Associative recognition processes are modulated by the semantic unitizability of memoranda

Although memory of episodic associations is generally considered to be recollective in nature, it has been suggested that when stimuli are experienced as a unit, familiarity processes might contribute to their subsequent associative recognition. To investigate the effect of semantic relatedness during episodic encoding on the processes of retrieval of associative information, we had participants interactively encode pairs of object pictures, vertically arranged so as to suggest a functional or configural relationship between them. Half the pairs were independently judged to be of related objects (e.g., a lamp over a table) and half of unrelated objects (e.g., a key-ring over an apple). At test, participants discriminated between intact, recombined, and new pairs while event related potentials (ERPs) were recorded. In an early ERP marker of retrieval success generally associated with familiarity processes, differences related to associative memory only emerged for related pairs, while differences associated with item memory emerged for both related and unrelated pairs. In contrast, in a later ERP effect associated with recollection, differences related to associative memory emerged for both related and unrelated pairs. These findings may indicate that retrieval of episodic associations formed between two semantically related visual stimuli can be supported by familiarity-related processes.     

Antimnemonic effects of schemas in young and older adults

Schema-consistent material that is aligned with an individual’s knowledge and experience is typically more memorable than abstract material. This effect is often more extreme in older adults and schema use can alleviate age deficits in memory. In three experiments, young and older adults completed memory tasks where the availability of schematic information was manipulated. Specifying nonobvious relations between to-be-remembered word pairs paradoxically hindered memory (Experiment 1). Highlighting relations within mixed lists of related and unrelated word pairs had no effect on memory for those pairs (Experiment 2). This occurred even though related word pairs were recalled better than unrelated word pairs, particularly for older adults. Revealing a schematic context in a memory task with abstract image segments also hindered memory performance, particularly for older adults (Experiment 3). The data show that processing schematic information can come with costs that offset mnemonic benefits associated with schema-consistent stimuli.     

A meta-analysis and systematic review of reactivity to judgements of learning

Judgements of learning (JoL) are often used in memory research as a means for assessing an individual’s metacognitive beliefs about their learning. JoL have been shown to reliably predict performance as well as learning behaviours and decisions . Participants may, however, modify their behaviour in response to performing JoL. There has, however, been little consensus as to the reliability and direction of the effect. We report on a meta-analyses that assesses the evidence that memory performance is reactive to JoL. The results indicate that overall providing JoL does not have a significant effect on memory performance (g?=?0.054, 95% CI ?0.027 to 0.135). However, sub-groups analysis showed that this effect depends on the nature of the stimuli to be recalled, with moderate positive reactivity observed for related word pairs (g?=?0.323, 95% CI 0.083 to 0.563) and word lists (g?=?0.384, 95% CI 0.146 to 0.622) but no reactivity when pairs were unrelated or a mixture of related and unrelated pairs. These results indicate that researchers should be aware that eliciting JoL may well influence participants’ underlying encoding processes, especially when using related word pairs or word lists.     

负性情绪对不同语义、空间关系联结记忆的影响

以负性项目-中性场景以及中性项目-中性场景组成的图片对为材料,通过操控项目-场景之间的语义联系和空间距离,考察了负性情绪对不同语义、空间关系联结记忆的影响。结果显示,当项目-场景空间距离较近时,无论项目-场景之间的语义是否相关,负性情绪始终不会影响项目-场景联结记忆;当项目-场景空间距离较远且语义不相关时,负性情绪会削弱项目-场景联结记忆;而当项目-场景空间距离较远且语义相关时,负性情绪会促进项目-场景联结记忆。结果表明,负性情绪对项目-场景联结记忆的影响会受到项目与场景之间语义关系和空间关系的调节,且语义关系在项目-场景空间距离较远时的作用更为突出。     

Perceived causality as a cue to temporal distance

The three experiments reported show that judgments of elapsed time between events depend on perceived causal relations between the events. Participants judged pairs of causally related events to occur closer together in time than pairs of causally unrelated events that were separated by the same actual time interval. The causality-time relationship was first demonstrated for time judgments about historical events. Causally related events were judged to be significantly closer together in time than causally unrelated events. In two subsequent experiments, perceived causality was manipulated by providing expert information and by asking the participants themselves to imagine causal relationships between the to-be-judged events. Again, substantial and reliable effects of perceived causality were obtained. Our results suggest that people use strength of perceived causality as a cue to infer temporal distance.     

