Incidental image memorability

ABSTRACT

Recent studies using intentional memory tasks showed that images differ consistently in memorability. Here, we used a surprise recognition memory test. We asked how incidental encoding would affect the consistency and ranking of the memorability scores. If memorability is truly an intrinsic property of the image, one should not expect large differences between incidental and intentional conditions. On the other hand, participants might process images differently when not anticipating a memory test, yielding different results. The study list of our incidental memory task was identical to our previous, intentional study. Participants were to watch the images of this list carefully as they appeared on the screen one by one (free viewing); supposedly for a study about eye movements. Afterwards, a surprise recognition memory test was administered. Despite the free viewing instructions during the study phase, the resulting incidental image memorability scores still showed high levels of consistency across participants. In addition, the overlap between the incidental and intentional memorability ranking was large. These results provide further support for the idea of memorability as an intrinsic image property and add to its ecological validity, as people rarely memorise images intentionally.     

编码意识对注意促进效应的影响——基于R/K范式的研究

注意促进效应指学习阶段采用目标探测性质的二级任务,不仅不会降低同时呈现的背景信息的编码加工,反而会促进其记忆。为进一步探究对背景信息的编码意识是否会影响该效应,本研究设置了有意与无意两种编码条件,并引入“记得/知道”判断进一步将再认区分为回想和熟悉性。结果表明,无意编码下也会产生ABE,但不同的编码条件下,目标探测所促进的背景信息的编码加工存在差异。有意编码条件下,目标探测促进的更多是对背景信息的精细加工,而无意编码条件下,目标探测促进的更多是对背景信息的知觉加工。     

Recollections of things schematic: room schemas revisited

In 2 experiments, the authors examined the effects of schemas on the subjective experience of remembering. Participants entered a room that was set up to look like a graduate student's office under intentional or incidental learning conditions. They later took a recognition memory test that included making remember-know judgments. In Experiment 1, they were tested during the same session; in Experiment 2 they were tested either during the same session or after a 48-hr delay. Consistent with the authors' predictions, memory for atypical objects was especially likely to be experienced in the remember sense. In addition, false remember judgments rose dramatically after the 48-hr delay, especially for participants in the incidental learning condition. Results are discussed in terms of schema theory, fuzzy-trace theory, and the distinctiveness heuristic.     

The novelty effect: support for the Novelty-Encoding Hypothesis

In two experiments, we examined the "Novelty-Encoding Hypothesis" proposed by Tulving and Kroll (1995), suggesting that the encoding of online information into long-term memory is influenced by its novelty and that novelty increases recognition performance. In Phase 1 (familiarization phase), subjects participated in a standard memory experiment in which different types of materials (verbs and nouns) were studied under different encoding conditions (enactment and non-enactment) and were tested by an expected recognition test. In Phase 2 (critical phase), subjects evaluated the materials (both familiar materials which were encoded earlier in Phase 1, and novel materials which were not presented earlier in Phase 1) in a frequency judgment task and were given an unexpected recognition test. The results of both experiments showed that novel items were recognized better than familiar items. This result held true for both hit rates - false alarms and hit rates. The novelty effect was observed for different subjects (Swedish and Japanese), different materials (verbs and nouns; high frequency and low frequency), and different types of encoding in Phase 1 (enactment and non-enactment). These findings provide support for the "Novelty-Encoding Hypothesis" stating that the effect is based on the encoding of target items at the time of the critical study (Phase 2). A comparison between the present experiments and the Tulving and Kroll (1995), Dobbins, Kroll, Yonelinas & Liu (1998) and Greene (1999) studies suggests that the novelty effect is more pronounced under incidental encoding than under intentional encoding.     

