From Association to Gist: Some Critical Tests Brainerd, C. J.; Chang, M.; Bialer, D. M. ...
Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition,
06/2024, Letnik:
50, Številka:
6
Journal Article
Recenzirano
We report the first evidence that the gist mechanism of fuzzy-trace theory and the associative mechanism of activation monitoring theory operate in parallel, in the recall version of the ...Deese/Roediger/McDermott illusion. In three experiments, we implemented a new methodology that allows their respective empirical indexes, gist strength (GS) and backward associative strength (BAS), to each be manipulated while the other is held constant. In Experiment 1, increasing GS increased false recall of missing words, but increasing BAS did not. In Experiments 2 and 3, however, increasing GS and increasing BAS both increased recall of missing words, and those effects were independent and additive. In all three experiments, GS and BAS affected true recall of list words in qualitatively different ways: (a) Increasing GS always improved true recall, regardless of whether BAS was high or low, but (b) increasing BAS impaired true recall when GS was high and improved true recall when GS was low. To pinpoint the retrieval loci of the two variables' effects, we analyzed the data of all experiments with the dual-retrieval model. Those analyses showed that the variables' respective effects were due to different retrieval processes.
In recognition memory, anything that is objectively new is necessarily not-old, and anything that is objectively old is necessarily not-new. Therefore, judging whether a test item is new is logically ...equivalent to judging whether it is old, and conversely. Nevertheless, a series of 10 experiments showed that old? and new? judgments did not produce equivalent recognition accuracy. In Experiments 1-4, wherein subjects made old? or new? judgments about test items, new? judgments yielded more accurate performance for old items than old? judgments did, and old? judgments yielded more accurate performance for new items than new? judgments did. This same violation of logical equivalence was observed in Experiments 5-10, wherein subjects made similar? judgments as well as old? and new? ones. In short, old? and new? judgments displayed consistent Judgment × Item crossovers, rather than equivalence. Response latencies were used to test the hypothesis that Judgment × Item crossovers were due to certain judgment-item combinations provoking more deliberate, thorough retrieval than other combinations. There was no support for that hypothesis, but the data were consistent with an earlier theory, which posits that latency depends on the extent to which judgments or items slant retrieval toward accessing verbatim traces.
From Association to Gist Brainerd, C. J; Chang, M; Bialer, D. M
Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition,
11/2020, Letnik:
46, Številka:
11
Journal Article
Recenzirano
We removed a key uncertainty in the Deese/Roediger/McDermott (DRM) illusion. The mean backward associative strength (MBAS) of DRM lists is the best-known predictor of this illusion, but it is ...confounded with semantic relations between lists and critical distractors. Thus, it is unclear whether associative relations, semantic relations, or both foment the illusion. In Experiment 1, we developed a tool for investigating this question-a normed pool of materials in which subjects rated the gist strength of 120 DRM lists that varied widely in MBAS. This produced a mean gist strength (MGS) statistic for each list, which allowed MGS and MBAS to be manipulated factorially. In Experiment 2, we conducted the first MGS (high vs. low) × MBAS (high vs. low) factorial study of the DRM illusion. To measure how MGS and MBAS affect underlying retrieval processes, we implemented a conjoint recognition design. For raw memory performance, MGS affected both true and false recognition of critical distractors, and it affected both true and false recognition of list words. MBAS did not affect true or false recognition of list words or true recognition of critical distractors. With false recognition of critical distractors, it had a reliable effect in one condition when MGS was low, but it had no effect in another condition. At the level of retrieval processes, increasing MGS increased the familiarity of critical distractors' semantic content, and it also increased the familiarity of list words' semantic content.
Rating norms for semantic attributes (e.g., concreteness, dominance, familiarity, and valence) are widely used in many psychological literatures to study the effects of processing specific types of ...semantic content. Word and picture norms for many attributes are available for thousands of items, but there is a contamination problem in experimentation. When an attribute's ratings are varied, how the semantic content that people process changes is unclear because ratings of individual attributes are correlated with ratings of so many other attributes. To solve this problem, the psychological space that 20 attributes occupy has been mapped, and factor score norms have been published for the latent attributes that generate that space (emotional valence, age-of-acquisition, and symbolic size). These latent attributes have yet to be manipulated in experimentation, and hence, their effects are unknown. We conducted a series of experiments that focused on whether they affect accuracy, memory organization, and specific retrieval processes. We found that (a) all three latent attributes affected recall accuracy, (b) all three affected memory organization in recall protocols, and (c) all three affected direct verbatim access, rather than reconstruction or familiarity. The memory effects of two of them (valence and age-of-acquisition) were unconditional, but memory effects were only detected for the third at particular levels of the other two. The key implications are that semantic attributes can now be cleanly manipulated, and when they are, they have broad downstream effects on memory.
