Source memory enhancement for emotional words.

The influence of emotional stimuli on source memory was investigated by using emotionally valenced words. The words were colored blue or yellow (Experiment 1) or surrounded by a blue or yellow frame (Experiment 2). Participants were asked to associate the words with the colors. In both experiments, emotionally valenced words elicited enhanced free recall compared with nonvalenced words; however, recognition memory was not affected. Source memory for the associated color was also enhanced for emotional words, suggesting that even memory for contextual information is benefited by emotional stimuli. This effect was not due to the ease of semantic clustering of emotional words because semantically related words were not associated with enhanced source memory, despite enhanced recall (Experiment 3). It is suggested that enhancement resulted from facilitated arousal or attention, which may act to increase organization processes important for source memory. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Lexical characteristics of words used in emotional Stroop experiments.

Validity of the emotional Stroop task hinges on equivalence between the emotion and the control words in terms of lexical features related to word recognition. The authors evaluated the lexical features of 1,033 words used in 32 published emotional Stroop studies. Emotion words were significantly lower in frequency of use, longer in length, and had smaller orthographic neighborhoods than words used as controls. These lexical features contribute to slower word recognition and hence are likely to contribute to delayed latencies in color naming. The often-replicated slowdown in color naming of emotion words may be due, in part, to lexical differences between the emotion and control words used in the majority of such studies to date. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Metacognition and False Recognition in Alzheimer's Disease: Further Exploration of the Distinctiveness Heuristic.

The distinctiveness heuristic is a response mode in which participants expect to remember vivid details of an experience and make recognition decisions on the basis of this metacognitive expectation. The authors examined whether the distinctiveness heuristic could be engaged to reduce false recognition in a repetition-lag paradigm in patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD). Patients with AD were able to use the distinctiveness heuristic--though not selectively--and thus they showed reduction of both true and false recognition. The authors suggest that patients with AD can engage in decision strategies on the basis of the metacognitive expectation associated with use of the distinctiveness heuristic, but the patients' episodic memory impairment limits both the scope and effectiveness of such strategies. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The role of memory activation in creating false memories of encoding context.

Using 3 experiments, I examined false memory for encoding context by presenting Deese–Roediger–McDermott themes (Deese, 1959; Roediger & McDermott, 1995) in usual-looking fonts and by testing related, but unstudied, lure items in a font that was shown during encoding. In 2 of the experiments, testing lure items in the font used to study their associated themes increased false recognition relative to testing lure items in a font that was used to study a different lure’s theme. Further, studying a larger number of associates exacerbated the influence of testing lure items in a font used to study their associated themes. Finally, testing lures in a font that was encoded many times, but was not used to present the lures’ studied associates, increased lure errors more than testing lures in a font that was encoded relatively fewer times. These results favor the explanation of false recognition offered by global-matching models of recognition memory over the explanations of activation-monitoring theory and fuzzy-trace theory. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Sensitivity reductions in false recognition: A measure of false memories with stronger theoretical implications.

Signal detection analyses of recognition memory indicate that a bias to respond "old" is large for critical words that are centrally related with previously encoded word lists, is small for words that are less related, and is not observed for unrelated words. Also, recognition sensitivity has not been previously shown to differ between those conditions, which has focused debate over how to explain false recognition on the bias differences. In 3 experiments, critical-word sensitivity was lower than sensitivity for other word types, but related-word sensitivity was not lower than sensitivity for unrelated words. Extant models that predict reduced critical-word sensitivity also predict lower sensitivity for related words than for unrelated words. These results provide crucial new constraints on theoretical explanations of false memories. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Reduced negativity effect in older adults' memory for emotional pictures: The heterogeneity-homogeneity list paradigm.

Using the heterogeneity-homogeneity list paradigm, the authors investigated 48 young adults' (20-30 years) and 48 older adults' (65-75 years) recognition memory for emotional pictures. The authors obtained no evidence for a positivity bias in older adults' memory: Age differences were primarily driven by older adults' diminished ability to remember negative pictures. The authors further found a strong effect of list types: Pictures, particularly neutral ones, were better recognized in homogeneous (blocked) lists than in heterogeneous (mixed) ones. Results confirm those of a previous study by D. Grühn, J. Smith, and P. B. Baltes (2005) that used a different type of to-be-remembered material, that is, pictures instead of words. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

False memory in aging: Effects of emotional valence on word recognition accuracy.

Memory is susceptible to distortions. Valence and increasing age are variables known to affect memory accuracy and may increase false alarm production. Interaction between these variables and their impact on false memory was investigated in 36 young (18-28 years) and 36 older (61-83 years) healthy adults. At study, participants viewed lists of neutral words orthographically related to negative, neutral, or positive critical lures (not presented). Memory for these words was subsequently tested with a remember-know procedure. At test, items included the words seen at study and their associated critical lures, as well as sets of orthographically related neutral words not seen at study and their associated unstudied lures. Positive valence was shown to have two opposite effects on older adults' discrimination of the lures: It improved correct rejection of unstudied lures but increased false memory for critical lures (i.e., lures associated with words studied previously). Thus, increased salience triggered by positive valence may disrupt memory accuracy in older adults when discriminating among similar events. These findings likely reflect a source memory deficit due to decreased efficiency in cognitive control processes with aging. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

On the role of individual items in recognition memory and metacognition: Challenges for signal detection theory.

