Mitigating the adverse effects of response deadline on recognition memory: Differential effects of semantic memory support on item and associative memory
Publication date: October 2018 Source:Journal of Memory and Language, Volume 102 Author(s): Praggyan (Pam) Mohanty, Moshe Naveh-Benjamin Prior research indicates that the effects of response deadline on episodic memory retrieval may be selective. Accordingly, this paper examines whether response deadline causes differential impairments in item and associative memory. Further, it investigates and contrasts the role of two types of semantic memory support– item memory support (in the form of meaningfulness of items, Experiment 1) and associative memory support (in the form of relatedness between items, Experiment 2), i...
Source: Journal of Memory and Language - June 28, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Individual differences in syntactic processing: Is there evidence for reader-text interactions?
Publication date: October 2018 Source:Journal of Memory and Language, Volume 102 Author(s): Ariel N. James, Scott H. Fraundorf, Eun-Kyung Lee, Duane G. Watson There remains little consensus about whether there exist meaningful individual differences in syntactic processing and, if so, what explains them. We argue that this partially reflects the fact that few psycholinguistic studies of individual differences include multiple constructs, multiple measures per construct, or tests for reliable measures. Here, we replicated three major syntactic phenomena in the psycholinguistic literature: use of verb distributional st...
Source: Journal of Memory and Language - June 28, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Comparing the confidence calculation rules for forced-choice recognition memory: A winner-takes-all rule wins
Publication date: October 2018 Source:Journal of Memory and Language, Volume 102 Author(s): Kiyofumi Miyoshi, Ayumi Kuwahara, Jun Kawaguchi Using a new signal-detection-theory-based approach, Experiments 1 and 2 of this study were found to reveal that the internal confidence for two-alternative forced-choice (2-AFC) recognition memory is calculated in a winner-takes-all manner. The signal strength for one of a pair of stimuli exclusively determines confidence and the other piece of useful information is discarded. Similar winner-takes-all confidence calculation has been reported in different kinds of visual perception...
Source: Journal of Memory and Language - June 27, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Patterns of forgetting
In this study, memory for a list of words and narrative texts was assessed up to 12 weeks after initial learning. We observed that memory for the word list showed some forgetting early on, followed by an abrupt loss after about seven days. Moreover, for the narrative text, surface form memories were forgotten to around chance level after about an hour, whereas textbase level memories were retained until about seven days when memory suddenly dropped to around chance levels, much like the word list memories. In contrast to this, memory at the event model level remained high throughout, although there was some forgetting ov...
Source: Journal of Memory and Language - June 12, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Adults with poor reading skills, older adults, and college students: The meanings they understand during reading using a diffusion model analysis
Publication date: October 2018 Source:Journal of Memory and Language, Volume 102 Author(s): Gail McKoon, Roger Ratcliff When a word is read in a text, the aspects of its meanings that are encoded should be those relevant to the text and not those that are irrelevant. We tested whether older adults, college students, and adults with poor literacy skills accomplish contextually relevant encoding. Participants read short stories, which were followed by true/false test sentences. Among these were sentences that matched the relevant meaning of a word in a story and sentences that matched a different meaning. We measured the...
Source: Journal of Memory and Language - June 8, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Does dynamic visual noise eliminate the concreteness effect in working memory?
Publication date: October 2018 Source:Journal of Memory and Language, Volume 102 Author(s): Chrissy Chubala, Aimée M. Surprenant, Ian Neath, Philip T. Quinlan Dynamic visual noise (DVN), an array of squares that randomly switch between black and white, interferes with certain tasks that involve visuo-spatial processing. Based on the assumption that the representation of concrete words includes an imagistic code whereas that of abstract words does not, Parker and Dagnall (2009) predicted that DVN should disrupt visual working memory and selectively interfere with memory for concrete words. They observed a reversal of...
Source: Journal of Memory and Language - June 8, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Testing potentiates new learning across a retention interval and a lag: A strategy change perspective
Publication date: October 2018 Source:Journal of Memory and Language, Volume 102 Author(s): Jason C.K. Chan, Krista D. Manley, Sara D. Davis, Karl K. Szpunar Practicing retrieval on previously studied materials can potentiate subsequent learning of new materials. In four experiments, we investigated the influence of retention interval and lag on this test-potentiated new learning (TPNL) effect. Participants studied four word lists and either practiced retrieval, restudied, or completed math problems following Lists 1–3. Memory performance on List 4 provided an estimate of new learning. In Experiments 1 and 2, parti...
