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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Testing a Strategy-Disruption Account of the List-Strength Effect.

Presenting items multiple times on a study list increases their memorability, a process known as item strengthening. The list-strength effect (LSE) refers to the finding that, compared to unstrengthened (pure) lists, lists for which a subset of the items have been strengthened produce enhanced memory for the strengthened items and depressed memory for the unstrengthened items. Although the LSE is found in free recall (Tulving & Hastie, 1972), it does not occur in recognition (Ratcliff et al.

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.

The list-length effect occurs in cued recall with the retroactive design but not the proactive design.

An ongoing debate in the memory literature concerns whether the list-length effect (better memory for short lists compared with long lists) exists in item recognition (Annis, Lenes, Westfall, Criss, & Malmberg, 2015; Dennis, Lee, & Kinnell, 2008). This debate was initiated when Dennis and Humphreys (2001) showed that, when confounds present in earlier list-length experiments were controlled, the list-length effect disappeared. The issue has yet to be settled.

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.

Short- and long-term memory tasks predict working memory performance, and vice versa.

The Brown-Peterson, operation span, and continual distractor tasks all require people to retain information while performing a distractor task. Scale Independent Memory, Perception, and Learning (SIMPLE), a local relative distinctiveness model, has been fit to aspects of each task and offers the same explanation for each: the distractor task serves to space the items out in time and memory performance depends on the relative distinctiveness of the target item at the time of recall. If this is correct, it follows that performance on all three tasks should correlate, even though the tasks have, at various times, been ascribed to different memory systems, short-term memory, working memory, and long-term memory, respectively.

Set size and long-term memory/lexical effects in immediate serial recall: Testing the impurity principle.

The impurity principle (Surprenant & Neath, 2009b) states that because memory is fundamentally reconstructive, tasks and processes are not pure. This principle is based on a long line of research showing the effects of one memory system or process on another. Although the principle is widely accepted, many researchers appear hesitant to endorse it in extreme edge cases.

Increasing word distinctiveness eliminates the picture superiority effect in recognition: Evidence for the physical-distinctiveness account.

A well-established phenomenon in the memory literature is the picture superiority effect-the finding that, all else being equal, memory is better for pictures than for words (Paivio & Csapo, 1973). Theorists have attributed pictures' mnemonic advantage to dual coding (Paivio, 1971), conceptual distinctiveness (Hamilton & Geraci, 2006), and physical distinctiveness (Mintzer & Snodgrass, 1999). Here, we present a novel test of the physical-distinctiveness account of picture superiority: If the greater physical variability of pictures relative to words is responsible for their mnemonic benefit, then increasing the distinctiveness of words and/or reducing the physical variability of pictures should reduce or eliminate the picture superiority effect.

Word length, set size, and lexical factors: Re-examining what causes the word length effect.

The word length effect, better recall of lists of short (fewer syllables) than long (more syllables) words has been termed a benchmark effect of working memory. Despite this, experiments on the word length effect can yield quite different results depending on set size and stimulus properties. Seven experiments are reported that address these 2 issues.

Three Semantic Serial Position Functions at the Same Time.

Serial position functions are so ubiquitous that researchers frequently use buffer items to control for primacy and recency effects regardless of the memory task. However, most theories offer different explanations for different types of tests. In contrast, the relative distinctiveness principle offers one explanation for all tasks: items with fewer close neighbors will generally be more distinct and therefore better remembered than items with more close neighbors.

The effect of lexical factors on recall from working memory: Generalizing the neighborhood size effect.

The word-length effect, the finding that lists of short words are better recalled than lists of long words, is 1 of the 4 benchmark phenomena that guided development of the phonological loop component of working memory. However, previous work has noted a confound in word-length studies: The short words used had more orthographic neighbors (valid words that can be made by changing a single letter in the target word) than long words. The confound is that words with more neighbors are better recalled than otherwise comparable words with fewer neighbors.

Relatively effortless listening promotes understanding and recall of medical instructions in older adults.

Communication success under adverse conditions requires efficient and effective recruitment of both bottom-up (sensori-perceptual) and top-down (cognitive-linguistic) resources to decode the intended auditory-verbal message. Employing these limited capacity resources has been shown to vary across the lifespan, with evidence indicating that younger adults out-perform older adults for both comprehension and memory of the message. This study examined how sources of interference arising from the speaker (message spoken with conversational vs.