Public Significance Statement
A fundamental principle of human memory is that meaning is crucial: Information that is more meaningful to people is more easily learned, more easily remembered, and more easily retained over time. Meaning has many components, and hence, we must understand the effects of specific components to use this principle to optimize memory. That question has traditionally been investigated by studying the effects of distinct semantic attributes, such as categorization, concreteness, imagery, familiarity, and valence. However, we know that these attributes are not actually distinct and, instead, are substantially correlated. This problem has recently been solved by analyzing a large collection of semantic attributes and extracting three latent attributes (emotional valence, age-of-acquisition, and symbolic size) that are actually distinct from each other. Our experiments show that people process each of these latent attributes because each has broad memory effects. In particular, each latent attribute affects recall accuracy, the organization of memory, and people's ability to recover literal verbatim memories of experience.
Emotional Ambiguity and Memory Brainerd, C. J.; Chang, M.; Bialer, D. M.
Journal of experimental psychology. General,
08/2021, Letnik:
150, Številka:
8
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
The emotional ambiguity hypothesis introduced the principle that uncertainty about items' valence determines how emotional content affects memory and other psychological processes. It was formulated ...to explain why correlations between the perceived valence and arousal of memory items range from weak to unreliable, but it also makes novel predictions. Although data are consistent with those predictions, the hypothesis does not provide a process model of how valence ambiguity causes the valence-arousal relation to fluctuate. We tested 2 such models-a quantitative one, which assumes that increasing ambiguity lowers the reliability of valence judgments, and a categorical/quantitative one, which assumes that increasing ambiguity restricts the range of valence judgments. These models predict different mathematical relations between measures of ambiguity and intensity for valence and other semantic attributes (e.g., arousal, concreteness, familiarity, imagery, meaningfulness). In Experiments 1-3, tests of those predictions favored the categorical/quantitative model-showing that ambiguity is an inverted-U function for valence and other attributes. Experiments 4 and 5 were designed to investigate whether the memory effects of valence ambiguity are similar to the known effects of valence intensity. In both experiments, recall improved when ambiguity was increased, as well as when intensity was increased. A mathematical model revealed that increases in ambiguity produced large increases in items' familiarity, whereas increases in intensity produced smaller increases in both recollection and familiarity.
Recollection rejection is traditionally defined as using verbatim traces of old items' presentations to reject new similar test cues, in old/new recognition (e.g., rejecting that couch is old by ...retrieving verbatim traces of sofa's presentation). We broaden this conceptualization to include (a) old as well as new similar test cues, (b) using verbatim traces for acceptance as well as rejection, and (c) using illusory verbatim traces of unpresented items (phantom recollection) as well as actual verbatim traces (true recollection). The expanded model describes how true recollection and phantom recollection generate memory decisions by creating matches and mismatches between comparisons of test cues to the content of retrieved verbatim traces versus comparisons of test cues to the content of test questions. This model generates a series of predictions about verbatim editing. Some are intuitive, such as the prection that performance will be more accurate for old cues than for new similar ones. Others are counterintuitive and conflict with an alternative model, such as correct rejections are easier than hits and that correct rejection rates will be more stable over time than hit rates. Meta-analyses of a corpus of conjoint recognition data sets provided support for the model's predictions.
Summary The Eigth Eilat Conference on New Antiepileptic Drugs (AEDs)-EILAT VII, took place in Sitges, Barcelona from the 10th to 14th September, 2006. Basic scientists, clinical pharmacologists and ...neurologists from 24 countries attended the conference, whose main themes included a focus on status epilepticus (epidemiology, current and future treatments), evidence-based treatment guidelines and the potential of neurostimulation in refractory epilepsy. Consistent with previous formats of this conference, the central part of the conference was devoted to a review of AEDs in development, as well as updates on marketed AEDs introduced since 1989. This article summarizes the information presented on drugs in development, including brivaracetam, eslicarbazepine acetate (BIA-2-093), fluorofelbamate, ganaxolone, huperzine, lacosamide, retigabine, rufinamide, seletracetam, stiripentol, talampanel, valrocemide, JZP-4, NS1209, PID and RWJ-333369. Updates on felbamate, gabapentin, lamotrigine, levetiracetam, oxcarbazepine and new extended release oxcarbazepine formulations, pregabalin, tiagabine, topiramate, vigabatrin, zonisamide and new extended release valproic acid formulations, and the antiepileptic vagal stimulator device are also presented.