Effects of Motivation on Young Children's Object Recall and Strategy Use

The study was designed to examine the effects of motivation on young children's recall for object names and early-emerging mnemonic activities. Seventy-two 4-year-old children were randomly assigned to 1 of 3 instructional conditions: incidental, intentional, or motivational. Each child was shown 10 small toy objects and provided a 90 s study period prior to recall. The children's mnemonic behaviors were videotaped for subsequent coding. The children in the incidental condition were instructed to simply look at the toys while children in the intentional and motivational condition were given explicit instructions to remember. The motivational group was also told that they could keep whichever toys they remembered. A recognition memory task was employed to examine the extent to which the stimuli were encoded during the study period. The children's recall memory did not vary as a function of instructional condition. Children's use of singular versus multiple strategies was calculated, along with a weighted summary score giving most weight to the participant's use of mature mnemonic strategies. Significant differences in strategy use were found, favoring the motivational condition. Significant positive correlations were found between the weighted summary scores and object recall, and the teacher ratings of mastery motivation and object recall. Mastery motivation was found to be unrelated to the strategic summary scores, failing to mediate strategic behaviors. The results suggest that when providing incentives to remember, children apparently engaged in more effortful mnemonic processing in order to remember the items, even though a greater number of items were not recalled.     

Subjective qualities of memories associated with the picture superiority effect in schizophrenia

Patients with schizophrenia (n = 24) matched with 24 normal subjects were presented with both words and pictures. On a recognition memory task, they were asked to give remember, know, or guess responses to items that were recognized on the basis of conscious recollection, familiarity, or guessing, respectively. Compared with normal subjects, patients exhibited a lower picture superiority effect selectively related to remember responses. Unlike normal subjects, they did not exhibit any word superiority effect in relation to guess responses; this explains why the overall picture superiority effect appeared to be intact. These results emphasize the need to take into account the subjective states of awareness when analyzing memory impairments in schizophrenia.     

Mixed-handedness advantages in episodic memory obtained under conditions of intentional learning extend to incidental learning

The existence of handedness differences in the retrieval of episodic memories is well-documented, but virtually all have been obtained under conditions of intentional learning. Two experiments are reported that extend the presence of such handedness differences to memory retrieval under conditions of incidental learning. Experiment 1 used Craik and Tulving’s (1975) classic levels-of-processing paradigm and obtained handedness differences under incidental and intentional conditions of deep processing, but not under conditions of shallow incidental processing. Experiment 2 looked at incidental memory for distracter items from a recognition memory task and again found a mixed-handed advantage. Results are discussed in terms of the relation between interhemispheric interaction, levels of processing, and episodic memory retrieval.     

Effects of dizocilpine (MK801) on olfactory span in rats

NMDA receptor antagonists interfere with learning and memory in some tasks, but not others. Some recent accounts have suggested that tasks placing demands on working memory are those most likely to be affected, and the present study tested this hypothesis. The purpose of the study was to adapt a recently developed procedure designed to test working memory capacity, the olfactory memory span task, for use in behavioral pharmacology and to then determine the effects of the NMDA receptor antagonist, dizocilpine (MK801) on performance in this task. Rats were trained in a non-match-to-sample procedure under conditions in which they had to remember an increasing number of olfactory stimuli as the session progressed. Simple olfactory discrimination trials were interspersed to provide a performance control. Effects of dizocilpine (.03, .10, .17, .3mg/kg) were determined after stable performances were obtained. Rats were able to sustain stable performances on both the span and simple discrimination tasks with average spans of about 10 items. Accuracy declined as the number of stimuli to remember increased, and dizocilpine impaired accuracy in a dose-dependent and memory-load dependent fashion. The finding that the effects of dizocilpine interacted with the number of stimuli to remember is generally consistent with hypotheses linking NMDA receptors and working memory processes.     

The self and recollective experience

Three experiments investigated the hypothesis that self-reference at encoding increases the probability of recollective experience in recognition memory. In all three experiments separate groups of subjects studied words naming personality traits. One group judged the self-relevance of the traits, the other groups performed orientating tasks low in self-reference. In a recognition test subjects first identified old items and then indicated which of these were accompanied by recollective experience ('remember' responses) and which were recognized on some other basis ('know' responses). No reliable differences in overall recognition performance between self-referent and semantic encoding tasks were observed. However, subjects who encoded trait adjectives with reference to the self produced reliably more remember responses and few know responses than subjects who had encoded the items in the low self-referent tasks. Experiment 1 demonstrated a self-reference effect in recognition accompanied by recollective experience after 1-hour retention interval, while Experiment 2 found this effect to persist over a 24-hour retention interval. Experiment 3 demonstrated that this self-reference effect is obtained under incidental as well as under intentional learning conditions. Taken together these findings demonstrate the importance of self-reference as a factor in determining the likelihood that recognition judgements will be accompanied by recollective experience.     

