Abstracts 2005 - The Psychonomic Society

Papers 322–327 Sunday Morning
EVA DREIKURS FERGUSON, Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville,
& JANET M. GIBSON, Grinnell College—The effects of word
repetition and social category semantic content in priming paragraphs
were explored for word recall. Data from a small liberal arts private
college versus results from a large public university were compared.
In one study, words to be recalled were either never presented in the
priming paragraph (usual semantic priming condition) or were presented
once or twice, in anticipation that regardless of how immediately
the words followed the priming paragraph, repetition itself
would significantly improve recall. This was not found. Rather, social
category semantic content and word repetition had complex effects.
Word repetition effects on recall were dependent on word block order
(how soon the words followed the priming paragraphs). In several
studies, autocratic and democratic content affected word recall differently
than did other social categories. Affective valence and strength
of cognitive identity were explored to explain the semantic social category
effects. Implications of the findings are discussed.
11:00–11:15 (322)
Multiple Priming Effects in Episodic Recognition. STEPHEN
DOPKINS & JESSE SARGENT, George Washington University—In
episodic recognition, a positive judgment to a word is impeded following
the processing of a superficially similar word, suggesting interference
in the recollective component of the recognition process. A
negative judgment to a word is impeded following the processing of
a semantically similar word, suggesting a positive criterion shift in the
familiarity component of the recognition process. These phenomena
may be helpful in distinguishing the dual-process conceptions of Norman
and O’Reilly and of Brainerd and colleagues. In addition, a positive
judgment to a word is impeded and a negative judgment facilitated
following a positive judgment to a word of the same syntactic
class, suggesting a negative criterion shift in the familiarity component
of the recognition process. The functional bases of these phenomena
are discussed in terms of what may be the primary real-life
manifestation of episodic recognition—the identification of repeated
words in discourse.
11:20–11:35 (323)
What Does It Take to Implicitly Prime Low-Frequency Category
Exemplars? R. REED HUNT, University of North Carolina, Greensboro—Very
low frequency exemplars are resistant to implicit repetition
priming on category production tasks, a fact that would not be
surprising in most theories of priming. A mild startle response might
be elicited, however, by the data to be presented, which show that the
items resistant to repetition priming can in fact be primed implicitly
following a single study trial. The results of two experiments suggest
that implicit priming of very low frequency items requires a prior experience
biasing the comprehension of the category label. Presentation
of the category label in a sentence biasing the low-frequency interpretation
of the label yielded reliable priming, even though the
exemplar was not presented explicitly. Explicit presentation of the exemplar
at study, even when accompanied by the label, was not sufficient
to produce reliable priming.
11:40–11:55 (324)
Dissociation Between Recognition of Prechange Objects and Change
Detection. YEI-YU YEH, CHENG-TA YANG, & YING-CHIH HUNG,
National Taiwan University—This study investigated how similarity
between the pre- and postchange objects affects recognition of prechange
objects and change detection. Experiment 1 replicated a previous
study by showing that recognition of prechange objects was worse
than recognition of postchange objects. Moreover, similarity benefited
recognition memory. Assuming that little information is required
to recognize a prechange object with intact representation, we manipulated
in Experiment 2 whether the to-be-recognized test object
was masked (2A) or the density of the mask (2B and 2C). The results
showed that unless the test stimuli were densely masked, recognition
was above chance when the two objects shared similarity. In contrast,
50
similarity reduced change detection. Experiment 3 investigated
whether similarity benefit arose from memory retrieval by examining
the proportion of false recognition on new distractors. The results
from a log-linear regression analysis showed that false recognition
was higher when new distractors shared similarity with the postchange
objects.
Metamemory
Conference Rooms B&C, Sunday Morning, 10:00–12:00
Chaired by Harold Pashler, University of California, San Diego
10:00–10:15 (325)
Does Being Forced to Guess Make One Learn the Wrong Answer?
HAROLD PASHLER, University of California, San Diego—If you do
not know the answer to a question, should you avoid guessing, in order
not to “stamp in” the wrong answer? Theorizing by Edwin Guthrie and
others would seem to imply that you should. To test this question, on
Day 1, subjects were taught obscure facts, and then given a test; on
Day 2, they returned for a final test. When subjects indicated on Day 1
that they had no idea of the answer to a question, they were forced to
guess on a randomly chosen subset of items. Regardless of whether
there was immediate feedback (Experiment 1), no feedback (Experiment
2), or delayed feedback (Experiment 3), Day 2 performance suggested
that the forced guessing had not impaired or contaminated
memory. Follow-up studies will examine the generalizability of this
result beyond fact memory.
10:20–10:35 (326)
The Cognitive Mechanisms of Errorless Learning in Younger and
Older Adults. NICOLE D. ANDERSON & SAMY ARITA, University
of Toronto—Recall is higher following learning without rather than
with errors (Baddeley & Wilson, 1994), but previous studies exploring
contributions of implicit and explicit memory to this effect have
yielded mixed results. Verbal responses were made “typical” (e.g.,
knee–bend) or “atypical” (e.g., knee–bone) in a 384-pair training
phase (following Hay & Jacoby, 1996). Participants in the “errorful”
condition guessed (e.g., knee–b_n_), whereas in the “errorless” condition
the pair was shown in full. In a study–test phase (16 lists of six
typical and two atypical pairs), participants recalled the studied response
word. Explicit recollection or implicit memory habit would
evoke a typical response after studying a typical pair, but only implicit
memory habits, in the absence of recollection, would evoke a typical
response after studying an atypical pair. Explicit recollection was
higher in younger than older adults, but implicit habit was greater following
errorful than errorless learning. Errorless learning is mediated
by implicit memory.
10:40–10:55 (327)
Familiarity Matching in Source Monitoring. NANCY FRANKLIN
& CHUI-LUEN VERA HAU, SUNY, Stony Brook, JENNIFER L. BECK,
National Opinion Research Center, & PAUL C. SYLVESTER, SUNY,
Stony Brook—People often apply rational heuristics during source
monitoring. For example, in probability matching, the distribution of
source decisions about old items reflects the relative frequency of subjects’
prior exposure to the different sources. We introduce a more sophisticated
but related heuristic, familiarity matching. We base our explanation
of the effect on the argument that in the real world,
individual sources tend to produce redundant content (e.g., George
Bush produces multiple messages over time about Iraq, and the deli
guy tells you on different occasions about available coffee flavors).
The greater expectation that familiar rather than unfamiliar content
will come from a high-frequency source leads to an interaction between
source frequency and content familiarity: People attribute more
items to frequent than to infrequent sources, and this effect is increased
for familiar items. We find such a familiarity matching effect even
when the experience of familiarity is artificially inflated at test through
simple priming.