Sentence production and working memory

Previous research has shown that subjects can make up sentences faster from related noun pairs than from unrelated pairs. Two experiments tested the proposal that for the related pairs a subject simply has to access stored information but must make up an appropriate relation for unrelated pairs. In both studies the subjects were asked on some trials to remember a digit preload while they made up their sentences. Contrary to an initial prediction, the latencies were faster rather than slower with a preload. Furthermore, a surprise recall test at the end of Experiment 2 showed that there was no difference in the recall of related and unrelated pairs. The results were interpreted as evidence that semantic work was necessary for both types of noun pairs, and that the subjects did less semantic work with a digit preload. This interpretation was further supported by the finding that with the preload the subjects produced a narrower range of semantic relations between the noun pairs.     

Monitoring memory errors: the influence of the veracity of retrieved information on the accuracy of judgements of learning

The current study examined the degree to which predictions of memory performance made immediately or at a delay are sensitive to confidently held memory illusions. Participants studied unrelated pairs of words and made judgements of learning (JOLs) for each item, either immediately or after a delay. Half of the unrelated pairs (deceptive items; e.g., nurse-dollar) had a semantically related competitor (e.g., doctor) that was easily accessible when given a test cue (e.g., nurse-do_ _ _r) and half had no semantically related competitor (control items; e.g., subject-dollar). Following the study phase, participants were administered a cued recall test. Results from Experiment 1 showed that memory performance was less accurate for deceptive compared with control items. In addition, delaying judgement improved the relative accuracy of JOLs for control items but not for deceptive items. Subsequent experiments explored the degree to which the relative accuracy of delayed JOLs for deceptive items improved as a result of a warning to ensure that retrieved memories were accurate (Experiment 2) and corrective feedback regarding the veracity of information retrieved prior to making a JOL (Experiment 3). In all, these data suggest that delayed JOLs may be largely insensitive to memory errors unless participants are provided with feedback regarding memory accuracy.     

Do people remember the temporal proximity of unrelated events?

In the present study, we tested the ability to remember the temporal proximity of two unrelated events that had happened within 7 days of one another. In three experiments, 1,909 participants judged whether pairs of news events, ranging in age from 1 month to about 6 years, had occurred within a week of each other and, if not, how far apart they had occurred. Some event pairs were related, and others were unrelated. For unrelated event pairs, same-week and separation judgments were very poor. Accuracy was much greater for both kinds of judgments when the events were related. Participants often guessed the separation of unrelated event pairs, whereas they frequently deduced the separation or remembered the proximity of related event pairs. For both types of pairs, the participants reported using the strength of the memories or the general period in which the events had occurred.     

Contextual influences of emotional speech prosody on face processing: How much is enough?

The influence of emotional prosody on the evaluation of emotional facial expressions was investigated in an event-related brain potential (ERP) study using a priming paradigm, the facial affective decision task. Emotional prosodic fragments of short (200-msec) and medium (400-msec) duration were presented as primes, followed by an emotionally related or unrelated facial expression (or facial grimace, which does not resemble an emotion). Participants judged whether or not the facial expression represented an emotion. ERP results revealed an N400-like differentiation for emotionally related prime-target pairs when compared with unrelated prime-target pairs. Faces preceded by prosodic primes of medium length led to a normal priming effect (larger negativity for unrelated than for related prime-target pairs), but the reverse ERP pattern (larger negativity for related than for unrelated prime-target pairs) was observed for faces preceded by short prosodic primes. These results demonstrate that brief exposure to prosodic cues can establish a meaningful emotional context that influences related facial processing; however, this context does not always lead to a processing advantage when prosodic information is very short in duration.     

Similarity, global matching, and judgments of frequency

In the test-pair similarity effect, forced-choice recognition is more accurate for similar test pairs, such as leopard-cheetah, than it is for unrelated test pairs, such as leopard-turnip. According to global matching models, this occurs because the retrieved familiarities of similar items are correlated. In the Minerva 2 model, global matching underlies frequency judgments as well as recognition memory. One implication of this model is that judged frequencies of similar items should be correlated. Another implication is that judgments of summed frequency for pairs of words (how many presentations were there of word1 and word2 combined?) should have higher variance when word1 and word2 are similar than when they are unrelated. These predictions were tested and confirmed in two experiments. A review of these and other results suggests that theories of recognition memory should also be applicable to frequency-judgment tasks.     

A rose by any other name is not the same: the role of orthographic knowledge in homophone confusion errors

Homophone confusion errors were examined in a series of 6 experiments. Across a variety of tasks, readers consistently made more errors on homophone trials than on control trials. These effects were established in Experiment 1 using a semantic-decision task in which participants judged whether pairs of words were related or unrelated. For both related and unrelated trials, error rates were higher for homophones as compared with controls. Results such as these have previously been taken as evidence for the role of phonology in lexical access and reading. However, differences in orthographic knowledge (more specifically, knowledge of spelling-to-meaning correspondences) across participants and homophone items significantly predicted homophone errors across all tasks. In addition, spelling tasks and multiple-choice questionnaires revealed differences in orthographic knowledge across participants and homophone items. Although these results do not rule out a role for phonology in lexical access, they indicate that homophone confusion errors may also be due to factors other than phonology.     