Parallel effects of aging and time pressure on memory for source: evidence from the spacing effect

Two experiments address the degree to which item memory-the ability to remember that a word has been presented-is dissociable from source memory, or the ability to remember the context of that word's presentation. Spacing (as opposed to massing) an item's two presentations leads young adults to endorse that item more often when they are instructed to recognize it and to reject it more often when they are instructed to exclude it. Old adults also enjoy beneficial effects of spacing when the item is to be recognized, but suffer detrimental effects of the spacing manipulation when the item is to be rejected: They falsely endorse the spaced to-be-rejected items more than the massed ones. This dissociation also obtains with young subjects under conditions of increased time pressure: Under normal decision conditions, the ability to endorse to-be-recognized items and to reject to-be-rejected items increases with spacing; under speeded conditions, the ability to reject the latter items decreases with spacing. The results support the notion that source memory is selectively impaired in the elderly and that it is difficult to access mnemonic information about source under time pressure.     

Cognitive effort and recollective experience in recognition memory

The difficulty of the cognitive operations required to process study items was manipulated in two experiments investigating recollective experience. In subsequent recognition tests, subjects indicated whether their recognition judgements for items processed in these tasks were based on recollection ("remember" responses) or on familiarity ("know" responses). In Experiment 1 target items were presented in the context of a category decision task. It was found that remember responses increased with the difficulty of the category decision. For positive instances, remember responses were greater for items of low instance frequency than for items of high instance frequency, while for negative instances remember responses were greater for items from similar categories than for items from dissimilar categories. These effects were not present in know responses. In Experiment 2, remember responses were more frequent when study items had been presented in the form of anagrams to be solved than when they had been presented in the form of words to be read aloud. The incidence of know responses was not affected by the format in which study items were presented. Source judgements were also more accurate when recognition was based on recollection. It is argued that the type of conscious awareness experienced during recognition is determined by the knowledge activated by items presented in the recognition test, which in turn is determined by the nature of the operations engaged at encoding.     

Movement and working memory: Patterns and positions in space

Five experiments are reported in which subjects were asked to remember short, visually presented sequences of whole body movement patterns, words, and spatial positions. The items were recalled in order in a memory span paradigm. During presentation of the items to be remembered subjects simply watched, or they carried out a concurrent activity involving articulatory suppression, movement to external spatial targets, or body-related movement. When the movement patterns to be remembered were familiar to subjects, movement span was not disrupted by articulatory suppression or movement to spatial targets but was disrupted by body-related movement. This movement suppression task, however, did not interfere with performance on a spatial span task or on verbal span. It is concluded that the memory for patterns of limb movement differs from memory for movement to spatial targets and that accounts of visuo-spatial processes in working memory involve the latter type of movement.     

The Role of Decision Processes in Conscious Recollection

Dual-process models of recognition memory posit a rapid retrieval process that produces a general sense of familiarity and a slower retrieval process that produces conscious recollections of prior experience. The remember / know paradigm has been used to study the subjective correlates of these two processes, with remember judgments assumed to index conscious recollection and know judgments assumed to index familiarity. Recently, a two-criterion signal detection model has been proposed as an alternative account of this paradigm. This model assumes only a single memory process with a criterion remember from know responses. This report presents an empirical test of the model's critical prediction that manipulations that influence criterion placement should influence both remember and know judgments. An experiment confirmed this prediction, demonstrating that subjects who were told that 70% of the test items were study items produced more remember and know responses than subjects who were told that 30% of the test items were study items.     

