Cathy L. McEvoy

The University of South Florida free association, rhyme, and word fragment norms

Preexisting word knowledge is accessed in many cognitive tasks, and this article offers a means for indexing this knowledge so that it can be manipulated or controlled. We offer free association data for 72,000 word pairs, along with over a million entries of related data, such as forward and backward strength, number of competing associates, and printed frequency. A separate file contains the 5,019 normed words, their statistics, and thousands of independently normed rhyme, stem, and fragment cues. Other files providen × n associative networks for more than 4,000 words and a list of idiosyncratic responses for each normed word. The database will be useful for investigators interested in cuing, priming, recognition, network theory, linguistics, and implicit testing applications. They also will be useful for evaluating the predictive value of free association probabilities as compared with other measures, such as similarity ratings and co-occurrence norms. Of several procedures for measuring preexisting strength between two words, the best remains to be determined. The norms may be downloaded fromwww.psychonomic.org/archive/.

Processing implicit and explicit representations

This article summarizes the results of a 15-year research program dedicated to understanding how implicitly activated memories affect remembering and proposes a model for describing such influences. Implicit memories are manipulated by varying the number of associates preexperimentally linked to test cues or to studied words. Assumptions of the model specify when implicit memories of various types are likely to contribute to performance in various tasks. The main assumptions are that encoding involves both explicit and implicit processing components and that these components provide mutually exclusive sources of information during testing. Experiments designed to evaluate the exclusivity assumption are reported, and implications of the findings for several theoretical frameworks are discussed.

What is free association and what does it measure

This paper reports the results of a study of free association in which participants were asked to produce the first two words to come to mind. The findings were used to estimate the reliability of indices of strength and set size for different types of items and to model free association as a retrieval task. When confined to first responses, reliability was generally high for both indices, particularly for words with smaller sets of associates and stronger primaries. When second responses were included, reliability declined. A second response added new but weak items to the set, and, when the primary associate was not produced on the first opportunity, it tended not to be produced on the second. Relative to when multiple responses are requested, first-response free association provides more reliable indices of the relative strength and set size for a word’s strongest associates. A model of free association assuming that a strength distribution underlies each response provided a good fit to the data.

The University of South Florida homograph norms

Norms were collected to determine the relative dominance of different meanings of homo-graphic words. Forty-six subjects wrote down the first word that came to mind for each of 320 homographs. Each homograph, the number of times each meaning was given, and the specific associates are made available. In addition, correlations with other norms are presented.

What is the connection between true and false memories? The differential roles of interitem associations in recall and recognition

Veridical memory for presented list words and false memory for nonpresented but related items were tested using the Deese/Roediger and McDermott paradigm. The strength and density of preexisting connections among the list words, and from the list words to the critical items, were manipulated. The likelihood of producing false memories in free recall varied with the strength of connections from the list words to the critical items but was inversely related to the density of the interconnections among the list words. In contrast, veridical recall of list words was positively related to the density of the interconnections. A final recognition test showed that both false and veridical memories were more likely when the list words were more densely interconnected. The results are discussed in terms of an associative model of memory, Processing Implicit and Explicit Representations (PIER 2) that describes the influence of implicitly activated preexisting information on memory performance.

Spreading activation or spooky action at a distance

How do preexisting connections among a words associates facilitate its cued recall and recognition? A spreading-activation model assumes activation spreads to, among, and from a studied words associates, and that its return is what strengthens its representation. An activation-at-a-distance model assumes strengthening is produced by the synchronous activation of the words associates. The spread model predicts that connections among the studied words associates will have a greater effect on memory when more of its associates return activation. The distance model predicts that total connections are important, not their direction. The results of cued recall experiments supported the distance model in showing that that connections among the associates facilitated recall regardless of the number of returning connections.

Negative life events and cognitive performance in a population of older adults

Objectives: This study examined the association between negative life events in the past year and cognitive performance in a population of older adults. Methods: Secondary data analysis was conducted on 428 participants from the Charlotte County Healthy Aging Study. Participants completed tests of episodic memory, attention, and psychomotor speed and endorsed the presence and severity of 24 life events. Life events were examined in the aggregate as well as individually. Results: Hierarchical multiple regression results suggest no significant relationship between the aggregate frequency and severity measures of negative life events and cognitive performance. At the individual-event level, individuals who experienced the injury or illness of a friend during the past year and rated it as having more of an effect on their lives performed better on all three cognitive tasks. However, individuals who reported having less money to live on over the past year and rated the event as having more of an effect on their lives performed more poorly on the psychomotor speed tasks. Discussion: The findings support previous research indicating that using estimates of individual stressors rather than aggregate stress measures increases the predictive validity of stress measurement. Furthermore, the individual negative life events can have both a positive and a negative effect, which nullify one another when using the sum score of events.

What is this thing called frequency

When researchers are interested in the influence of long-term knowledge on performance, printed word frequency is typically the variable of choice. Despite this preference, we know little about what frequency norms measure. They ostensibly index how often and how recently words are experienced, but words appear in context, so frequency potentially reflects an influence of connections with other words. This paper presents the results of a large free association study as well as the results of experiments designed to evaluate the hypothesis that common words have stronger connectionsto other words. The norms indicate that common words tend to be more concrete but they do not appear to have more associates, stronger associates, or more connections among their associates. Two extralist cued recall experiments showed that, with other attributes being equal, high- and low-frequency words were equally effective as test cues. These results suggest that frequency does not achieve its effects because of stronger or greater numbers of connectionsto other words, as implied in SAM. Other results indicated that common words have more connectionsfrom other words, including their associates, and that free association provides a valid index of associative strength.

Effects of retention interval and modality on sensory and semantic trace information

Subjects studied a long list of individual words that were presented either visually or auditorily. Recall was tested immediately or after a filled delay by using either word endings or taxonomic categories as extralist retrieval cues. Two interactions were of particular interest. First, word ending cues were just as effective as taxonomic cues on the immediate test. On the delayed test, however, ending cues were less effective. This result suggests that sensory information encoded about a word decays at a faster rate than semantic information. Second, although modality had no observable influence on the taxonomic cues, word ending cues were more effective when all items were shown visually than when they were presented auditorily. Taken together, these findings indicate that the visual features of words are encoded at study and that this information can be accessed during test if it is recapitulated by the retrieval cue shortly after acquisition.

Negative and Positive Pretrial Publicity Affect Juror Memory and Decision Making.

The experiment examined the effects of exposure to pretrial publicity (PTP) and delay on juror memory and decision-making. Mock jurors read news articles containing negative PTP, positive PTP, or unrelated articles. Five days later, they viewed a videotaped murder trial, after which they made decisions about guilt. Finally, all participants independently attributed specific information as having been presented during the trial or in the news articles. Half of the jurors rendered their verdicts and completed the source-memory test immediately after the trial, while the other half did so after a 2-day delay. Exposure to PTP significantly affected guilty verdicts, perceptions of defendant credibility, juror ratings of the prosecuting and defense attorneys, and misattributions of PTP as having been presented as trial evidence. Similar effects were obtained for negative and positive PTP. Delay significantly increased source-memory errors but did not influence guilt ratings. Defendants credibility and juror ratings of prosecuting and defense attorneys significantly mediated the effect of PTP on guilt ratings.