The distribution of subjective memory strength: List strength and response bias

Models of recognition memory assume that memory decisions are based partially on the subjective strength of the test item. Models agree that the subjective strength of targets increases with additional time for encoding however the origin of the subjective strength of foils remains disputed. Under the fixed strength assumption the distribution of memory strength for foils is invariant across experimental manipulations of encoding. For example, the subjective strength of foils may depend solely on the pre-experimental history of the item, thus encoding manipulations have no impact. In contrast, under the differentiation assumption the subjective strength of foils depends on the nature of the traces stored in episodic memory. If those traces are well encoded, the subjective strength of foils will be lower than the case where noisy traces are stored (e.g., when targets received minimal encoding). The fixed strength and differentiation accounts are tested by measuring direct ratings of memory strength. In Experiments 1 and 2, item strength is varied via repetition and in Experiment 3 response bias is varied via the relative proportion of targets on the test list. For all experiments empirical distributions of memory strength were obtained and compared to the distributions predicted by the two accounts. The differentiation assumption provides the most parsimonious account of the data.     

Parents’ Monitoring Knowledge Attenuates the Link Between Antisocial Friends and Adolescent Delinquent Behavior

Developmental trajectories of parents’ knowledge of their adolescents’ whereabouts and activities were tested as moderators of transactional associations between friends’ antisociality and adolescent delinquent behavior. 504 adolescents (50% female) provided annual reports (from ages 12 to 16) of their parents’ knowledge and (from ages 13 to 16) their own delinquent behavior and their friends’ antisociality. Parents also reported the adolescents’ delinquent behavior. Growth mixture modeling was used to identify two sub-groups based on their monitoring knowledge growth trajectories. Adolescents in the sub-group characterized by decreasing levels of parents’ knowledge reported more delinquent behavior and more friend antisociality in early adolescence, and reported greater increases in delinquent behavior and friend antisociality from early to middle adolescence compared to adolescents in the sub-group characterized by increasing levels of parents’ knowledge. Transactional associations consistent with social influence and social selection processes also were suppressed in the increasing knowledge sub-group as compared to the decreasing knowledge sub-group. Findings of this study were presented at the 2005 biennial meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development.     

The effect of perceptual information on output interference

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review - Retrieval from episodic memory has consequences (Malmberg, Lehman, Annis, Criss, & Shiffrin, The Psychology of Learning and Motivation, 61;...     

Context noise and item noise jointly determine recognition memory: a comment on Dennis and Humphreys (2001)

S. Dennis and M. S. Humphreys (see record 2001-17194-007) proposed a model with the strict assumption that recognition memory is not affected by interference from other items. Instead, confusions are due to noise generated by prior contexts in which the test item appeared. This model seems disparate from existing models of recognition memory but is similar in many ways that are not superficially obvious. One difference is the order in which item and context information are used as retrieval cues. A more critical difference is the assertion that only an item's history, and not other items, affects recognition memory. Conceptual arguments along with the results of 2 experiments make a persuasive case that both types of noise affect recognition. To illustrate the approach, the authors fit experimental data with a version of the retrieving effectively from memory model (R. M. Shiffrin & M. Steyvers, 1997) incorporating both sources of noise.     

Pairs do not suffer interference from other types of pairs or single items in associative recognition

Memory &; Cognition - What is the source of interference on a memory test following study of a list containing different types of pairs? Many current models predict that pairs and singles of all...     

Overcoming the negative consequences of interference from recognition memory testing

Theories of why humans forget have been challenged by the newly discovered list-length/output-interference paradox, in which--under certain testing conditions--learning is not harmed by the amount of verbal material studied, whereas retrieval of that material becomes more difficult with increases in the number of items tested. The latter finding is known as output interference, and the results of the experiment reported here indicate that a release from output interference is obtained when the nature of the items is changed during testing. Specifically, when participants are asked to recognize items from two categories, output interference is minimized when items from each category are tested separately in large blocks. This finding supports models of forgetting that assume interference arises from information about the to-be-learned material that is stored in memory; in contrast, this finding is difficult to explain using models that assume forgetting is the result only of changing context.