The Role of Surface Similarity in Analogical Retrieval: Bridging the Gap Between the Naturalistic and the Experimental Traditions

Blanchette and Dunbar (2000) have claimed that when participants are allowed to draw on their own source analogs in the service of analogical argumentation, retrieval is less constrained by surface similarity than traditional experiments suggest. In two studies, we adapted this production paradigm to control for the potentially distorting effects of analogy fabrication and uneven availability of close and distant sources in memory. Experiment 1 assessed whether participants were reminded of central episodes from popular movies while generating analogies for superficially similar versus superficially dissimilar target situations. In Experiment 2, we modified this procedure to assess the retrieval of autobiographic memories, more familiar to participants than fictional episodes. Both studies revealed a strong effect of surface similarity on the retrieval of participants' own sources, thus suggesting that the superficial bias typically observed in experimental studies—and simulated by most computational models—does not originate in a lack of ecological validity.     

Single-word predictions of upcoming language during comprehension: Evidence from the cumulative semantic interference task

Comprehenders predict upcoming speech and text on the basis of linguistic input. How many predictions do comprehenders make for an upcoming word? If a listener strongly expects to hear the word “sock”, is the word “shirt” partially expected as well, is it actively inhibited, or is it ignored? The present research addressed these questions by measuring the “downstream” effects of prediction on the processing of subsequently presented stimuli using the cumulative semantic interference paradigm. In three experiments, subjects named pictures (sock) that were presented either in isolation or after strongly constraining sentence frames (“After doing his laundry, Mark always seemed to be missing one …”). Naming sock slowed the subsequent naming of the picture shirt – the standard cumulative semantic interference effect. However, although picture naming was much faster after sentence frames, the interference effect was not modulated by the context (bare vs. sentence) in which either picture was presented. According to the only model of cumulative semantic interference that can account for such a pattern of data, this indicates that comprehenders pre-activated and maintained the pre-activation of best sentence completions (sock) but did not maintain the pre-activation of less likely completions (shirt). Thus, comprehenders predicted only the most probable completion for each sentence.     

The cognitive profile of Chinese children with mathematics difficulties

This study examined how four domain-specific skills (arithmetic procedural skills, number fact retrieval, place value concept, and number sense) and two domain-general processing skills (working memory and processing speed) may account for Chinese children’s mathematics learning difficulties. Children with mathematics difficulties (MD) of two age groups (7-8 and 9-11 years) were compared with age-matched typically achieving children. For both age groups, children with MD performed significantly worse than their age-matched controls on all of the domain-specific and domain-general measures. Further analyses revealed that the MD children with literacy difficulties (MD/RD group) performed the worst on all of the measures, whereas the MD-only group was significantly outperformed by the controls on the four domain-specific measures and verbal working memory. Stepwise discriminant analyses showed that both number fact retrieval and place value concept were significant factors differentiating the MD and non-MD children. To conclude, deficits in domain-specific skills, especially those of number fact retrieval and place value understanding, characterize the profile of Chinese children with MD.     

The impact of retrieval suppression on conceptual implicit memory

ABSTRACT

When people suppress retrieval of episodic memories, it can induce forgetting on later direct tests of memory for those events. Recent reports indicate that suppressing retrieval affects less conscious, unintentional retrieval of unwanted memories as well, at least on perceptually-oriented indirect tests. In the current study we examined how suppressing retrieval affects conceptual implicit memory for the suppressed content, using a category verification task. Participants studied cue-target words pairs in which the targets were exemplars of 22 semantic categories, such as vegetables or occupations. They then repeatedly retrieved or suppressed the targets in response to the cues for some of those pairs. Afterwards, they were exposed to the targets intermixed with novel items, one at a time, and asked to verify the membership of each of the words in a semantic category, as quickly as possible. Judgment response times to studied words were faster than to unstudied exemplars, reflecting repetition priming, as has been previously observed. Strikingly, the beneficial effects of prior exposure on response time were eliminated for targets that had been suppressed. Follow-up explicit memory tests also demonstrated that retrieval suppression continued to disrupt episodic recall for the items that had been just been re-exposed on the category verification test. These findings support the contention that the effects of retrieval suppression are not limited to episodic memory, but also affect indirect expressions of those memories on conceptually oriented tests, raising the possibility that underlying semantic representations of suppressed content are affected.     

False memories in obstructive sleep apnoea syndrome: evidence from the divided attention paradigm at encoding or retrieval

ABSTRACT

Patients with obstructive sleep apnoea syndrome (OSAS) exhibit impaired retrieval of item-specific information, increasing their propensity to generate false recognitions. The present study investigated the effect of OSAS on false recognition, using a divided-attention paradigm to examine whether reducing the availability of attentional resources during encoding or retrieval in healthy participants mimics the effect of OSAS. We tested four groups of participants, using the Deese – Roediger – McDermott paradigm: patients with OSAS and controls, either under full attention or under divided attention at encoding or retrieval. Results showed that divided attention at retrieval, but not at encoding, mimicked the effects of OSAS on memory performance, as controls in this group exhibited a higher level of false recognition than those under full attention, but a similar level of correct recognition. Our results suggest that the greater susceptibility of patients with OSAS to false recognition may be due to a limited availability of attentional resources, which may specifically disrupt retrieval processes.     

