Productions Need Not Match Study Items to Confer a Production Advantage, But It Helps.

The production effect is the finding that, relative to silent reading, producing information at study (e.g., reading aloud) leads to a benefit in memory.

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.

The prod eff: Partially producing items moderates the production effect.

Current accounts of the production effect suggest that production leads to the encoding of additional production-associated features and/or better feature encoding. Thus, if it is the act of production that leads to the storage and/or enhanced encoding of these features, then less of this act should reduce the resulting production effect. In two experiments, we provide a direct test of this idea by manipulating how much of a given item is produced within a single mode of production (typing).

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.

Essays in honour of William E. Hockley: A Festschrift.

A Festschrift (the German word standing for feast-script) is a collection of essays to celebrate the significant contributions of a scholar to their respective field of studies. Here, it is our honour to introduce this special issue of the Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology as a Festschrift for William (Bill) E. Hockley to celebrate his rich scholarly contributions to the field of cognitive psychology, specifically on human memory.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In support of selective rehearsal: Double-item presentation in item-method directed forgetting.

Despite the substantial evidence highlighting the role of selective rehearsal in item-method directed forgetting, recent work has suggested that forgetting may occur as a function of an active inhibitory mechanism that is more effortful than elaborative rehearsal processes. In the present work, we test this hypothesis by implementing a double-item presentation within the item-method directed forgetting paradigm. Participants studied two unrelated items at a time.

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.

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.

Diffusion modeling of interference and decay in auditory short-term memory.

Decay and interference are two leading proposals for the cause of forgetting from working and/or short-term memory, and mathematical models of both processes exist. In the present study, we apply a computational model to data from a simple short-term memory task and demonstrate that decay and interference can co-occur in the same experimental paradigm, and that neither decay nor interference alone can account for all cases of forgetting.

Listening to the Picture-Superiority Effect.

The picture-superiority effect (PSE) refers to the finding that, all else being equal, pictures are remembered better than words ( Paivio & Csapo, 1973 ). Dual-coding theory (DCT; Paivio, 1991 ) is often used to explain the PSE. According to DCT, pictures are more likely to be encoded imaginally and verbally than words.

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.

Overwriting and intrusion in short-term memory.

Studies of interference in working and short-term memory suggest that irrelevant information may overwrite the contents of memory or intrude into memory. While some previous studies have reported greater interference when irrelevant information is similar to the contents of memory than when it is dissimilar, other studies have reported greater interference for dissimilar distractors than for similar distractors. In the present study, we find the latter effect in a paradigm that uses auditory tones as stimuli.