The conjoint-recognition model (CRM) implements fuzzy-trace theory's opponent process conception of false memory. Within the family of measurement models that separate the memory effects of ...recollection and familiarity, CRM is the only one that accomplishes this for false as well as true memory. We assembled a corpus of 537 sets of conjoint-recognition data, with estimates of CRM's parameters plus goodness-of-fit statistics being available for all the data sets. This corpus was used to conduct a meta-analysis of CRM's underlying process assumptions by pitting two theoretical interpretations of the model against each other: (a) the original interpretation, which assumes that its retrieval parameters tap a single recollection process (verbatim retrieval) and a single familiarity process (gist retrieval), and (b) the dual-recollection interpretation, which assumes that its parameters also tap a second recollection process (context retrieval). The two interpretations generate a series of differential predictions that fall into three groups-namely, predictions about invariant relations among parameters, about the structure of CRM's parameter space, and about the location of individual parameters within the space. When these predictions were evaluated with the corpus, the results converged on the dual-recollection interpretation. The results also resolved a long-standing uncertainty about whether the familiarity process for true memory is semantically or perceptually driven.
Rating norms for semantic attributes (e.g., concreteness, familiarity, valence) are widely used to study the content that people process as they encode meaningful material. Intensity ratings of ...individual attributes have been manipulated in numerous experiments with a range of memory paradigms, but those manipulations are contaminated by substantial correlations with the intensity ratings of other attributes. A method of controlling such contamination is needed, which requires a determination of how many distinct attributes there are among the large collection of attributes for which published norms are available. Identification of overlapping words in multiple rating projects yielded a data base containing normed values for each word’s perceived intensity (
M
rating) and ambiguity (rating
SD
) on 20 different attributes. Principal component analyses then revealed that the intensity space was spanned by just three latent semantic attributes, and the ambiguity space was spanned by five. Psychologically, the big three intensity factors (emotional valence, size, age) were highly interpretable, as were the big five ambiguity factors (discrete emotion, emotional valence, age, meaningfulness, and verbatim memory). We provide a data base of intensity and ambiguity factor scores that can be used to conduct uncontaminated studies of the memory effects of the intensity and ambiguity of latent semantic attributes.
A distinction has recently been drawn between surface distortions and deep distortions in false memory, where the former are conventional errors of commission and the latter are illogical relations ...among multiple memories of items. The deep distortions that have been studied to date are violations of the logical rules that govern incompatibility relations, such as additivity and countable additivity. Because that work is confined to laboratory word-list tasks, it is subject to the ecological validity criticism that memory for everyday facts may not exhibit such phenomena. We report evidence that memory for everyday facts displays the same deep distortions as laboratory tasks. We developed a version of the conjoint-recognition paradigm that measures memory for incompatible general knowledge facts, similar to those found on the quiz program Jeopardy! In experiments with university participants, four deep distortions were detected (violations of the additivity, countable additivity, universal set, and compensation rules), with participants consistently remembering more than what is logically possible. The distortions were more robust than in laboratory experiments, and memories of incompatible facts (e.g., Jupiter and Saturn cannot both be the largest planet in the solar system) did not suppress each other. These patterns were replicated in subsequent experiments with older and more diverse participant samples. Consistent with the notion that deep distortions are by-products of gist memory, conjoint-recognition modeling analyses revealed that memory for everyday facts was even more reliant on gist than memory for word lists, and that verbatim memory was near-floor.
Public Significance Statement
When events are physically incompatible, they obey some inviolate logical constraints: You cannot simultaneously stand on your head and on your feet, nor can you simultaneously turn left and turn right when you arrive at an intersection. Do our memories of incompatible events obey these logical rules? Fuzzy-trace theory predicts that the answer is no because reliance on semantic gist causes events to be over remembered. That prediction has been confirmed in laboratory word-list experiments, but does it hold for real-world memories of meaningful facts? We investigated this question in memory for everyday facts that appear on quiz programs such as Jeopardy! Logical rules such as additivity, countable additivity, universal event, and compensation were all violated by wide margins-the reason being that memory was even more reliant on semantic gist than in word-list experiments.
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