Similar phonemes create interference in the serial recall task.

The mechanisms underlying forgetting have been central to theorising about verbal short-term and working memory, and the importance of interference as opposed to decay continues to be vigorously debated. Here, we present two experiments to evaluate the nature and locus of phonological interference as a source of forgetting in serial recall. In these experiments, we replicate studies showing that repetition of phonemes across items impairs recall of the later list item, even with visual presentation and typed recall.

Neighborhood frequency effects in simple and complex span: Do high-frequency neighbors help or hurt?

A word's orthographic neighborhood is the set of words that differ from the target word by one letter. Both Roodenrys (2009) and Robert et al. (Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 44, 119-125, 2015) posit that orthographic neighbors are activated when the target word is encountered in tasks such as simple and complex span.

Distinctiveness, not dual coding, explains the picture-superiority effect.

The picture-superiority effect is the finding that memory for pictures exceeds memory for words on many tasks. According to dual-coding theory, the pictures' mnemonic advantage stems from their greater likelihood to be labelled relative to words being imaged. In contrast, distinctiveness accounts hold that the greater variability of pictures compared to words leads to their mnemonic advantage.

Valence and concreteness in item recognition: Evidence against the affective embodiment account.

The Affective Embodiment Account posits that sensorimotor interactions play an important role in learning and processing concrete words whereas experiences from emotional states play an important role in learning and processing abstract words. Because of this, there should be greater enhancement of valence for abstract than for concrete words and therefore there should be an interaction between valence and concreteness. Although this prediction has been observed in a number of tasks, very few studies have looked specifically at memory.

Set size and the orthographic/phonological neighbourhood size effect in serial recognition: The importance of randomization.

The neighbourhood size effect refers to the finding of better memory for words with more orthographic/phonological neighbours than otherwise comparable words with fewer neighbours. Although many studies have replicated this result with serial recall, only one has used serial recognition. Greeno et al.

Irrelevant speech, changing state, and order information.

The changing state effect is the finding that a stream of irrelevant sounds that change more (e.g., different digits in random order) disrupts memory more than a stream of irrelevant sounds that change less (e.

The orthographic/phonological neighbourhood size effect and set size.

A growing number of studies have shown that on serial recall tests, words with more orthographic/phonological neighbours are better recalled than otherwise comparable words with fewer neighbours, the so-called neighbourhood size effect. Greeno et al. replicated this result when using a large stimulus pool but found a reverse neighbourhood size effect-better recall of words with fewer rather than more neighbours-when using a small stimulus pool.

The block order effect in reconstruction of order tasks and metacognitive processing.

In serial reconstruction of order tasks, high-frequency words are better remembered than otherwise equivalent low-frequency words. Neath and Quinlan (2021) found that although the usual high-frequency advantage was observed when subjects received a block of low-frequency lists first followed by a block of high-frequency lists, there was no frequency effect when subjects received a block of high-frequency lists followed by a block of low-frequency lists. In order to assess whether the block order effect simply reflects the inherent changeability of frequency effects, we manipulated concreteness, a much more stable effect.

Semantic Relatedness Effects in Serial Recall But Not in Serial Reconstruction of Order.

Lists of semantically related words are better recalled than lists of unrelated words on immediate serial recall tests. Prominent explanations for this beneficial effect of semantic relatedness, such as the item/order hypothesis, invoke differential contributions of item and order information and predict that on tests that de-emphasize item information, the effect of semantic relatedness will be abolished. The prediction is hard to assess because previous studies using reconstruction of order tests show conflicting and equivocal results.

Using preexperimental familiarity to compare the ICE and cue-overload accounts of context-dependent memory in item recognition.

In recognition, context effects often manifest as higher hit and false-alarm rates to probes tested in an old context compared with probes tested in a new context; sometimes, this concordant effect is accompanied by a discrimination advantage. According to the cue-overload account of context effects (Rutherford, 2004), context acts like any other cue, and thus context effects should be larger with lighter context loads. Conversely, the Item, Associated Context, and Ensemble (ICE) account (Murnane et al.

Additional evidence that valence does not affect serial recall.

In immediate serial recall, a canonical short-term memory task, it is well established that performance is affected by several sublexical, lexical, and semantic factors. One factor that receives a growing interest is valence, whether a word is categorised as positive (e.g.

Stimulus-based mirror effects in associative recognition revisited.

The mirror effect, the finding that a manipulation which increases the hit rate in recognition tests also decreases the false alarm rate, is held to be a regularity of memory. Neath et al. (in press) took advantage of the recent increase in the number of linguistic databases to create sets of stimuli that differed on one dimension but were more fully equated on other dimensions known to affect memory.

Valence does not affect recognition.

Valence refers to the extent to which a stimulus is viewed as negative or positive. One recent model of valence, the NEVER model (Bowen et al., 2018), predicts that in general negative words will be better remembered than positive or neutral words.

Stimulus-based mirror effects revisited.

