Is memory organized by temporal contiguity?

The hypotheses that memories are ordered according to time and that contiguity is central to learning have recently reemerged in the human memory literature. This article reviews some of the key empirical findings behind this revival and some of the evidence against it, and finds the evidence for temporal organization unconvincing. A central problem is that, as many memory experiments are done, they have a prospective, as well as a retrospective, component.

Research Strategy in the Study of Memory: Fads, Fallacies, and the Search for the "Coordinates of Truth".

This article presents an evaluation of research strategy in the psychology of memory. To the extent that a strategy can be discerned, it appears less than optimal in several respects. It relates only weakly to subjective experience, it does not clearly differentiate between structure and strategy, and it is oriented more toward remembering which words were in a list than to the diverse functions that memory serves.

How does repetition affect memory? Evidence from judgments of recency.

Four experiments were done to investigate the effects of repetition on judgment of recency (JOR). Experiment 1 showed that repetition can make an item seem either more recent or less recent than a nonrepeated item, depending on presentation spacing. Experiments 2-4 showed that subjects are able to judge the recency of a repeated item's first presentation or of its second presentation with a high degree of independence, especially if they report that the item occurred twice.

Memory strength and recency judgments.

Two experiments were done to examine the effect of memory strength on numerical judgment of recency (JOR). In one experiment, the strong versus weak manipulation was defined by stimulus type (pictures vs. names); and in the other, it was defined by long versus short study durations of pictures.

Time versus items in judgment of recency.

In the numerical judgment of recency (JOR) task, subjects judge how many items have intervened since the test item was previously presented. Two experiments were conducted to determine whether the basis of JOR is the age of the memory (time) or the number of intervening items. Subjects went through a long list that was made up of alternating fast blocks and slow blocks, but the block structure was disguised by probabilistic selection of a short or long intertrial interval.

Judgment of frequency versus recognition confidence: repetition and recursive reminding.

Judgments of presentation frequency (JOFs) were compared with recognition confidence ratings (RCRs) in a single memory experiment. Two differences were found: (1) Relative to the effect of exposure duration, frequency had a larger effect on JOF than it had on RCR. (2) Replicating a finding by Proctor (1977), normalized memory operating characteristic (zMOC) curves for JOF had slopes greater than 1.

Robert Hooke's model of memory.

In 1682 the scientist and inventor Robert Hooke read a lecture to the Royal Society of London, in which he described a mechanistic model of human memory. Yet few psychologists today seem to have heard of Hooke's memory model. The lecture addressed questions of encoding, memory capacity, repetition, retrieval, and forgetting--some of these in a surprisingly modern way.

Judgments of recency and their relation to recognition memory.

Subjects went through a list of 550 high- and low-frequency words (Experiment 1) or concrete and abstract words (Experiment 2) in which individual items were repeated at lags of 5 to 30 other items. They made old versus new recognition decisions on each word and followed each "old" response with a numerical judgment of recency (JOR). Recognition judgments displayed the mirror effect.

Context matching and judgments of recency.

An experiment was done to test a context-matching explanation of memory for recency under steady-state conditions. Subjects went through a list of 550 names, in which individual names were repeated at lags of 5-30 other items. The names were shown in two different styles or contexts.