DESIGNING A MEMORY
EXPERIMENT
• Manipulation versus control
• Whose memory will we study?
– Effects of age, gender, disorders,
expertise
• What state are they in?
– Arousal, mood, motivation
• What is the object of memory?
– Verbal or nonverbal material
– Simple or complex structure
– Learned in the lab or elsewhere
• What are the conditions of
presentation?
–
–
–
–
–
Visual, auditory or other modality
Number of presentations
Sequence of presentations
Time between presentations
Context of presentations
• What will they do with the material?
– Intentional or incidental instructions
– Special encoding tasks
• Who gets what conditions?
– Between-group or within-subject
• How long is the retention interval?
– Immediate (STM, seconds to tens of sec)
– Recent (LTM, minutes to hours)
– Remote (LTM, months to decades)
• What is the memory task?
– Explicit tests of memory
• Free or cued recall
• Recognition
– Implicit tests of memory
• Repetition priming, fragment completion
• What attribute(s) do we test?
– Identity, frequency, position, sequencing
of items
MEASURING MEMORY:
THE DEPENDENT VARIABLES
• Performance measures
– Accuracy, speed of response
• Potential for speed-accuracy trade-offs
Attention Condition
Full
Divided
RT(ms) 620
540
errors (%) 4
6
– Types of errors
• omission, commission, distortions in recall
• Hits and false alarms in recognition
Proportion “old” words
High Low
Hits
.80
.40
False Alarms
.30
.05
d’
1.37 1.39
• Subjective judgments
– Confidence
• Is confidence correlated with accuracy?
– Qualitative judgments (remember-know)
• Physiological markers
– Measures of CNS: Blood flow
• Positron emission tomography (PET)
• Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI, fMRI)
– Measures of CNS: electromagnetic activity
• Electroencephalography (EEG, ERP)
• Magentoencephaolography (MEG)
• Optical imaging (EROS)
– Measures of ANS activity
• Galvanic skin responses (GSR)
• Muscular activity (EMG)
• Heart, respiration rate
Explicit versus Implicit Memory
for Spoken Words (Jacoby 83)
Study task:
Read, no context XXX – COLD
Read, context
hot - COLD
Generate word
hot - XXX
NC
C
G
NC
C
G
Recognition
Prob (hit)
.56
.71
.78
Perceptual
Identification
Priming
.23
.14
.07