sentences included either a local or a global anomaly. During an incidental study phase, participants performed a sentence categorization task. The strength of the incidental associations formed between two nouns jointly appearing in a sentence was probed by gauging their influence on subsequent paired-associate learning and cued recall in Experiment 1, and by assessing their associative priming effect in a subsequent unexpected explicit recognition test for single words in Experiment 2. In both experiments, significant associative memory was found for noun pairs studied in coherent sentences but not for those appearing in anomalous sentences, regardless of anomaly type. In a sentence rating task, global anomalies yielded less plausible sentences than local anomalies, however both types of anomalies were equally detrimental to the sentence integration process. We suggest that sentence constituents are incidentally associated during sentence processing, particularly as a result of sentence integration and the consolidation of a mental model.     

Hemispheric alpha asymmetries and behavioral responses of aphasic and normal subjects for the recall and recognition of active, passive, and negative sentences

The hemispheric alpha asymmetries of a group of normal males, a group of normal females, and a group of aphasic patients (fluent and dysfluent) were examined with electroencephalographic (EEG) techniques under memory conditions of recall and recognition of active, passive, and negative sentences. Aphasic patients, regardless of classification, showed right hemispheric alpha suppression across memory conditions and sentence types. Both normal groups were found to have greater left hemispheric alpha suppression for the recall memory condition and greater right hemispheric alpha suppression for the recognition memory condition (males significantly more than females). The aphasic subjects performed better on recognition tasks compared to recalled tasks and active sentences compared to transformed sentences. Results are discussed as providing evidence of the aphasic subjects' greater dependency on information processing resources of the right hemisphere in the recovery of language function. The findings are also discussed as providing support for a multiple-resources model of information processing.     

Examining Visual-Verbal Associations in Children with and Without Reading Disorder

The purpose of this study was to investigate verbal working memory processing both before and after providing semantically elaborated training sentences designed to enhance memory for symbol-word (visual-verbal) pairs. Abilities of 20 children diagnosed with Reading Disorder (RD) and 20 age-matched peers who were normally achieving in reading (NA) were compared (M = 10 years old). Results demonstrated RD children experienced significantly more difficulties on measures of complex auditory-verbal working memory than their NA peers. The best predictor of reading performance was word recall ability measured after students were provided with semantic training sentences. Findings have important implications for identifying young children with potential reading impairment.     

Role of stimulus modality in rating ordinary and derived word strings.

Four types of word strings were presented either visually or auditorily and rated for grammaticality and meaningfulness. The string types were normal sentences, syntactically deviant strings, semantically deviant strings, and strings both syntactically and semantically deviant. Results for the auditory mode conform to expectations based upon the linguistic competence of the native speaker but results for the visual mode do not. The results are discussed in terms of the inferiority of visual over auditory short-term memory for verbal information and attentional strategies.     

Source memory enhancement for emotional words

The influence of emotional stimuli on source memory was investigated by using emotionally valenced words. The words were colored blue or yellow (Experiment 1) or surrounded by a blue or yellow frame (Experiment 2). Participants were asked to associate the words with the colors. In both experiments, emotionally valenced words elicited enhanced free recall compared with nonvalenced words; however, recognition memory was not affected. Source memory for the associated color was also enhanced for emotional words, suggesting that even memory for contextual information is benefited by emotional stimuli. This effect was not due to the ease of semantic clustering of emotional words because semantically related words were not associated with enhanced source memory, despite enhanced recall (Experiment 3). It is suggested that enhancement resulted from facilitated arousal or attention, which may act to increase organization processes important for source memory.     

The role of integration in recognition failure and action memory

In three experiments, we studied memory for action events with respect to exceptions from the Tulving-Wiseman function demonstrated in experiments on recognition failure of recallable words. In Experiment 1, we examined exceptions of poor integration in a regular recognition failure condition (i.e., recognition of targets without contextual cues, followed by recall of targets in the presence of contextual cues). In Experiment 2, we examined exceptions of cue overlap in which subjects also had access to the information of contextual cues at recognition test. In Experiment 3, we attempted to equate the levels of recognition across the action and verbal encoding. In addition, the cue overlap and no-cue overlap conditions were studied in a within-subjects design. Results from the three experiments indicated that encoding enactment (episodic integration) and conceptual integration (semantic integration) are related to each other. As a consequence of this relationship, there is a larger independence between recognition and recall of well-integrated items with encoding enactment. On the other hand, for the poorly integrated items without encoding enactment, there is a larger dependence between recognition and recall. Even in the cue overlap condition, where there is a case of large dependence between recognition and recall, the same pattern of data was observed. The results are discussed in terms of an episodic integration view of encoding enactment.     