Source: Journal of Memory and Language - May 31, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Electrophysiological evidence for an independent effect of memory retrieval on referential processing
In this study, we show that the difficulty of re-activating and retrieving the representations of potential referents from memory (retrieval difficulty) influences referential processing, and that this effect is independent of the number of potential referents for a pronoun or the probability of possible referential interpretations (referential coherence). In two experiments, we varied retrieval difficulty by manipulating whether two referential candidates were modified by extra semantic information or not, creating representationally rich (modified) or bare (unmodified) referential candidates, respectively, and we measure...
Source: Journal of Memory and Language - May 30, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Detecting when timeseries differ: Using the Bootstrapped Differences of Timeseries (BDOTS) to analyze Visual World Paradigm data (and more)
Publication date: October 2018 Source:Journal of Memory and Language, Volume 102 Author(s): Michael Seedorff, Jacob Oleson, Bob McMurray In the last decades, major advances in the language sciences have been built on real-time measures of language and cognitive processing, measures like mouse-tracking, event related potentials and eye-tracking in the visual world paradigm. These measures yield densely sampled timeseries that can be highly revealing of the dynamics of cognitive processing. However, despite these methodological advances, existing statistical approaches for timeseries analyses have often lagged behind. H...
Source: Journal of Memory and Language - May 25, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Linguistic experience affects pronoun interpretation
Publication date: October 2018 Source:Journal of Memory and Language, Volume 102 Author(s): Jennifer E. Arnold, Iris M. Strangmann, Heeju Hwang, Sandra Zerkle, Rebecca Nappa We test the hypothesis that language experience influences the cognitive mechanisms used to interpret ambiguous pronouns like he or she, which require the context for interpretation. Pronoun interpretation is influenced by both the linguistic context (e.g., pronouns tend to corefer with the subject of the previous sentence) and social cues (e.g., gaze can signal the pronoun’s referent). We test whether pronoun comprehension biases are related ...
Source: Journal of Memory and Language - May 22, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Temporal contiguity in incidentally encoded memories
Publication date: October 2018 Source:Journal of Memory and Language, Volume 102 Author(s): M. Karl Healey Thinking of one event often triggers recall of other events experienced nearby in time. This Temporal Contiguity Effect has been extensively documented in laboratory list learning tasks, but its source is debated. Is it due to task-general automatic processes that operate whenever new memories are formed? Or is it due to task-specific encoding strategies that operate only during deliberate rote learning? I test these theories by presenting over 3500 subjects with a surprise free recall test after various incidental...
Source: Journal of Memory and Language - May 17, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Retrieval interference and semantic interpretation
We report two reading experiments that manipulated sentence plausibility, rather than grammaticality, as a diagnostic of interference. In both experiments, although reading times were longer for implausible sentences, this plausibility effect was reliably attenuated when a distractor item partially matched the cues at retrieval. We interpret these results as being compatible with the predictions of cue-based parsing. The illusions of plausibility that we report indicate that similarity-based retrieval interference has a potent influence on the semantic interpretation that is assigned to a sentence during processing. (Sourc...
Source: Journal of Memory and Language - May 13, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Learning to recall: Examining recall latencies to test an intra-item learning theory of testing effects
Publication date: October 2018 Source:Journal of Memory and Language, Volume 102 Author(s): William J. Hopper, David E. Huber We propose a new theory for the benefits of recall practice based on intra-item learning. On this account, retrieval cues produce an initial memory state (termed ‘primary retrieval’). However, this state is incomplete and insufficient for overt recall of the item. A subsequent process, termed ‘convergent retrieval’, fills in any missing information through intra-item associations, allowing recall of the item. Because this occurs in a staged manner, directional learning occurs from the in...
Source: Journal of Memory and Language - May 8, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Divided attention during encoding causes separate memory traces to be encoded for repeated events
In this report, we examined the LSE in free recall and recognition when items were learned with full attention or under divided attention at encoding. In free recall, the results showed a robust LSE under full attention, but a null LSE in divided attention. In contrast, in recognition a null LSE was observed under full attention, but a positive LSE emerged under divided attention. Within REM theoretical framework, the combination of these findings suggests that DA reduces the tendency to accumulate information across repetitions in a single trace, thereby reducing the influence of differentiation. (Source: Journal of Memory and Language)
Source: Journal of Memory and Language - May 6, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Language unifies relational coding: The roles of label acquisition and accessibility in making flexible relational judgments
We examined the ability to make relative, spatial judgments across verbal and nonverbal tasks of above, below, right and left in children between the ages of 5 and 10 years. We found that the verbal ability to make above/below judgments preceded verbal right/left judgments and all nonverbal judgments. We also found that only when the labels were accessed – as opposed to only having been acquired – did children’s nonverbal performance improve. Our findings further indicate that accessing the correct term was not needed for enhanced performance. The results suggest that accessing language unifies different instantiat...
Source: Journal of Memory and Language - May 2, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
