Effects of incidental pictorial and verbal adjuncts on text learning

In this study, college students read and studied texts on historical figures in psychology, which were supplemented by drawings and/or brief biographies of these persons. In Experiment 1, a 2 x 2 between-groups design was conducted in which students received one adjunct with each text, both adjuncts, or neither. In Experiment 2, a single group of students received a within-subjects manipulation of the same adjunct conditions. In the between-groups comparison, students receiving biographies learned less of the target text passages, with the group receiving illustrations and biographies performing least accurately. In the within-subject conditions, texts accompanied by an illustration were better learned, with these students doing best on the text with both picture and biography. The results suggest that adjuncts may emphasize some texts, at the expense of learning from the other texts, but that too much adjunct material interferes with the learning of the target passages.     

Using a paired-associate learning task to assess parent-child phenotypic similarity

The fact of uncertain paternity has led some researchers to hypothesize that children should more closely resemble their fathers than their mothers. The evidence in support of this hypothesis is mixed, partly because the procedures used to measure perceived phenotypic similarity may not be sensitive enough to detect small effects and partly because comparisons are made between fathers and mothers rather than random control groups. In the present experiment the viability of using a paired-associate learning paradigm to investigate parent-child phenotypic similarity is demonstrated using 15 stimulus sets of colored photographs picturing two adults and one child. Using a 2 x 2 between subjects analysis of variance for total errors across learning trials, evidence indicated genetic relatedness for both mothers and fathers influences perceived resemblance and that association of male facial features with those of children, whether paternal or not, are learned more quickly than female facial features. While the significance of genetic relatedness to facial similarity was expected, the overall sex difference was not. However, the additive combination of these variables, genetic relatedness and maleness may explain why children seem to more closely resemble their fathers.     

On obtaining episodic priming in a lexical decision task following paired-associate learning

In four experiments, subjects made lexical (word-nonword) decisions to target letter strings after studying paired associates. In this lexical decision test, word targets previously studied as response terms in the paired associates were preceded at a 150-ms and/or 950-ms stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) by one of various subsets of the following six types of primes: a neutral (XXX or ready) prime, a semantically unrelated word prime episodically related to the target through its having been previously studied in the same pair, a semantically related word prime previously studied in a pair with some other unrelated word, a semantically unrelated word prime previously studied in a pair with some other unrelated word, a nonstudied semantically related word prime, and a nonstudied semantically unrelated word prime. At the 950-ms SOA, facilitation of lexical decisions produced by the episodically related primes was greater in test lists in which there were no 150-ms SOA trials intermixed, no previously studied semantically related primes, and no studied nonword targets. At the 150-ms SOA, facilitation from episodic priming was greater in test lists in which there were no semantically related primes and all studied word targets and no studied nonword targets. Facilitation effects from semantically related primes were small in magnitude and occurred inconsistently. Discussion focused on the implications these results have for the episodic-semantic memory distinction and the automaticity of episodic and semantic priming effects.     

The production effect in paired-associate learning: Benefits for item and associative information

In five experiments, we extended the production effect—better memory for items said aloud than for items read silently—to paired-associate learning, the goal being to explore whether production enhances associative information in addition to enhancing item information. In Experiments 1 and 2, we used a semantic-relatedness task in addition to the production manipulation and found no evidence of a production effect, whether the measure was cued recall or item recognition. Experiment 3 showed that the semantic-relatedness task had overshadowed the production effect; the effect was present when the semantic-relatedness task was removed, again whether cued recall or item recognition was the measure. Experiments 4 and 5 provided further evidence that production can enhance recall for word pairs and, using an associate recognition test with intact versus rearranged pairs, indicated that production may also enhance associative information. That production boosts memory for both types of information is considered in terms of distinctive encoding.