Monitoring memory errors: The influence of the veracity of retrieved information on the accuracy of judgements of learning

The current study examined the degree to which predictions of memory performance made immediately or at a delay are sensitive to confidently held memory illusions. Participants studied unrelated pairs of words and made judgements of learning (JOLs) for each item, either immediately or after a delay. Half of the unrelated pairs (deceptive items; e.g., nurse–dollar) had a semantically related competitor (e.g., doctor) that was easily accessible when given a test cue (e.g., nurse–do_ _ _r) and half had no semantically related competitor (control items; e.g., subject–dollar). Following the study phase, participants were administered a cued recall test. Results from Experiment 1 showed that memory performance was less accurate for deceptive compared with control items. In addition, delaying judgement improved the relative accuracy of JOLs for control items but not for deceptive items. Subsequent experiments explored the degree to which the relative accuracy of delayed JOLs for deceptive items improved as a result of a warning to ensure that retrieved memories were accurate (Experiment 2) and corrective feedback regarding the veracity of information retrieved prior to making a JOL (Experiment 3). In all, these data suggest that delayed JOLs may be largely insensitive to memory errors unless participants are provided with feedback regarding memory accuracy.     

Long-term memory of hierarchical relationships in free-living greylag geese

Animals may memorise spatial and social information for many months and even years. Here, we investigated long-term memory of hierarchically ordered relationships, where the position of a reward depended on the relationship of a stimulus relative to other stimuli in the hierarchy. Seventeen greylag geese (Anser anser) had been trained on discriminations between successive pairs of five or seven implicitly ordered colours, where the higher ranking colour in each pair was rewarded. Geese were re-tested on the task 2, 6 and 12 months after learning the dyadic colour relationships. They chose the correct colour above chance at all three points in time, whereby performance was better in colour pairs at the beginning or end of the colour series. Nonetheless, they also performed above chance on internal colour pairs, which is indicative of long-term memory for quantitative differences in associative strength and/or for relational information. There were no indications for a decline in performance over time, indicating that geese may remember dyadic relationships for at least 6 months and probably well over 1 year. Furthermore, performance in the memory task was unrelated to the individuals’ sex and their performance while initially learning the dyadic colour relationships. We discuss possible functions of this long-term memory in the social domain.     

Automatic activation of phonological information in reading: Evidence from the semantic relatedness decision task

A semantic relatedness decision task was used to investigate whether phonological recoding occurs automatically and whether it mediates lexical access in visual word recognition and reading. In this task, subjects read a pair of words and decided whether they were related or unrelated in meaning. In Experiment 1, unrelated word-homophone pairs (e.g., LION-BARE) and their visual controls (e.g., LION-BEAN) as well as related word pairs (e.g., FISH-NET) were presented. Homophone pairs were more likely to be judged as related or more slowly rejected as unrelated than their control pairs, suggesting phonological access of word meanings. In Experiment 2, word-pseudohomophone pairs (e.g., TABLE-CHARE) and their visual controls (e.g., TABLE-CHARK) as well as related and unrelated word pairs were presented. Pseudohomophone pairs were more likely to be judged as related or more slowly rejected as unrelated than their control pairs, again suggesting automatic phonological recoding in reading.     

When deaf signers read English: do written words activate their sign translations?

Deaf bilinguals for whom American Sign Language (ASL) is the first language and English is the second language judged the semantic relatedness of word pairs in English. Critically, a subset of both the semantically related and unrelated word pairs were selected such that the translations of the two English words also had related forms in ASL. Word pairs that were semantically related were judged more quickly when the form of the ASL translation was also similar whereas word pairs that were semantically unrelated were judged more slowly when the form of the ASL translation was similar. A control group of hearing bilinguals without any knowledge of ASL produced an entirely different pattern of results. Taken together, these results constitute the first demonstration that deaf readers activate the ASL translations of written words under conditions in which the translation is neither present perceptually nor required to perform the task.     

Decreased parahippocampal activity in associative priming: evidence from an event-related fMRI study

In recent years, there has been intense debate on the neural basis of associative priming, particularly on the role of the medial temporal lobe (MTL) in retrieving associative information without awareness. In this study, event-related fMRI was used while healthy subjects performed a perceptual identification task on briefly presented unrelated word pairs and an associative recognition memory task. Contamination of priming by explicit memory was successfully controlled, as associative priming and explicit memory were dissociated on the behavioral level. The fMRI results showed a functional dissociation within the MTL with respect to associative priming effects. The right parahippocampal cortex, but not the hippocampus, showed decreased activation for old vs. new pairs and old vs. recombined pairs (associative priming). The bilateral hippocampus and the right parahippocampal cortex were involved in explicit associative memory. These data provide evidence that subregions of the MTL participate in associative priming even when explicit involvement was controlled. Thus, different regions within the MTL play distinct roles in explicit and implicit associative memory.     