无关言语对汉字短时记忆系列回忆的影响*

采用视觉呈现字表和听觉呈现无关言语方式,探讨在字表项目保持期间阻止被试复述情况下,不同呈现位置的无关言语对汉字短时记忆系列回忆的影响。在字表保持期间,采用计算任务进行分心作业。实验结果发现：(1)无关言语对汉字短时记忆系列回忆成绩存在显著影响;(2)在字表保持期间阻止被试进行复述消除了字表呈现期间呈现无关言语对回忆成绩产生的干扰效应;(3)汉字短时记忆系列回忆成绩表现出系列位置效应。实验结果没有完全支持客体情节记忆模型。     

协作抑制的认知机制

协作抑制是指当人们在一个记忆小组中一起提取信息的时候,小组提取的信息总量比等量个体提取的信息总量要少.心理学研究者致力于从认知角度对该现象进行解释,主要的理论解释有提取策略破坏假说和提取抑制假说.前者认为小组成员的提取结果对组内其他成员的信息组织策略产生了干扰,导致小组的提取成绩低.而后者认为小组内成员的提取结果会抑制其他成员对非提取项目的表征,降低小组协作提取能力,出现协作抑制.本文对两种理论假说的提出背景,基本观点,证据支持及现有争论进行了介绍,同时指出了未来的研究应关注于对两种机制的关键矛盾点进行区别性检验、对不同认知机制在不同条件下成立可靠性的检验以及通过对编码阶段进行操控来进一步考察协作抑制的认知机制.     

Does prospective memory influence quality of life in community-dwelling older adults?

Older adults commonly experience declines in prospective memory, which describes one’s ability to “remember to remember,” and can adversely affect instrumental activities of daily living and healthcare compliance. However, the extent to which prospective memory failures may influence quality of life in typically aging older adults is not well understood. One-hundred and four community-dwelling older Australians (aged 50 to 82 years) were administered a comprehensive, neuropsychological battery that included the Memory for Intentions Screening Test (MIST), Prospective and Retrospective Memory Questionnaire (PRMQ), Instrumental Activities of Daily Living Questionnaire (IADLQ), and World Health Organization Quality of Life-8 (WHOQOL-8). Multiple regressions controlling for negative affect, medical comorbidities, and other neurocognitive functions revealed an interaction between prospective memory and instrumental activities of daily living in the concurrent prediction of quality of life. Among the 39 older adults who reported multiple problems on the IADLQ, lower performance-based prospective memory (MIST) and higher self-reported prospective memory failures in daily life (PRMQ) were significantly associated with lower quality of life (WHOQOL-8). Conversely, no significant associations were observed between prospective memory and quality of life in the 65 participants without IADL problems. Prospective memory difficulties adversely impact quality of life in community-dwelling older adults who experience problems independently managing their instrumental activities of daily living. These findings extend prior literature showing that prospective memory plays a unique role in the real-world outcomes of older adults and clinical populations and highlight the need to develop effective strategies to enhance prospective memory functioning in these vulnerable groups.     

The role of attention during retrieval in working-memory span: A dual-task study

We tested the hypothesis that retrieving target words in operation span (OSpan) involves attention-demanding processes. Participants completed the standard OSpan task and a modified version in which all equations preceded all target words. Recall took place under either full attention or easy versus hard divided-attention conditions. Recall suffered under divided attention with the recall decrement being greater for the hard secondary task. Moreover, secondary-task performance was disrupted more by the standard OSpan task than by the modified version with the hard secondary task showing the larger decrement. Finally, the time taken to start recalling the first word was considerably longer for the standard version than for the modified version. These results are consistent with the proposal that successful OSpan task performance in part involves the attention-demanding retrieval of targets from long-term memory.     

Imageability,age of acquisition,and frequency factors in acronym comprehension

In spite of their unusual orthographic and phonological form, acronyms (e.g., BBC, HIV, NATO) can become familiar to the reader, and their meaning can be accessed well enough that they are understood. The factors in semantic access for acronym stimuli were assessed using a word association task. Two analyses examined the time taken to generate a word association response to acronym cues. Responses were recorded more quickly to cues that elicited a large proportion of semantic responses, and those that were high in associative strength. Participants were shown to be faster to respond to cues which were imageable or early acquired. Frequency was not a significant predictor of word association responses. Implications for theories of lexical organisation are discussed.