The orthographic distinctiveness effect on direct and
indirect tests of memory: delineating the awareness and
processing requirements
Lisa Geraci and Suparna Rajaram
Journal of Memory and Language 47 (2002) 273-291
Summary: Orthographically distinctive words are recalled better than common words,
except when indirectly tested. This may suggest that there needs to be some sort of test
awareness to create the orthographical distinctiveness effect.
Leder, Helmut & Carbon, Claus-Christian (2005). When context hinders! learn-test
compatibility in face recognition. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology:
Section A. Volume 58, Number 2
This examines how people perceive faces and whether they see parts of the face explicity
or holistic. They examined if learning parts of the face would carry over to knowing the
entire face. They found that after learning parts of the face, subjects were not able to
carry this learning over when the features were presented in the full face. They
concluded that this shows it is hard to ignore irrelevant parts in faces.
A holistic account of the own-race effect in face recognition: Evidence from
a cross-cultural study Cognition [0010-0277] Tanaka
yr: 2004 vol: 93 iss: 1 pg: B1
Abstract
A robust finding in the cross-cultural research is that people's memories for faces of their own race are
superior to their memories for other-race faces. However, the mechanisms underlying the own-race effect
have not been well defined. In this study, a holistic explanation was examined in which Caucasian and Asian
participants were asked to recognize features of Caucasian and Asian faces presented in isolation and in
the whole face. The main finding was that Caucasian participants recognized own-race faces more
holistically than Asian faces whereas Asian participants demonstrated holistic recognition for both own-race
and other-race faces. The differences in holistic recognition between Caucasian and Asian participants
mirrored differences in their relative experience with own-race and other-race faces. These results suggest
that the own-race effect may arise from the holistic recognition of faces from a highly familiar racial group.
1) The false memory and the mirror effects: The role of familiarity and backward
association in creating false recollections
David Anaki, Yifat Faran, Dorit Ben-Shalom, and Avishai Henik
aRotman
Research Institute, Baycrest Centre for Geriatric Care, 3560 Bathurst Street, Toronto,
Ont., Canada M6A 2E1
This experiment examined whether false memory for non-presented lures would be
influenced by the lure’s familiarity. Their results revealed that false memory levels for
low familiarity lures were higher than that for high familiarity lures, but only when the
backward association strength between the presented list’s words and the lure was high.
In contrast, higher false alarms were observed for high frequency unrelated distractors.
They relate their results to the false memory effect, and suggest an activation/monitoring
account of the effect, according to which non-presented lures are activated during
encoding.
2) Sensitivity reductions in false recognition: A measure of false memories with stronger theoretical
implications
Westerberg, Carmen E; Marsolek, Chad J, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, &
Cognition. Vol 29(5), Sep 2003, pp. 747-759
This study states that signal detection analyses of recognition memory indicate that a bias
to respond "old" is large for critical words that are centrally related with previously
encoded word lists, is small for words that are less related, and is not observed for
unrelated words. Also, recognition sensitivity has not been previously shown to differ
between those conditions. In this study, they conduct three experiments, where criticalword sensitivity was lower than sensitivity for other word types, but related-word
sensitivity was not lower than sensitivity for unrelated words.
Literature:
Glanzer, M., Hilford, A., Kim, K. (2004). Six Regularities of Source Recognition.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition. Vol. 30,
6:1176-1195.
Summary:
The authors/experimentors of this experiment looked at previous research that
suggests source-recognition memory can be woven into a signal detection model
covering source and item recognition. The authors used 5 experiments involving
variables that have learned, documented effects on item recognition as seen in previous
studied into this topic. The authors found 6 source-recognition premises that support the
enhanced model involving source-recognition, including one premise that states a
correlation between item and source recognition. The authors state that “any learning
variable that increases item recognition increases source recognition” as this correlation
between recognition. The study generally offers an alternative explanation for source
recognition that accounts for most of the variance (99%) of the five experiments the
authors used to develop the enhanced model with the advantage of unifying item and
source recognition where previous studies were not able to join these recognitions under
the same structure.
The article focuses on recognition memory and what certain cues are used in the retrieval
of certain information. The researchers of this experiment hypothesized that item and
contextual cues are used in retrieving information. Another experiment on recognition
hypothesized that the history of the item is an important cue that affects recognition
memory. The results of this experiment conclude that all types of cues, item, context, and
memory affect recognition.
Criss, Amy H., Shiffrin, Richard M. (2004) Context Noise and Item Noise Jointly
Determine Recognition Memory; A Comment on Dennis and Humphreys (2001).
Psychological Review. Pp. 800-807. Retrieved from PsychInfo Database (AN: 0033295X)
Malmberg, K.J., Nelson, T.O. The word frequency effect for recognition memory and the
elevated-attention hypothesis. Memory&Cognition. 2003. 31(1), 35-43
According to the article low-frequency (LF) words are better recognized than
high-frequency (HF) words since LF words attract more attention than do HF
words. Then, they hypothesized that more attentional resources are allocated to
Lf words than to HF words only during the early phase of encoding and that the
allocation of attentional resources during the late phase of encoding is not greater
for LF words than HF words.
1: J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn. 1992 Mar;18(2):379-90.
Remembering pictures: pleasure and arousal in memory.
Bradley MM, Greenwald MK, Petry MC, Lang PJ.
Health Science Center, University of Florida, Gainesville 32610.
Incidental memory performance for pictures that varied along the affective
dimensions of pleasantness and arousal was assessed. For both an immediate and
delayed (1 year later) free-recall task, only the arousal dimension had a stable
effect on memory performance: Pictures rated as highly arousing were remembered
better than low-arousal stimuli. This effect was corroborated in a speeded
recognition test, in which high-arousal materials encoded earlier in the
experiment produced faster reaction times than their low-arousal counterparts.
Pleasantness affected reaction time decisions only for pictures not encoded
earlier. These results suggest that whereas both the dimensions of pleasantness
and arousal are processed at initial encoding, long-term memory performance is
mainly affected by arousal.
PMID: 1532823 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]