S1 (FriAM 1-65) - The Psychonomic Society

Posters 1069–1075 Thursday Evening
(1069)
Encoding Strategy and the Testing Effect in Free Recall. PETER
P. J. L. VERKOEIJEN, Erasmus University Rotterdam, PETER F. DE-
LANEY, University of North Carolina, Greensboro, & REMY M. J. P.
RIKERS, Erasmus University Rotterdam (sponsored by Remy M. J. P.
Rikers)—The testing effect refers to the phenomenon that taking an
intermediate test benefits long-term retention more than restudying
the material does. In the present study, we investigated the interaction
between encoding strategy, retention interval, and testing effects. Participants
studied a word list using a story strategy or a rehearsal strategy.
Subsequently, they restudied the list or they received an intermediate
free-recall test. Then, half of the participants received a final test
after 5 min, whereas the other half received the final test after 1 week.
When the final test was administered after 5 min, restudying yielded
a better memory performance than testing. This held true for the story
and the rehearsal strategy. Conversely, when the final test was given
after 1 week, a testing effect was obtained in the story-strategy condition,
whereas a reversed testing was found in the rehearsal-strategy
condition. The theoretical and the practical implications of these findings
are discussed.
(1070)
The Effects of Effort After Meaning on Recall. FRANKLIN M.
ZAROMB & HENRY L. ROEDIGER III, Washington University (sponsored
by Todd Braver)—Three experiments examined free recall of
ambiguous sentences with and without corresponding cues to facilitate
comprehension using Auble and Franks’s (1977) paradigm. Sentences
were either studied without cues, with cues provided immediately
beforehand, or with cues following a 2- or 6-sec interval delay.
When the conditions were manipulated within subjects, puzzling over
the meaning of sentences for several seconds prior to receiving the cue
to aid comprehension enhanced veridical recall and reduced false recall.
The memorial advantage associated with increasing the sentencecue
delay did not occur when the cue presentation conditions were
arranged in homogeneous sentence-blocks or manipulated between
subjects. However, when instructions were changed to direct subjects
to try to discern the meaning of sentences prior to receiving a cue, recall
improved in both the between-subjects and blocked-sentence designs.
Effort after meaning improves recall.
(1071)
Episodic Cuing: More Information Makes Worse Memory. ANDREA
K. TAMPLIN & GABRIEL A. RADVANSKY, University of Notre
Dame (sponsored by Gabriel A. Radvansky)—In three experiments,
people were trained on general information, with accompanying
unique episodic information, to choose an appropriate factory task or
filing procedure. The learning task emphasized both the general and
the episodic knowledge. After training, people were given task numbers/names,
and were asked to recall the general information associated
with these tasks. Findings suggest that while episodic cues aided
memory in some cases, in others they made memory worse. Memory
was generally improved with episodic cues when the traces were relatively
weak, and harmed when memory traces were stronger. These
results are interpreted in the context of theories of focused and competitive
memory retrieval. Specifically, providing an episodic cue may
misdirect retrieval processes away from portions of memory containing
the needed information, and there may even be suppression of
noncued information.
• WORKING MEMORY •
(1072)
Depth of Processing Differentially Affects Working Memory and
Long-Term Memory. NATHAN S. ROSE, JOEL MYERSON, HENRY
L. ROEDIGER III, & SANDRA HALE, Washington University—Two
experiments compared the effects of depth of processing at encoding
on working memory and long-term memory. Experiment 1 examined
working memory performance on the levels-of-processing (LOP)
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span task, a newly developed complex span procedure which involves
processing to-be-remembered words on the basis of either their visual,
phonological, or semantic characteristics. Using the LOP span task,
Experiment 2 compared the effect of depth of processing at encoding
on immediate serial recall with its effect on subsequent delayed recognition
of the same items. Taken together, the results of the two experiments
show that depth of processing has a minimal effect on working
memory, but that even in the absence of an effect on immediate
recall, there is a clear LOP effect on long-term memory for the same
items. These results are consistent with previous findings showing
that working memory and long-term memory are fundamentally separable
systems and provide strong support for dual-store memory
models.
(1073)
The Utilization of Domain Knowledge to Expand Working Memory
Capacity. TRAVIS R. RICKS & JENNIFER WILEY, University of
Illinois, Chicago (sponsored by Jennifer Wiley)—To investigate how
expertise improves working memory capacity (WMC), we completed
a set of studies that extended the Fincher-Kiefer et al. (1988) findings
that domain knowledge increased scores on domain-related span
tasks, which we replicate in our Experiment 1. In our subsequent studies,
we isolated whether the storage or processing components of span
tasks were related to baseball. In Experiment 2, processing was related,
but storage items were not. No effects were seen due to domain
knowledge. In Experiment 3, storage was related but processing was not.
Again there was no effect for knowledge. Only Experiment 4, where
the storage items were related to baseball, and participants were explicitly
informed of the baseball theme, found an effect for knowledge.
This suggests that experts expand their WMC by utilizing domainrelated
retrieval structures, but that they need to be aware of the relation
between to-be-remembered items and their prior knowledge.
(1074)
The Negative Impact of Prior Reflective Selection is Sometimes
Due to Target Enhancement. JULIE A. HIGGINS & MARCIA K.
JOHNSON, Yale University—Briefly thinking of one item from an active
set of semantically related items reduces accessibility of the nonselected
items during subsequent processing. We test whether this reduced
accessibility is due to target enhancement or to distractor
suppression. Participants read aloud a word set containing three related
category exemplars (one high, one medium, and one low associate).
Then they either reread or thought of (refreshed) one of the
words. Participants read the original set again before refreshing a second
word from the set. Response times to refresh the second word
were longer having just refreshed versus having just reread a word
from the set. This increase was larger when the first word refreshed
was a higher associate than when it was a lower associate. This pattern
of results suggests that the negative impact of prior refreshing is
due to enhanced activation of the refreshed item and not inhibition of
the nonrefreshed items.
(1075)
Do Working Memories Decay? MARC G. BERMAN, JOHN
JONIDES, LEE I. NEWMAN, & DEREK E. NEE, University of
Michigan (sponsored by John Jonides)—We present data from a series
of experiments exploring decay and interference in working memory.
Utilizing an item-recognition task, we examined the degree to
which previously seen stimuli interfered with item-recognition performance
on current memoranda. The amount of time that separated
previously seen items from current memoranda was manipulated from
2 to 14 sec to determine whether working memories do in fact decay
with the sheer passage of time. In addition, the amount of proactive
interference (PI) that was aggregated over the course of the experiment
was varied between studies to determine whether the amount of
aggregated PI interacted with the amount of time-based decay. Lastly,
we analyzed how the number of intervening trials modulated the interfering
ability of previously seen items. Our preliminary results