The authors tested the role of individual items in recognition memory using a forced-choice paradigm with face stimuli. They constructed distractor stimuli using morphing procedures that were similar to two parent faces and then compared a studied morph against an unstudied morph that was similar to two studied parents. The similarity of the parent faces was carefully balanced so that the choosing rates for the studied and unstudied morphs were approximately equal. Despite being equally likely to choose the studied and the unstudied morph, participants were systematically more confident when choosing the studied morph. This result is incompatible with Gaussian signal detection theory, even with unequal variances for targets and distractors. The authors propose an extension of an extant sampling model, SimSample, which provides a qualitative and quantitative account of the confidence and recognition dissociation. The results suggest that observers make contact with individual items when making recognition judgments with faces and that the structure of the sampling and decision process naturally leads to this dissociation of confidence and recognition. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

On the nature of associative information in recognition memory.

In a typical associative-recognition task, participants must distinguish between intact word pairs (both words previously studied together) and rearranged word pairs (both words previously studied but as part of different pairs). The familiarity of the individual items on this task is uninformative because all of the items were seen before, so the only way to solve the task is to rely on associative information. Prior research suggests that associative information is recall-like in nature and may therefore be an all-or-none variable. The present research reports several experiments in which some pairs were strengthened during list presentation. The resulting hit rates and false alarm rates, and an analysis of the corresponding receiver operating characteristic plots, suggest that participants rely heavily on item information when making an associative-recognition decision (to no avail) and that associative information may be best thought of as a some-or-none variable. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Memory distortion in people reporting abduction by aliens.

False memory creation was examined in people who reported having recovered memories of traumatic events that are unlikely to have occurred: abduction by space aliens. A variant of the Deese/Roediger-McDermott paradigm (J. Deese, 1959; H. L. Roediger III & K. B. McDermott, 1995) was used to examine false recall and false recognition in 3 groups: people reporting recovered memories of alien abduction, people who believe they were abducted by aliens but have no memories, and people who deny having been abducted by aliens. Those reporting recovered and repressed memories of alien abduction were more prone than control participants to exhibit false recall and recognition. The groups did not differ in correct recall or recognition. Hypnotic suggestibility, depressive symptoms, and schizotypic features were significant predictors of false recall and false recognition. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

False recognition of pictures versus words in Alzheimer's disease: The distinctiveness heuristic.

False recognition of semantic associates can be reduced when older adults also study pictures representing each associate. D. L. Schacter, L. Israel, and C. Racine (1999) attributed this reduction to the operation of a distinctiveness heuristic: a response mode in which participants demand access to detailed recollections to support a positive recognition decision. The authors examined patients with probable Alzheimer's disease (AD) and older adults with this paradigm. Half of the participants studied pictures and auditory words; the other half studied visual and auditory words. Older adults who studied pictures were able to reduce their false alarms compared with those who studied words only. AD patients who studied pictures were unable to reduce their false alarms compared with those who studied words only and, in fact, exhibited trends toward greater false recognition. Implications for understanding semantic memory in AD patients are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Aging and emotional memory: The forgettable nature of negative images for older adults.

Two studies examined age differences in recall and recognition memory for positive, negative, and neutral stimuli. In Study 1, younger, middle-aged, and older adults were shown images on a computer screen and, after a distraction task, were asked first to recall as many as they could and then to identify previously shown images from a set of old and new ones. The relative number of negative images compared with positive and neutral images recalled decreased with each successively older age group. Recognition memory showed a similar decrease with age in the relative memory advantage for negative pictures. In Study 2, the largest age differences in recall and recognition accuracy were also for the negative images. Findings are consistent with socioemotional selectivity theory, which posits greater investment in emotion regulation with age. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Hallucinations, Negative Symptoms, and Response Bias in a Verbal Recognition Task in Schizophrenia.

Several studies have reported an association between hallucinations and tendency to make false alarms in acoustic signal detection tasks. Previous work on patients with schizophrenia has suggested that false recognitions and other types of memory error were positively associated with hallucinations and inversely associated with certain negative symptoms of withdrawal. In this study, 40 patients with schizophrenia were administered a word recognition task. Mixed lists of high- and low-frequency words were presented, then the target words had to be recognized among distractors in immediate and delayed recognition conditions. Hallucination scores were correlated with an increased bias toward false recognitions of nonpresented words. Affective flattening tended to be correlated with a reduced bias toward false recognitions. Anhedonia was significantly correlated with a reduced response bias. Hallucinations and anhedonia therefore presented an opposite association with the response bias. The influence of word frequency and delay on this association is discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

On the nature of the decision axis in signal-detection-based models of recognition memory.

