Semantic richness theory predicts that words with richer, more distinctive semantic representations should facilitate performance in a word recognition memory task. We investigated the contribution of multiple aspects of sensorimotor experience--those relating to the body, communication, food, and objects--to word recognition memory, by analyzing…

Contemporary theories of semantic representation posit that social experience is an important source of information for deriving meaning. However, there is a lack of behavioral evidence in support of this proposal. The aim of the present work was to test whether words' degree of social relevance, or "socialness", influences…

Semantic similarity between stimuli can lead to false memories and can also potentially cause retroactive interference (RI) for veridical memories. Here, participants first learned spatial locations for "critical" words that reliably produce false memories in the Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm. Next, participants centrally viewed…

Remembering facilitates future remembering. This benefit of practicing by active retrieval, as compared to more passive relearning, is known as the testing effect and is one of the most robust findings in the memory literature. It has typically been assessed using verbal materials such as word pairs, sentences, or educational texts. We here…

The conjoint-recognition model (CRM) implements fuzzy-trace theory's opponent process conception of false memory. Within the family of measurement models that separate the memory effects of recollection and familiarity, CRM is the only one that accomplishes this for false as well as true memory. We assembled a corpus of 537 sets of…

Item memory and source memory are different aspects of episodic remembering. To investigate metamemory differences between them, the authors assessed systematic differences between predictions of item memory via Judgments of Learning (JOLs) and source memory via Judgments of Source (JOSs). Schema-based expectations affect JOLs and JOSs…

Retrieval enhances subsequent memory more than restudy (i.e., the testing effect), demonstrating the encoding (or reencoding) effects of retrieval. It is important to delineate the nature of the encoding effects of retrieval especially in comparison to traditional encoding processes. The current study examined if the level of retrieval, analogous…

The phenomenological experience of lexical retrieval often involves repeated, active attempts to retrieve phonologically and/or semantically related information. However, the influence of these multiple retrieval attempts on subsequent lexical retrieval is presently unknown. We investigated the influence of passively viewing or actively retrieving…

We removed a key uncertainty in the Deese/Roediger/McDermott (DRM) illusion. The mean backward associative strength (MBAS) of DRM lists is the best-known predictor of this illusion, but it is confounded with semantic relations between lists and critical distractors. Thus, it is unclear whether associative relations, semantic relations, or both…

The mechanisms underlying native (L1) and non-native (L2) sentence processing have been widely debated. One account of potential L1/L2 differences is that L2 sentence processing underuses syntactic information and relies heavily on semantic and surface cues. Recently, an alternative account has been proposed, which argues that the source of L1/L2…

People often misrecognize objects that are similar to those they have previously encountered. These mnemonic discrimination errors are attributed to shared memory representations (gist) typically characterized in terms of meaning. In two experiments, we investigated multiple semantic and perceptual relations that may contribute: at the concept…

In recognition memory, anything that is objectively new is necessarily not-old, and anything that is objectively old is necessarily not-new. Therefore, judging whether a test item is new is logically equivalent to judging whether it is old, and conversely. Nevertheless, a series of 10 experiments showed that old? and new? judgments did not produce…

Based on the classic distinction between semantic and episodic memory, people answer general-knowledge questions by querying their semantic memory. And yet, an appeal of trivia games is the variety of memory experiences they arouse--including the recollection of episodic details. We report the first in-depth exploration of the memory states that…

Two broad approaches characterize the type of evidence that mediates recognition memory: discrete state and continuous. Discrete-state models posit a thresholded memory process that provides accurate information about an item (it is detected) or, failing that, no mnemonic information about the item. Continuous models, in contrast, posit the…

This article examines how semantic memory processes influence the items that are considered by decision makers in memory-based preferential choice. Experiments 1A through 1C ask participants to list the choice items that come to their minds while deliberating in a variety of everyday choice settings. These experiments use semantic space models to…