Comparison and combination of recall and Background Interference Procedures for the Bender-Gestalt Test with brain-damaged and schizophrenic patients.

The Bender-Gestalt Test was administered under standard, recall, Background Interference Procedure (BIP), and BIP-recall conditions to 20 brain-damaged and 20 schizophrenic male inpatients. Individual recall, BIP, and BIP-recall scores differentiated between the groups prior to controlling for IQ, but only recall and BIP-recall continued to discriminate once IQ was held constant. The use of difference scores corrected for standard copy performance (base level) resulted in improved diagnostic discrimination compared to difference scores alone. However, this procedure also produced a substantial multiple correlation with IQ and a consequent loss of group differentiation for the BIP difference score, while failing to yield an appreciable increase in predictive accuracy over individual scores for recall and BIP-recall. Nonetheless, a significant effect emerged independently of both recall and IQ for the BIP-recall score, suggesting that the BIP hypothesis may have merit within the context of memory functioning.     

Sequential search processes in long-term memory

In an experiment employing the symbol-element recognition task (Mohs, Wescourt, & Atkinson, 1975), subjects first learned six lists consisting of four words (elements) each. Each list was associated with a unique consonant (symbol). Subsequently, on each of a series of test trials, subjects were presented with one, two, or four symbol-element pairs. A positive response was required if all test words were correctly paired with their associated consonants and a negative response if any one test word was incorrectly paired with a consonant. Of primary concern was the way reaction time (RT) varied with number of pairs presented, the type of response required, and, on negative trials, the position of the mismatched pair in the test display. RT increased with the number of pairs presented on a trial and the increase was greater for positive than for negative trials. For negative pair trials, RT increased with the distance of the mismatched pair from the top of the test display. On negative trials in which the top pair in the test display was the mismatched pair, RT increased with the total number of pairs presented on the trial. A serial, probabilistic order of processing model is proposed to account for these results, and applications of the model to other paradigms are discussed.