The structure of semantic person memory: evidence from semantic priming in person recognition

This paper reviews research on the structure of semantic person memory as examined with semantic priming. In this experimental paradigm, a familiarity decision on a target face or written name is usually faster when it is preceded by a related as compared to an unrelated prime. This effect has been shown to be relatively short lived and susceptible to interfering items. Moreover, semantic priming can cross stimulus domains, such that a written name can prime a target face and vice versa. However, it remains controversial whether representations of people are stored in associative networks based on co-occurrence, or in more abstract semantic categories. In line with prominent cognitive models of face recognition, which explain semantic priming by shared semantic information between prime and target, recent research demonstrated that priming could be obtained from purely categorically related, non-associated prime/target pairs. Although strategic processes, such as expectancy and retrospective matching likely contribute, there is also evidence for a non-strategic contribution to priming, presumably related to spreading activation. Finally, a semantic priming effect has been demonstrated in the N400 event-related potential (ERP) component, which may reflect facilitated access to semantic information. It is concluded that categorical relatedness is one organizing principle of semantic person memory.     

Collaborative inhibition in spatial memory retrieval

Collaborative inhibition refers to the finding that pairs of people working together to retrieve information from memory—a collaborative group—often retrieve fewer unique items than do nominal pairs, who retrieve individually but whose performance is pooled. Two experiments were designed to explore whether collaborative inhibition, which has heretofore been studied using traditional memory stimuli such as word lists, also characterizes spatial memory retrieval. In the present study, participants learned a layout of objects and then reconstructed the layout from memory, either individually or in pairs. The layouts created by collaborative pairs were more accurate than those created by individuals, but less accurate than those of nominal pairs, providing evidence for collaborative inhibition in spatial memory retrieval. Collaborative inhibition occurred when participants were allowed to dictate the order of object placement during reconstruction (Exp. 1), and also when object order was imposed by the experimenter (Exp. 2), which was intended to disrupt the retrieval processes of pairs as well as of individuals. Individual tests of perspective taking indicated that the underlying representations of pair members were no different than those of individuals; in all cases, spatial memories were organized around a reference frame aligned with the studied perspective. These results suggest that inhibition is caused by the product of group recall (i.e., seeing a partner’s object placement), not by the process of group recall (i.e., taking turns choosing an object to place). The present study has implications for how group performance on a collaborative spatial memory task may be optimized.     

Semantic and spatial factors in environmental memory

Reaction time (RT) in simple categorization tasks was predicted to vary as a function of the relatedness among environmental items. Differences in RT were interpreted as reflecting differences in proximity or strength of associations in environmental memory. In Experiment 1, subjects sorted names of familiar local buildings according to which seemed to go together. Hierarchical cluster analysis revealed major clusters whose members were related in function and, within these, smaller clusters of buildings related by spatial proximity. In Experiment 2, subjects responded “Yes” if two items on a trial were both local buildings and “No” if one item was local and one nonlocal. Subjects responded significantly faster to pairs taken from the cluster analysis that were related by both spatial proximity and function than they did to unrelated pairs or pairs related in function only. In Experiment 3, a free-associaton task identified related pairs of spatially proximate, functionally dissimilar environmental items. In Experiment 4, RTs to these pairs did not differ from RTs to pairs of spatially proximate, functionally dissimilar items or from RTs to pairs unrelated functionally and spatially. Spatial proximity and functional similarity together contribute to the organization in memory of buildings in the physical environment.     

The use of phonological information by good and poor readers in memory and reading tasks

There has been a recent debate about the utilization of phonological information by poor readers in both working memory and reading tasks. The purpose of the first experiment in this study was to examine whether the absence of phonological similarity effects in working memory reported in previous studies was due to inappropriate levels of task difficulty. Poor readers and their reading age controls were found to show a normal effect when the memory task was at an appropriate level of difficulty, but no effect when a large number of items had to be recalled. However, in a recognition memory task, the poor readers chose orthographically similar pairs, whereas the reading-age and chronological age controls chose phonologically similar pairs. The purpose of a final experiment was to determine whether or not the good and poor readers could be differentiated in terms of their reading strategies; both groups showed regularity effects in a naming task and pseudohomophone effects in a lexical decision task. However, although poor readers could read three-letter nonwords as well as their controls, they were significantly impaired in reading more complex one-syllable nonwords. It was concluded that poor readers may have a phonological dysfunction in some aspects of reading that is unrelated to whether or not they show phonological similarity effects in working memory. Impaired segmentation skills may underly their difficulties in both reading and nonreading tasks.