When unfamiliarity matters: Changing environmental context between study and test affects recognition memory for unfamiliar stimuli (original) (raw)
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition
2012
Emotions have important and powerful effects on cognitive processes. Although it is well established that memory influences liking, we sought to document whether liking influences memory. A series of 6 experiments examined whether liking is related to recognition memory for novel music excerpts. In the general method, participants listened to a set of music excerpts and rated how much they liked each one. After a delay, they heard the same excerpts plus an equal number of novel excerpts and made recognition judgments, which were then examined in conjunction with liking ratings. Higher liking ratings were associated with improved recognition performance after a 10-min (Experiment 1) or 24-hr (Experiment 2) delay between the exposure and test phases. The findings were similar when participants made liking ratings after recognition judgments (Experiments 3 and 6), when possible confounding effects of similarity and familiarity were held constant (Experiment 4), and when a deeper level of processing was encouraged for all the excerpts (Experiment 5). Recognition did not vary as a function of liking for previously unheard excerpts (Experiment 6). The results implicate a direct association between liking and recognition. Considered jointly with previous findings, it is now clear that listeners tend to like music that they remember and to remember music that they like.
Comparing the Effects of Testing and Restudying on Recollection in Recognition Memory
Experimental Psychology (formerly Zeitschrift für Experimentelle Psychologie), 2011
found that relative to studying words once, taking an initial test increased recollection, whereas it did not affect familiarity. However, an open question remains what the effect is of testing on recollection and familiarity relative to restudying. We conducted four experiments to address this question. Experiment 1 was a replication of Chan and McDermott's third experiment. In Experiment 2, restudied words were compared with tested words. In Experiment 3 we replicated Experiment 2 with the exception that feedback was provided after each initial-test trial. Finally, in Experiment 4, stronger cues were used during the initial test without feedback. The results showed a recollection advantage of testing over restudying, but only when feedback was given during the test or when stronger cues were employed. Further, recognition decisions were more familiarity based for restudied words than for tested words.
Neuropsychology, 2003
Whether the format of a recognition memory task influences the contribution of recollection and familiarity to performance is a matter of debate. The authors investigated this issue by comparing the performance of 64 young (mean age ϭ 21.7 years; mean education ϭ 14.5 years) and 62 older participants (mean age ϭ 64.4 years; mean education ϭ 14.2 years) on a yes-no and a forced-choice recognition task for unfamiliar faces using the rememberknow-guess procedure. Familiarity contributed more to forced-choice than to yes-no performance. Moreover, older participants, who showed a decrease in recollection together with an increase in familiarity, performed better on the forced-choice task than on the yes-no task, whereas younger participants showed the opposite pattern.
Scientific Reports
Sensory processing sensitivity (SPS) is a biologically-based trait associated with greater reactivity to both positive and negative environments. Recent studies suggest that the activity following learning can support or hinder memory retention. Here, we employed a within-subject experiment to examine whether and how individual differences in SPS contribute to differences in memory retention. Sixty-four participants encoded and immediately recalled two word lists: one followed by 8-min of eyes-closed, wakeful resting; and the other by a distraction task. After 7 days, participants completed a surprise free recall test for both word lists. If participants wakefully rested after encoding, memory retention increased as a function of higher SPS. However, in the distraction condition, a negative curvilinear relationship indicated that memory retention was especially hindered for highly sensitive individuals. These results suggest that individual differences in SPS are an important factor...
Aging, Neuropsychology, and Cognition, 2010
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Stimulus generalization, context change, and forgetting
Psychological Bulletin, 1999
Forgetting is often attributed to retrieval failure caused by background contextual cues changing over time. However, generalization between stimuli may increase over time and make them increasingly interchangeable. If this effect occurs with contextual cues, it might cancel any effect of a changing context. The authors review the evidence and suggest a resolution of this paradox. Although generalization gradients can change over time, the effect is not always strong. Increased responding to nontarget stimuli is not often shown, and few studies have demonstrated such changes with contextual cues in a way that rules out other interpretations. Even this example of forgetting may be caused by retrieval failure. The physical contexts manipulated in learning and memory experiments themselves occur within a superordinate temporal context and can thus be forgotten with no inherent challenge to a contextchange account of forgetting. Spontaneous forgetting, the loss in learned performance that is often observed when time elapses between learning and remembering, is presumably caused by several mechanisms. The memory trace might decay over time, or information acquired earlier or later might increasingly interfere with it (proactive and retroactive interference, respectively). This article focuses on retrieval failure, another factor that has received considerable attention over the last few decades (e.g., . In this case, memory performance might deteriorate when an individual fails to access material that is otherwise still available in the memory store. The idea that forgetting involves retrieval failure is consistent with evidence suggesting that forgotten information can be recovered by the presentation of retrieval cues (e.g., . Thus, information may remain available, yet become less accessible over time (e.g., . What exactly causes the decrease in accessibility? Ordinarily, retrieval is best when there is a match between the conditions present during encoding and the conditions present during retrieval (e.g., ; when there is a mismatch, retrieval failure occurs. It is now widely assumed that the passage of time can create a mismatch
Psychophysiology, 2009
Event-related potential (ERP) frontal (300-500 ms) and parietal (500-700 ms) episodic memory (EM) effects are thought to reflect, respectively, familiarity and recollection. However, as most ERP studies use preexperimentally familiar items, an alternative idea is that the frontal EM effect reflects conceptual priming. Repetition of unnameable symbols was used to assess modulations of the putative ERP indices of familiarity and recollection. The same symbols were viewed in each of 4 study/test blocks. Increases in familiarity and conceptual processing of symbols did not modulate the frontal EM effect, suggesting that it reflects neither familiarity nor conceptual priming. The magnitude of the parietal EM effect increased and its onset latency decreased across tests for items given remember (R) but not know (K) judgments. R and K old-new topographies differed. These findings support dual-process proposals that familiarity-and recollection-based processes are distinct.
Age-Related Changes in the use of Study Context to Increase Recollection
Aging, Neuropsychology, and Cognition, 2009
We examined how context presented at study affects recollection of words in younger and older adults. In Experiment 1, participants studied words presented with a picture of a face (context-rich condition) or a rectangle (context-weak condition), and subsequently made 'Remember', 'Know', or 'New' judgments to words presented alone. Younger, but not older, adults showed higher Remember accuracy following rich-than weak-context trials. In Experiment 2, we manipulated the type of processing engaged during the encoding of contextword pairs. Younger and older adults studied words presented with a picture of a face under a surface feature (gender) or binding feature (match) instruction condition. Both age groups showed higher Remember accuracy in the binding than surface instruction condition. Results suggest that providing rich contextual detail at encoding boosts later item recollection in younger adults. Older adults, however, do not spontaneously engage in the processes required to boost recollection, though instructional manipulation during encoding lessens this deficit.
Context effects in recognition memory: The role of familiarity and recollection
Consciousness and cognition, 2004
A variant of the process dissociation procedure was coupled with a manipulation of response signal lag to assess whether manipulations of context affect one or both of the familiarity and search processes described by the dual process model of recognition. Participants studied a list of word pairs (context + target) followed by a recognition test with target words presented in the same or different context, and in the same or different form as study (singular/plural). Participants were asked to recognize any target word regardless of changes to form (inclusion), or to only recognise words that were presented in the same form (exclusion). The standard context reinstatement effect was evident even at the short response lags. Analyses of the estimates of the contributions of familiarity and search processes suggest that the context effect demonstrated here can be attributed in part to the influence of familiarity on recognition, whereas the effect on recollection was less clear.