The mirror effect is the finding that in recognition tests, a manipulation that increases the hit rate also decreases the false alarm rate. For example, low frequency words have a higher hit rate and a lower false alarm rate than high frequency words. Because the mirror effect is held to be a regularity of memory, it has had a pronounced influence on theories of recognition.

Memory without retrieval: Testing the direct-access account of the missing item task.

In the missing item task, two short lists are presented. The test list contains all but one of the items from the study list in a new random order and the task is to report which item from the study list is missing. Murdock and Smith (2005) found that the time to correctly respond with the missing item was independent of the position of the missing item and was also independent of the list length.

Valence does not affect serial recall.

Despite being the prototypical test of short-term/working memory, immediate serial recall is affected by numerous lexical and long-term memory factors. Within this large literature, very few studies have examined whether performance on the task is affected by valence, the extent to which a word is viewed as positive or negative. Whereas the NEVER model (Bowen, Kark, & Kensinger, 2018) makes the general prediction that negative words will be remembered better than positive words, two previous studies using serial recall have reported that positive words are better remembered than negative words.

Calculating semantic relatedness of lists of nouns using WordNet path length.

Lists of semantically related words are better recalled on immediate memory tests than otherwise equivalent lists of unrelated words. However, measuring the degree of relatedness is not straightforward. We report three experiments that assess the ability of various measures of semantic relatedness-including latent semantic analysis (LSA), GloVe, fastText, and a number of measures based on WordNet-to predict whether two lists of words will be differentially recalled.

The item/order account of word frequency effects: Evidence from serial order tests.

According to the item/order hypothesis, high-frequency words are processed more efficiently and therefore order information can be readily encoded. In contrast, low-frequency words are processed less efficiently and the focus on item-specific processing compromises order information. Most experiments testing this account use free recall, which has led to two problems: First, the role of order information is difficult to evaluate in free recall, and second, the data from free recall show all three possible patterns of results: memory for high-frequency words can be better than, the same as, or worse than that for low-frequency words.

Re-assessing age of acquisition effects in recognition, free recall, and serial recall.

Age of acquisition (AoA) refers to the age at which a person learns a word. Research has converged on the conclusion that early AoA words are processed more efficiently than late AoA words on a number of perceptual and reading tasks. However, only a few studies have investigated whether AoA affects memory on recognition, serial recall, and free recall tests, and the results are equivocal.

Dynamic Visual Noise Does Not Affect Memory for Fonts.

Dynamic visual noise (DVN) selectively impairs memory for some types of stimuli (e.g., colors, textures, concrete words), but not for others (e.

Concreteness and disagreement: Comment on Pollock (2018).

Pollock (Behavior Research Methods doi:10.3758/s13428-017-0938-y, Pollock, 2018) points out that most memory experiments using abstract and concrete words have a potential confound: Raters express more disagreement, on average, about the rating for an abstract word than for a concrete word, as evidenced by the larger standard deviation of the rating (SDR). Therefore, past demonstrations of the concreteness effect could be explained by the disagreement hypothesis: Words that engender disagreement (i.

Modeling list-strength and spacing effects using version 3 of the retrieving effectively from memory (REM.3) model and its superimposition-of-similar-images assumption.

Shiffrin and Steyvers (1997) introduced a model of recognition memory called retrieving effectively from memory (REM) and successfully applied it to a number of basic memory phenomena. REM incorporates differentiation, wherein item repetitions are accumulated in a single mnemonic trace rather than separate traces. This allows REM to account for several benchmark findings, including the null list-strength effect in recognition (Ratcliff, Clark, & Shiffrin, 1990).

Dynamic visual noise affects ill-defined, not well-defined, images.

Dynamic visual noise (DVN), a matrix of squares that randomly alternate between black and white, interferes with some but not all tasks that involve visuo-spatial processing. Although visual working memory is generally invoked to explain the detrimental effects of DVN, the failure of DVN to impair memory for some stimuli that should be processed via visual working memory has not been satisfactorily explained. The image-definition hypothesis proposes that DVN will impair only ill-defined, not well-defined, images.

Visual similarity effects in immediate serial recall and (sometimes) in immediate serial recognition.

Words that sound dissimilar are recalled better than otherwise comparable words that sound similar on both immediate serial recall and immediate serial recognition tests, the so-called acoustic similarity effect. Although studies using immediate serial recall have shown an analogous visual similarity effect, in which words that look dissimilar are recalled better than words that look similar, this effect has not been examined in immediate serial recognition. We derived a prediction from the Feature Model that a visual similarity effect will be observed in immediate serial recognition only when the items are acoustically dissimilar; the model predicts no effect when the items are acoustically similar.

A comparison of immediate serial recall and immediate serial recognition.

In an immediate serial recall task, participants are presented with a list of items that they must subsequently report back in the original presentation order. Although immediate serial recall has long been taken as the standard short-term and working memory task, a growing body of literature has instead made use of immediate serial recognition. In immediate serial recognition, a list of items is presented and subsequently represented, either in the exact same order or with two adjacent items swapped.