Distinctiveness models of memory and absolute identification: Evidence for local,not global, effects (original) (raw)
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The effect of interstimulus interval on sequential effects in absolute identification
The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 2009
In absolute identification experiments, the participant is asked to identify stimuli drawn from a small set of items which differ on a single physical dimension (e.g., ten tones which vary in frequency). Responses in these tasks show a striking pattern of sequential dependencies: The current response assimilates towards the immediately preceding stimulus but contrasts with the stimuli further back in the sequence. This pattern has been variously interpreted as resulting from confusion of items in memory, shifts in response criteria or the action of selective attention, and these interpretations have been incorporated into competing formal models of absolute identification performance. In two experiments, we demonstrate that lengthening the time between trials increases contrast to both the previous stimulus and the stimulus two trials back.
Distinctiveness effects in recall
Memory & Cognition, 1998
Unusual information is generally recalled better than common information (the distinctiveness effect). Differential processing accounts propose that the effect occurs because unusual material elicits encoding processes that are different from those elicited by common material, and strong versions of these accounts predict distinctiveness effects in between-list as well as within-list designs. Experiment 1 employed a between-list design and manipulated presentation rate. Contrary to differential processing predictions, no distinctiveness effect emerged, nor did recall patterns for atypical versus common sentences differ as a function of presentation rate. Experiment 2 further tested differential processing accounts as well as representation accounts via a within-list manipulation and conditions that included experimenter-provided elaborations. Distinctiveness effects emerged in all conditions and, contrary to differential processing predictions, the pattern of recall in the elaborated conditions did not differ from that in the unelaborated conditions. Taken together, the results of this study lend more support to a representation view that suggests mechanisms related to the representation and subsequent retrievability of elements in the memory record playa major role in the distinctiveness effect. One of the more robust findings reported in the memory literature is that stimuli that are in some way unusual are generally remembered better than stimuli that are not
Distinctiveness in serial memory for spatial information
Memory & Cognition, 2010
Several studies have shown that recall performance depends on the extent to which an item differs from other items in a sequence (the distinctiveness effect; see, e.g., Kelley & Nairne, 2001). Distinctiveness effects, however, have been demonstrated mainly in the verbal domain. The present study extends distinctiveness effects to the spatial domain. In two experiments, participants recalled the order in which series of spatially located dots had been presented. Item discriminability was varied within the sequence by manipulating the duration of the interval inserted between the presentation of the dots (Experiment 1) and the perceptual characteristics of the stimuli (Experiment 2). The results showed that these manipulations in the spatial domain produce distinctiveness effects similar to those observed with verbal material (see, e.g., Neath & Crowder, 1990) and suggest that distinctiveness models of memory should take into account the processing of spatial information.
Dissociating Speed and Accuracy in Absolute Identiļ¬cation: The Effect of Unequal Stimulus Spacing
Identification accuracy for sets of perceptually discriminable stimuli ordered on a single dimension (e.g., line length) is remarkably low, indicating a fundamental limit on information processing capacity. This surprising limit has naturally led to a focus on measuring and modeling choice probability in absolute identification research. We show that choice response time (RT) results can enrich our understanding of absolute identification by investigating dissociation between RT and accuracy as a function of stimulus spacing. The dissociation is predicted by the SAMBA model of absolute identification (Brown, Marley, Dockin, & Heathcote, 2008), but cannot easily be accommodated by other theories. We show that SAMBA provides an accurate, parameter free, account of the dissociation that emerges from the architecture of the model and the physical attributes of the stimuli, rather than through numerical adjustment. This violation of the pervasive monotonic relationship between RT and accuracy has implications for model development, which are discussed.
2008
Three experiments examined the effects of position distinctiveness, item familiarity, and frequency of presentation on serial position functions in a task involving reconstructing the order of a subset of 12 names in a list of 20 names. Three different serial position conditions were compared in which the subset of names occurred in Positions 1-12, 5-16, or 9-20, with all subsets including Positions 9-12. The serial positions were defined temporally in Experiments 1 and 2 and spatially in Experiment 3. The serial position functions in all three experiments were well predicted by Murdock's [Murdock, B. B., Jr. (1960). The distinctiveness of stimuli. Psychological Review, 67, 16-31] account in terms of the distinctiveness of the absolute positions. Experiment 3 also revealed significant effects of item familiarity and frequency of presentation on order reconstruction.
The mnemonic value of perceptual identification
1988
In four experiments, subjects were required to name words presented on a CRT screen. On generate trials, the words were presented quickly, at a point where roughly half could be identified correctly; on read trials, the items were presented for a full second, allowing for rapid and easy naming. A surprise recognition test for the presented items then revealed a substantial retention advantage for the briefly presented items, but no similar advantage was produced in recall. It is argued that under rapid viewing conditions subjects may fail to extract enough visual features to allow for immediate resolution, requiring the initiation of a kind of data-driven generation process. This latter process then produces a generation effect for the briefly presented items compared with the read items, but only on a retention test that shows sensitivity to data-driven processing. These results are discussed from the standpoint of current theoretical views on the generation effect. People will remember a familiar verbal item better if it has been self-generated during study rather than read (e.g.
A contextual interference account of distinctiveness effects in recognition
Memory & Cognition, 2006
Several recent studies have found that memory for words is affected not only by whether the font studied during encoding is reinstated at test (Graf & Ryan, 1990), but also by the number of other words that share the font (Diana, Peterson, & Reder, 2004; Reder, Donavos, & Erickson, 2002). This effect has been called the font fan effect, because the postulated memory representations vary in the number of contextual associations that "fan" out from the node that represents a particular font (see Figure 1). The mechanistic account of this result proposed by Reder et al. (2002) assumes that the amount of activation that spreads from the font source to the node representing the encoding event varies as a function of the fan or number of competitors that share the activation. Further details about the font fan effect on memory will be discussed later. The important issue to understand at this juncture is that these memory effects have been assumed to result from retrieval processes. Alternatively, it is possible that the font fan effect reflects an effect of distinctiveness, whereby participants pay more attention to distinctive fonts (i.e., those that were shown fewer times during encoding). It has been well established in the memory literature that distinctive stimuli are better remembered than nondistinctive stimuli, and, conceivably, the effect of "contextual fan" of the features that we manipulate might well be only an expression of this distinctiveness. For example, it has been shown that both semantically distinctive words (e.g.,
Absolute identification is surprisingly faster with more closely spaced stimuli
2006
Bow and set size effects on response times in absolute identification mirror the effects on accuracy: Central stimuli and stimuli in large sets are responded to more slowly and less accurately. In an analysis of the response time data from Experiment 1 of N. Stewart, G. D. , involving the absolute identification of tone frequency (pitch), we find that in contrast to the accuracy data, where widely spaced stimuli are responded to slightly more accurately than narrowly spaced stimuli, widely spaced stimuli receive slower responses than narrowly spaced stimuli. This result poses an additional challenge for models of absolute identification, as accuracy and response times are not jointly linked to some unified difficulty factor.
Memory for detail in item versus associative recognition
Memory & Cognition, 2001
Some studies have shown that, although repetition increases the familiarity of a stimulus, it does not improve memory for its details. Because memory for associative information is thought to require memory for the details of study presentation, the effects of repetition on associative recognition were examined in the present study. The pattern of results was similar to that found for the recognition of item details: Repetition increased the familiarity of the individual items within each pair to a greater extent than it improved memory for their specific pairings.