Intention to learn influences the word frequency effect in recall but not in recognition memory

Watkins, LeCompte, and Kim (2000) suggested that the recall advantage for rare words in mixed lists is due to a compensatory study strategy that favors the rare words. They found the advantage was reversed when rare and common words were studied under incidental learning conditions. The present study investigated the possibility that the rare-word advantage in recognition memory is also the result of a compensatory study strategy. Experiment 1 replicated the findings of Watkins et al. that the rare-word advantage in recall is eliminated under incidental learning conditions. In contrast, Experiment 2 showed that the rare-word advantage in recognition memory is maintained under both intentional and incidental learning conditions. Experiment 3 replicated the results of Experiments 1 and 2 using different stimuli and a different orienting task. Finally, Experiment 4 showed that the rare-word advantage in recognition is maintained with pure lists. These findings show that the rare-word advantage in recognition memory is not the result of a compensatory study strategy. Instead, rare words are encoded more distinctively than common words, irrespective of participants' intention to remember them.     

Misinformation revisited: New evidence on the suggestibility of memory

In three experiments involving a total of 623 subjects, a series of slides was shown depicting a student in a college bookstore stealing a variety of items. Next, subjects read a narrative describing the event that contained some misinformation and some neutral information about several critical details. Finally, subjects took a memory test. On this test, subjects were asked to list exemplars of 20 specified categories but were instructed not to list any items that they saw in the slide sequence. Analogous to Lindsay's (1990) adaptation of Jacoby, Woloshyn, and Kelley's (1989) “logic-ofopposition” paradigm, the tendency to report suggested details was thus set in opposition to the ability to remember the source of those details. Therefore, we interpreted failure to include suggested details as exemplars as evidence that subjects believed those details had been present in the event. Analysis of subjects' responses under opposition instructions suggests that some misled subjects come to genuinely believe that they saw items that, in reality, were only suggested to them.     

Incidental psychomotor learning: the effects of number of movements, practice, and rehearsal

Three experiments were conducted to investigate the effects of the number of movements, practice, and rehearsal on incidental and intentional psychomotor learning. incidental learners received no formal instructions to learn the central task to which they were exposed in a choice reaction-time task. The movements to the targets in this task comprised a movement sequence. Intentional learners also performed the choice reaction-time task but were additionally instructed to remember the order of the movements. Intentional learning was superior to incidental learning, unless rehearsal was disrupted; all three independent variables demonstrated similar functional effects under both learning conditions. It was concluded that incidental and intentional learning are not distinct types of learning; and that "intent to learn" per se is a significant factor in psychomotor learning only when it elicits beneficial cognitive processes such as rehearsal.     

复述、提取抑制与有意遗忘的实验研究

有意遗忘是关于记忆研究的另一种实验范式,对于在实验中出现的要求遗忘的学习项目的记忆成绩差于要求记忆的项目的结果,目前主人存在着两种理论解释：基于编码的理论和基于提取抑制的理论。该实验运用单字提示方式,采用控制较为严密的补笔测验方法和加入所谓的“无关项”,对有意遗忘的心理过程进行进一步的探讨,实验表明：在单了提示方式下,被试在进行有意遗忘的过程中,既对记忆项进行了有意的复述又对遗忘项产生了提取抑制。     

Exhaustive memory-scanning and familiarity discrimination: Separate mechanisms in recognition memory tasks

Experiment I was a yes-no recognition task with lists of one, two or four items to remember. Each item in the experiment appeared in only one list, and each list was presented only once. One group of subjects performed the task with complex pictures. Their results were incompatible with the hypothesis of exhaustive memory scanning, since the function relating “yes” response latency to list length was not parallel to but steeper than the function for “no” responses. Another group performed the task with words. Their results were consistent with exhaustive memory-scanning. Experiment II was a similar task in which the familiarity was varied of the test items to which the subjects had to respond “no”. That variation affected response latency with pictures but not with words. From these results and from a consideration of relevant neurological data, the hypothesis is advanced that familiarity discrimination and exhaustive memory-scanning are separate mechanisms.     

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.