The effects of age-of-acquisition and frequency-of-occurrence in visual word recognition: Further evidence from the Dutch language

It has been claimed that the frequency effect in visual word naming is an artefact of age-of-acquisition: Words are named faster not because they are encountered more often in texts, but because they have been acquired earlier. In a series of experiments using immediate naming, lexical decision, and masked priming, we found that frequency had a clear effect in lexical tasks when age-of-acquisition is controlled for. At the same time, age-of-acquisition was a significant variable in all tasks, whereas imageability had no effect. These results corroborate findings previously reported in English and Dutch.     

Assessing changes in performance and monitoring processes in individual and collaborative tests according to students' metacognitive skills

This study assessed students' test performances and metacognitive processes in real classroom settings. Psychology undergraduates were categorised according to their metacognitive skills (high vs. low) and had their test performances and monitoring processes in two different types of tests (multiple-choice and short-answer tests) compared in individual and collaborative test conditions. Students' test preparation practices, attributions, and regulatory processes during test-taking were also compared by using open-ended questions. In the collaborative tests, three types of metacognitive pairings were made (high/high vs. high/low vs. low/low). Results showed that: (1) in individual tests, high-metacognitive students presented better performance and higher confidence levels due to their more effective test preparation practices and regulatory skills; (2) Differences in performance and confidence levels due to metacognitive skills disappear when students take tests collaboratively; (3) Over time, collaborative testing had particular positive effects on the low/low metacognitive pairings. Results are discussed focusing on their educational implications.     

Collaborative inhibition persists following social processing

In this experiment, participants read target words that were presented in the context of a social sentence “Willow towered over Meadow” or a nonsocial sentence “The willow towered over the meadow.” Subsequently, they received a surprise cued recall test for the target nouns/names and completed the test either alone or in a group of two. Despite the fact that the stimulus materials were held constant across conditions, participants showed a social processing advantage in memory—that is, they remembered the social (name) versions of the target words significantly better than the nonsocial (noun) versions. Further, the social benefit was not strong enough to neutralise the inhibitory effects of collaboration as collaborative groups (two people working together) recalled significantly fewer words than did nominal groups (combined, nonredundant, output of two individuals working separately). The present study also demonstrated robust collaborative inhibition with cued recall, a task previously assumed to eliminate such inhibition.     

Adapting to Context in Community-Based Participatory Research: “Participatory Starting Points” in a Chinese Immigrant Worker Community

Community-based participatory research (CBPR) is increasingly being used to better understand and improve the health of diverse communities. A key strength of this research orientation is its adaptability to community contexts and characteristics. To date, however, few studies explicitly discuss adaptations made to CBPR principles and processes in response to community context and partners’ needs. Using data from our CBPR study, the San Francisco Chinatown Restaurant Worker Health and Safety Project, and drawing from literature on immigrant political incorporation, we examine the links between the contexts of the Chinese immigrant worker community, adaptations made by our collaborative, and study outcomes. In particular, we explore the concepts of contexts of reception and participatory starting points, which may be especially relevant for partnerships with immigrant communities whose members have historically had lower rates of civic and political participation in the US. We discuss contextual findings such as worker partner accounts of language barriers, economic and social marginalization, and civic skills and participation, as well as subsequent adaptations made by the partnership. We also describe the relative effectiveness of these adaptations in yielding equitable participation and building partners’ capacity. We conclude by sharing lessons learned and their implications for CBPR and partnerships with immigrant communities more broadly.     

Retrospective recall of affect in clinically depressed individuals and controls

The current study examined the nature of retrospective recall of affect in depressed participants and nonclinical controls. Utilising the Experience Sampling Method, we compared average momentary affect reports to retrospective summaries of the same period of time. Both groups exhibited exaggerated retrospective summaries of positive affect (PA) and negative affect (NA). Greater bias for PA than NA was found in the controls but not the depressed. Across groups, depressed individuals exhibited more absolute inaccuracy in their recall of NA but not PA. For depressed and nonclinical individuals, retrospective summaries of PA were better predicted by an average of all weekly momentary PA than a combination of the most intense (“peak”) PA and most recent (“end”) PA experiences. For nonclinical participants, retrospective NA was better predicted by an average of all weekly momentary NA. For depressed individuals, however, no clear advantage to predicting retrospective NA by average weekly NA relative to a combination of peak NA and end NA was found. Based on our findings, clinicians should realise that depressive cognition may not lie in recall that is less positive and more negative than “reality” but in retrospective intensifications of all affect that are, compared to normal, relatively greater for negative than for positive affect.     

Examining variation in working memory capacity and retrieval in cued recall

Groups of individuals often work together to generate solutions to a problem. Subsequently, one member of the group can plagiarise another either by recalling that person's idea as their own (recall-own plagiarism), or by generating a novel solution that duplicates a previous idea (generate-new plagiarism). The current study examines the extent to which these forms of plagiarism are influenced by the quality of the ideas. Groups of participants initially generated ideas, prior to an elaboration phase in which idea quality was manipulated in two ways: participants received feedback on the quality of the ideas as rated by independent judges, and they generated improvements to a subset of the ideas. Unconscious plagiarism was measured in recall-own and generate-new tasks. For recall, idea improvement led to increased plagiarism, while for the generate-new task, the independent ratings influenced plagiarism. These data indicate that different source-judgement processes underlie the two forms of plagiarism, neither of which can be reduced simply to memory strength.     

Dual-memory processes in crack cocaine dependents: The effects of childhood neglect on recall

Exposure to adversities during sensitive periods of neurodevelopment is associated with the subsequent development of substance dependence and exerts harmful, long-lasting effects upon memory functioning. In this study, we investigated the relationship between childhood neglect (CN) and memory using a dual-process model that quantifies recollective and non-recollective retrieval processes in crack cocaine dependents. Eighty-four female crack cocaine–dependent inpatients who did (N = 32) or did not (N = 52) report a history of CN received multiple opportunities to study and recall a short list composed of familiar and concrete words and then received a delayed-recall test. Crack cocaine dependents with a history of CN showed worse performance on free-recall tests than did dependents without a history of CN; this finding was associated with declines in recollective retrieval (direct access) rather than non-recollective retrieval. In addition, we found no evidence of group differences in forgetting rates between immediate- and delayed-recall tests. The results support developmental models of traumatology and suggest that neglect of crack cocaine dependents in early life disrupts the adult memory processes that support the retrieval of detailed representations of events from the past.     

Pictorial superiority effects in oldest-old people

We examined memory for pictures and words in middle-age (45–59 years), young-old (60–74 years), old-old (75–89 years), and the oldest-old adults (90–97 years) in the Louisiana Healthy Aging Study. Stimulus items were presented and retention was tested in a blocked order where half of the participants studied 16 simple line drawings and the other half studied matching words during acquisition. Free recall and recognition followed. In the next acquisition/test block a new set of items was used where the stimulus format was changed relative to the first block. Results yielded pictorial superiority effects in both retention measures for all age groups. Follow-up analyses of clustering in free recall revealed that a greater number of categories were accessed (which reflects participants’ retrieval plan) and more items were recalled per category (which reflects participants’ encoding strategy) when pictures served as stimuli compared to words. Cognitive status and working memory span were correlated with picture and word recall. Regression analyses confirmed that these individual difference variables accounted for significant age-related variance in recall. These data strongly suggest that the oldest-old can utilise nonverbal memory codes to support long-term retention as effectively as do younger adults.