The Tulving-Wiseman law and the recognition of recallable music

Memory for well-known musical phrases was tested first for recognition in the absence of any specific musical context and then for recall given the preceding musical phrase as a contextual cue. Recognition and recall were found to be largely, but not completely, independent. Moreover, there was no evidence of any greater dependency between recognition and recall than that previously observed in the relation between word recognition and recall, as summarized by the Tulving-Wiseman law. These findings significantly extend the range of applicability of this law.     

Contextual effects in a metaphor verification task

The verbal transformation effect, an auditory illusion in which physically invariant repetitive verbal input undergoes perceptual transformation, has traditionally been interpreted as a speech-specific phenomenon. Experiment 1 showed that the effect is not limited to speech, but occurs in non-speech categories such as music and other complex everyday sounds, with transformations being comparable in nature and number to those in speech. Experiment 2 provided evidence for an alternative, broader-based view of the phenomenon, involving spreading activation through a multidimensional associative network of mental representations, by demonstrating that creating or activating pre-existing links between a single complex non-verbal stimulus and other representations by priming led to an increase in transformations.     

Mixed matters: fluency impacts trust ratings when faces range on valence but not on motivational implications

Facial features that resemble emotional expressions influence key social evaluations, including trust. Here, we present four experiments testing how the impact of such expressive features is qualified by their processing difficulty. We show that faces with mixed expressive features are relatively devalued, and faces with pure expressive features are relatively valued. This is especially true when participants first engage in a categorisation task that makes processing of mixed expressions difficult and pure expressions easy. Critically, we also demonstrate that the impact of categorisation fluency depends on the specific nature of the expressive features. When faces vary on valence (i.e. sad to happy), trust judgments increase with their positivity, but also depend on fluency. When faces vary on social motivation (i.e. angry to sad), trust judgments increase with their approachability, but remain impervious to disfluency. This suggests that people intelligently use fluency to make judgments on valence-relevant judgment dimensions – but not when faces can be judged using other relevant criteria, such as motivation. Overall, the findings highlight that key social impressions (like trust) are flexibly constructed from inputs related to stimulus features and processing experience.     

Verbal transformation: habituation or spreading activation?

Experiment 1 tested the habituation hypothesis of the Verbal Transformation Effect, an auditory illusion in which a repeating verbal stimulus undergoes perceptual transformation, by varying stimulus dimensions which might be expected to retard habituation. Transformations were found to increase as a function of imagery value and word length, failing to support the habituation hypothesis. Experiment 2, in which transformations were found to vary as a function of number of activated semantic representations of a physically invariant homophone stimulus, provided support for a new dual-process explanation of the Transformation effect, based on spreading activation between cognitive representations.     

Repetition of previously novel melodies sometimes increases both remember and know responses in recognition memory

Recognition memory for previously novel melodies was tested in three experiments in which subjects usedremember andknow responses to report experiences of recollection, or of familiarity in the absence of recollection, for each melody they recognized. Some of the melodies were taken from Polish folk songs and presented vocally, but without the words. Others were taken from obscure pieces of classical music, presented as single-line melodies. Prior to the test, the melodies were repeated for varying numbers of study trials. Repetition of the Polish melodies increased both remember and know responses, while repetition of classical melodies increased remember but not know responses. When subjects were instructed to report guesses, guess responses were inversely related to remember and know responses and there were more guesses to lures than to targets. These findings establish that remembering and knowing are fully independent functionally and, by the same token, they provide further evidence against the idea that response exclusivity causes increases in remembering to force decreases in knowing. The findings also suggest that simultaneous increases in remembering and knowing occurred because the Polish melodies came from a genre for which the subjects had relatively little previous experience.     

Memory confusions and memory codes: A simulation of the acoustic similarity effect

It is hypothesized that items are coded for short-term storage in the language of the modality through which the customary responses to these items are normally monitored. This Response Monitoring Modality Hypothesis may account for the acoustic similarity effect in short-term memory for verbal items. The hypothesis was tested using non-verbal material. After paired-associate training subjects were found to confuse, in retention tests, items sharing similar previously trained responses to a greater extent than items that were directly similar to one another. The experiment simulates under controlled conditions the natural phenomenon of acoustical confusions in short-term memory, and provides strong support for the Response Monitoring Modality Hypothesis.     

Casting a spell with witches and broomsticks: Direct and associative influences on nonword orthography

Abstract

This study investigated direct and associative lexical priming of nonword spelling in adults and children. Two possible alternative orthographies of each nonword were targeted under both direct and associative priming conditions. It was found that both direct and associative priming manipulations were effective in influencing the choice of spelling pattern of nonwords, with both children and adults showing the effect. Levels of priming in children were lower, though not significantly lower, than those in adults. Direct priming was significantly stronger than associative priming for both subject groups, with the size of this differential being reduced in children. The differences between the types of priming are seen as speaking to a multiple-activation model of the orthographic lexicon, whereas those between age groups as pointing to a differential functional organisation of the lexicon.