When participants must classify their recognition experiences as remembering or knowing, variables often have dissociative effects on the two judgments. In contrast, when participants independently rate recollection "and" familiarity only parallel effects have been reported. To investigate this discrepancy we compared the effects of masked priming…

According to contextual-variability theory, experiences encoded at different times tend to be associated with different contextual states. The gradual evolution of context implies that spaced items will be associated with more distinct contextual states, and thus have more unique retrieval cues, than items presented in proximity. Ross and Landauer…

We investigated the mechanisms by which fillers, such as "uh" and "um", affect memory for discourse. Participants listened to and attempted to recall recorded passages adapted from "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland". The type and location of interruptions were manipulated through digital splicing. In Experiment 1, we tested a processing time…

Retrieving information from memory produces more learning than does being presented with the same information, and the benefits of such retrieval appear to grow as the delay before a final recall test grows longer. Recall tests, however, measure the number of items that are above a recall threshold, not memory strength per se. According to the…

When people are asked to perform actions, they remember those actions better than if they are asked to talk about the same actions. But when people talk, they often gesture with their hands, thus adding an action component to talking. The question we asked in this study was whether producing gesture along with speech makes the information encoded…

This paper addresses two Global Matching predictions in embedded-category designs: the within-category choice advantage in forced-choice recognition (superior discrimination for test choices comprising a same-category distractor); and the category length effect in forced-choice and old/new recognition (a loss in discriminability with increases in…

Many accounts of working memory posit specialized storage mechanisms for the maintenance of serial order. We explore an alternative, that maintenance is achieved through temporary activation in the language production architecture. Four experiments examined the extent to which the phonological similarity effect can be explained as a sublexical…

A recently proposed theory of the spacing effect [Raaijmakers, J. G. W. (2003). Spacing and repetition effects in human memory: application of the SAM model. "Cognitive Science," 27, 431-452.] suggests that the spacing effect is conditional on study-phase retrieval leading to two groups of students showing different magnitudes of the spacing…

The strongest support for feedback in speech perception comes from evidence of apparent lexical influence on prelexical fricative-stop compensation for coarticulation. Lexical knowledge (e.g., that the ambiguous final fricative of "Christma?" should be [s]) apparently influences perception of following stops. We argue that all such previous…

When recognition probes seem familiar but their presentation cannot be recollected, dual-process models predict that they will be attributed to too many presentation contexts--most dramatically, to multiple contexts that are mutually contradictory. This is the phenomenon of episodic over-distribution. In the conjoint-recognition and…

Do the operating characteristics of memory continue to bear the imprints of ancestral selection pressures? Previous work in our laboratory has shown that human memory may be specially tuned to retain information processed in terms of its survival relevance. A few seconds of survival processing in an incidental learning context can produce recall…

Reports two experiments on mechanism of interference in working memory. Experiment 1 shows that a target word in a memory list, which bears high similarity to one of 4 words read aloud in the retention interval, is recalled less well than a control word. A second target word, not similar to any word read aloud but with all its phonemes repeated…

The effects of associative strength and gist relations on rates of children's and adults' true and false memories were examined in three experiments. Children aged 5-11 and university-aged adults participated in a standard Deese/Roediger-McDermott false memory task using DRM and category lists in two experiments and in the third, children…

Recognition memory experiments are an important source of empirical constraints for theories of memory. Unfortunately, standard methods for analyzing recognition memory data have problems that are often severe enough to prevent clear answers being obtained. A key example is whether longer lists lead to poorer recognition performance. The presence…

We tested the impact of associative strength and retrieval heuristics in false source memory. We arranged 12-item associative lists in descending order of backward associative strength to a critical non-presented item and then split them into 6-item sub-lists at the median. High- and low-strength sub-lists were correlated with presentation source.…