Strong cues are not necessarily weak: Thomson and Tulving (1970) and the encoding specificity principle revisited

Performance on tests in which there is control over reporting (e.g., cued recall with the option to withhold responses) can be characterized by four parameters: free- and forced-report retrieval (correct responses retrieved from memory when the option to withhold responses is exercised and when it is not, respectively), monitoring (discrimination between correct and incorrect potential responses), and report bias (willingness to report responses). Typically, researchers do not examine all these components in cued-test performance; blanks are sometimes counted the same as errors, meaning that the (free-report) performance index is contaminated with report bias and monitoring ability. In this research, a two-stage testing procedure is described that allows measures of free- and forced-report retrieval, monitoring, and bias to be derived from the original encoding specificity experiments (Thomson & Tulving, 1970). The results show that their cue-reinstatement manipulation affected free-report retrieval, but once report bias and monitoring effects were removed by forcing output, retrieval was unaffected.     

The effect of category learning on sensitivity to within-category correlations

A salient property of many categories is that they are not just sets of independent features but consist of clusters of correlated features. Although there is much evidence that people are sensitive to between-categories correlations, the evidence about within-category correlations is mixed. Two experiments tested whether the disparities might be due to different learning and test tasks. Subjects learned about categories either by classifying items or by inferring missing features of items. Their knowledge of the correlations was measured with classification, prediction, typicality, and production tests. The inference learners, but not the classification learners, showed sensitivity to the correlations, although different tests were differentially sensitive. These results reconcile some earlier disparities and provide a more complete understanding of people's sensitivities to within-category correlations.     

Effects of right and left hemisphere damage on performance of the "Right Hemisphere Communication Battery"

A Hebrew adaptation of Gardner and Brownell's (1986) "Right Hemisphere Communication Battery" (HRHCB) was administered to 27 right brain-damaged (RBD) patients, 31 left brain-damaged (LBD) patients, and 21 age-matched normal controls. Both patient groups showed deficits relative to controls and overall there was no difference between the two patient groups. A factor analysis of patients' scores on the HRHCB yielded two interpretable factors, a verbal and a nonverbal one. These factors were not lateralized. Performance of patients on the HRHCB correlated significantly and positively with performance on most tests of basic language functions, measured with a Hebrew adaptation of the "Western Aphasia Battery" (HWAB) and with other cognitive functions measured with standardized neuropsychological tests. There were stronger correlations of HRHCB with subtests of the HWAB in LBD patients and with nonlanguage cognitive tests in RBD patients. In the LBD group, HRHCB subtests' scores correlated negatively with lesion extent in frontal and temporal perisylvian regions. Such localization was not observed in RBD patients. The results argue against selective right hemisphere (RH) involvement in the RHCB, alleged to measure pragmatic aspects of language use, and show, instead, bilateral involvement. The results also argue against a modular organization of these functions of language use, especially in the RH.     

College-educated women's personality development in adulthood: perceptions and age differences

Adulthood encompasses a large time span and includes a series of psychosocial challenges (E. H. Erikson, 1950). Five aspects of personality (identity certainty, confident power, concern with aging, generativity, and personal distress) were assessed in a cross-sectional study of college-educated women who at the time of data collection were young adults (age: M = 26 years), middle-aged adults (age: M = 46 years), or older adults (age: M = 66 years). Respondents rated each personality domain for how true it was of them at the time, and they then rated the other 2 ages either retrospectively or prospectively. Results are discussed with attention to the ways in which women's adult development may have been shaped by experiences particular to both gender and birth cohort, and to how these women fit with E. H. Erikson's theory of adult development.     

Global self-esteem across the life span

This study provides a comprehensive picture of age differences in self-esteem from age 9 to 90 years using cross-sectional data collected from 326,641 individuals over the Internet. Self-esteem levels were high in childhood, dropped during adolescence, rose gradually throughout adulthood, and declined sharply in old age. This trajectory generally held across gender, socioeconomic status, ethnicity, and nationality (U.S. citizens vs. non-U.S. citizens). Overall, these findings support previous research, help clarify inconsistencies in the literature, and document new trends that require further investigation.     

Consolidation theory and retrograde amnesia in humans

Recent research on the cognitive dysfunctions experienced by human anmesic patients indicates that very long term (multidecade) changes may occur in memory.Flat retrograde amnesia (RA), consisting of a uniform memory deficit for information from all preamnesia time periods, indicates a simple, monolithic retrieval problem, whereasgraded RA, with greater memory deficits for information from recent as opposed to remote time periods, suggests the presence of a gradual long-term encoding, or consolidation, process. An evaluation of 247 outcomes from 61 articles provides strong evidence of graded RA across different cerebral injuries, materials, and test procedures, as well as in measures of both absolute and relative (patient vs. control) performance. Future conceptualizations of human memory should address the possibility that memories increase in resistance to forgetting, or reduction in trace fragility, across many decades.     

Overt and covert object-based attention

To examine the role of perceptual object representations in the control of eye movements and attention, a pair of experiments adapted the object-cuing paradigm of Egly, Driver, and Rafal (1994) to require eye movements. Displays were pairs of adjacent rectangles, each containing two characters. Observers were asked to make a speeded judgment of a target character’s orientation, and a cue was provided prior to target/distractor onset to indicate the target’s likely location. Gaze-contingent presentation of target and distractors was used to demand overt scanning of displays. Eye movements during task performance evinced two forms of object-based effects. First, saccades following fixation on an invalidly cued item were more likely to be made within the cued rectangle than between rectangles. Second, saccades within the cued rectangle were preceded by shorter dwell times than saccades between rectangles. Extrafoveal processing of stimuli within the cued rectangle, however, was not facilitated, suggesting that covert attention was not allocated more densely within the cued than within the uncued object.