Most models of recognition memory involve a signal-detection component in which a criterion is placed along a decision axis. Older models generally assume a familiarity-decision axis, but newer models often assume a likelihood ratio axis instead because it allows for a more natural account of the ubiquitous mirror effect. In 3 experiments reported here, item strength was differentially manipulated to see whether a mirror effect would occur. Within a list, the items from 1 category were strengthened by repetition, but the items from another category were not. On the subsequent recognition test, the hit rate was higher for the strong category, but the false-alarm rates for the weak and strong categories were the same (i.e., no mirror effect was observed). This result suggests that the decision axis represents a familiarity scale and that participants adopt a single decision criterion that they maintain throughout the recognition test. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The activation of phonological representations by bilinguals while reading silently: Evidence from interlingual homophones.

These experiments investigated whether bilinguals activate phonological representations from both of their languages when reading silently in one. The critical stimuli were interlingual homophones (e.g., sank in English and cinq in French). French-English and English-French bilinguals completed an English lexical decision task. Decisions made by French-English bilinguals were significantly faster and more accurate for interlingual homophones than for matched English control words. In subsequent experiments, the homophone facilitation effect in the latency data disappeared when distractors were changed to pseudohomophones, when cognates and interlingual homographs were added to the experiment, and when the proportion of critical stimuli was decreased. However, the homophone effect in the error data remained. In contrast, English-French bilinguals revealed little evidence of an interlingual homophone effect. Several attempts were made to increase the saliency of the nontarget language, however these manipulations produced only a small effect in the error data. These results indicate that the activation of phonological representations can appear to be both language-specific and nonspecific depending on the proficiency of the bilinguals and whether they are reading in their weaker or stronger language. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Not all negative words slow down lexical decision and naming speed: Importance of word arousal.

Previously the authors (see record 2006-04603-006) analyzed sets of words used in emotion Stroop experiments and found little evidence of automatic vigilance, for example, slower lexical decision time (LDT) or naming speed for negative words after controlling for lexical features. If there is a slowdown evoked by word negativity, most studies to date overestimate the effect because word negativity is often confounded with lexical features that promote slower word recognition. Estes and Adelman (this issue; see record 2008-09984-001) analyze a new set of words, controlling for important lexical features, and find a small but significant effect for word negativity. Moreover, they conclude the effect is categorical. The authors analyze the same data set but include the arousal value of each word. The authors find nonlinear and interaction effects in predicting LDT and naming speed. Not all negative words produce the generic slowdown. Paradoxically, negative words that are moderate to low on arousal produce more LDT slowing than negative words higher on arousal. This finding presents a theoretical and empirical challenge to researchers wishing to understand the boundaries of the automatic vigilance effect. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Automatic vigilance for negative words is categorical and general.

With other factors controlled, negative words elicit slower lexical decisions and naming than positive words (Estes & Adelman, 2008; see record 2008-09984-001). Moreover, this marked difference in responding to negative words and to positive words (i.e., between-category discontinuity) was accompanied by relatively uniform responding among negative words (i.e., within-category equivalence), thus suggesting a categorical model of automatic vigilance. Larsen, Mercer, Balota, and Strube (this issue; see record 2008-09984-002) corroborated our observation that valence predicts lexical decision and word naming latencies. However, on the basis of an interaction between linear arousal and linear valence, they claim that automatic vigilance does not occur among arousing stimuli and they purport to reject the categorical model. Here we show that (a) this interaction is logically irrelevant to whether automatic vigilance is categorical; (b) the linear interaction is statistically consistent with the categorical model; (c) the interaction is not observed within the categorical model; and (d) despite having 5 fewer parameters, the categorical model predicts word recognition times as well as the interaction model. Thus, automatic vigilance is categorical and generalizes across levels of arousal. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Interactions Between Study Task, Study Time, and the Low-Frequency Hit Rate Advantage in Recognition Memory.

In studies of episodic recognition memory, low-frequency words (LF) have higher hit rates (HR) and lower false alarm rates (FAR) than do high-frequency words (HF), which is known as the mirror pattern. A few findings have suggested that requiring a task at study may reduce or eliminate the LF-HR advantage without altering the LF-FAR effect. Other studies have suggested that the size of the LF-HR advantage interacts with study time. To explore such findings more thoroughly and relate them to theory, the authors conducted 5 experiments, varying study time and study task. The full mirror pattern was found only in 2 cases: the standard condition requiring study for a later memory test and a condition requiring a judgment about unusual letters. The authors explain their findings in terms of the encoding of distinctive features and discuss the implications for current theories of recognition memory and the word frequency effect. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

On the dynamic nature of response criterion in recognition memory: Effects of base rate, awareness, and feedback.

The authors examined whether participants can shift their criterion for recognition decisions in response to the probability that an item was previously studied. Participants in 3 experiments were given recognition tests in which the probability that an item was studied was correlated with its location during the test. Results from all 3 experiments indicated that participants' response criteria were sensitive to the probability that an item was previously studied and that shifts in criterion were robust. In addition, awareness of the bases for criterion shifts and feedback on performance were key factors contributing to the observed shifts in decision criteria. These data suggest that decision processes can operate in a dynamic fashion, shifting from item to item. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)