Is there a memory for sentences?

A critical discussion of the model of sentence memory which enjoyed greatest popularity in the psycholinguistic research of the sixties, namely the model based on the deep-structure-plus-tag hypothesis of sentence memory, is presented together with the results of an experiment on prompted recall for sentences with various intervals after presentation and with two types of instructions. This experiment contributed to show that immediate memory for sentences can be affected by appropriate instructions, and that after a short time after presentation only the main semantic information of the sentences is recalled. An alternative model is presented, based on the notion of storage of the meaningful elements of the sentences in a rather abstract form, and of recall as a reconstructive process to produce new sentences. The results of two new experiments on sentence memory, the first a free and prompted recall experiment with children, the second a recognition memory study with adolescents, are then presented and discussed in relation to the model.     

Developmental differences in remembering sentences after integrative or selective semantic processing

Fifth graders (age: 10 years) and college undergraduates performed one of four different semantic orienting activities on a series of agent-action-object sentences. Afterwards all subjects received a memory test combining recognition for whole sentences with cued recall for component agents, actions, and objects. Overall levels of both recall and recognition varied with the orienting activities. Relative recallability of agents, actions, and objects varied with orienting activity as well. Recognition performance improved with grade level but recall did not. The interaction between type of memory test and grade level was taken to indicate that organization of material in memory increases during adolescence even when the total amount of material stored does not.     

Speech event related potentials reflect linguistic content and processing level

Amplitude changes in the auditory event related response reflect differences in linguistic content and the level of processing of spoken sentences. Thus, the neurophysiology of the cognitive processes underlying speech perception can be evaluated by noninvasive techniques. Semantically correct, semantically incorrect, and grammatically incorrect sentences were processed either semantically or syntactically by 25 subjects while their EEGs were recorded. The amplitude of the P250 component to each word varied with processing level. A slow positive wave appeared after semantically correct sentences regardless of the linguistic processing level. N480 and P780 components were observed following words which made the sentences incorrect.     

A propositional theory of recognition memory

This paper modifies the Anderson and Bower (1972) theory of recognition memory for words. A propositional representation is outlined for the contextual information underlying word recognition. Logical arguments are offered for preferring this representation over the undifferentiated associative representation used earlier. The propositional representation is used to interpret effects of verbal context upon recognition memory. The implications of these context effects are considered for two-process models of recall and recognition.     

Imagery effects and semantic similarity in sentence recognition memory

The idea that subjects often use imagery to discriminate semantically similar sentences was tested in three experiments. In the first experiment, subjects heard subject-verb-object sentences in the context of either a comprehension task or an image-generation task. Their memory for the sentences was tested using a two-alternative forced-choice recognition test in which different types of distractor sentence were used. A sentence semantically similar to the target sentence was one type; a sentence with the same subject and object nouns as the target sentence, but dissimilar in meaning, was another type; and a sentence similar in meaning to one of the stimulus sentences, but not to the target sentence, was a third type. The results showed that the image-generation instructions enhanced later recognition performance, but only for semantically similar test items. A second experiment showed that this finding only holds for high-imagery sentences containing concrete noun concepts. A third experiment demonstrated that the enhanced recognition performance could not be accounted for in terms of a semantic model of test-item discrimination. Collectively, the results were interpreted as providing evidence for the notion that subjects discriminate the semantically similar test items by elaborating the sentence encoding through image processing.     

Facilitation and impairment of event memory produced by photograph review

Selectively reviewing some items from a larger set of previously learned items increases memory for the items that are reviewed but may also be accompanied by a cost: Memory for the nonreviewed items may be impaired relative to cases where no review occurs at all. This cost to nonreviewed items has primarily been shown in contexts of verbal list learning and in situations where the reviewed and nonreviewed items are categorically or semantically related. Using a more naturalistic impetus to selective review--photographs relating to previously experienced events--we assessed whether the memory of older and younger adults for unrelated complex activities that they themselves had performed was also impaired due to nonreview. Both younger and older adults showed impaired memory for nonreviewed activities when tested with free recall (Experiment 1), but not when tested with recognition or cued recall (Experiment 2). If mitigating retrieval cues are unavailable, selective review may impair memory for nonreviewed everyday events.