Gordon H. Bower

Scripts in Memory for Text

These experiments investigate people’s knowledge of routine activities (e.g., eating in a restaurant, visiting a dentist) and how that knowledge is organized and used to understand and remember narrative texts. We use the term script to refer to these action stereotypes. Two studies collected script norms: people described what goes on in detail during familiar activities. They largely agreed on the nature of the characters, props, actions, and the order of the actions. They also agreed on how to segment the low-level action sequences into constituent “scenes,” suggesting a hierarchical organization in memory of the activity. Other studies investigated memory for a text narrating actions from a script. Subjects tended to confuse in memory actions that were stated with unstated actions implied by the script. This tendency increased as more related script instances were studied. Subjects also preferred to recall script actions in their familiar order; a scrambled text that presented some script actions out of order tended to be recalled in canonical order. We also investigated whether the reading time for adjacent statements in a text varied with their distance apart in the underlying script. A statement at a one-step distance was read faster than one at a two- or three-step distance; statements in the second half of a script were read faster than those in the first half. A final experiment found that goal-relevant deviations from a script were remembered better than script actions. The role of script knowledge in text memory was discussed, as was the relation of scripts to schema memory in general.

From conditioning to category learning: An adaptive network model

We used adaptive network theory to extend the Rescorla-Wagner (1972) least mean squares (LMS) model of associative learning to phenomena of human learning and judgment. In three experiments subjects learned to categorize hypothetical patients with particular symptom patterns as having certain diseases. When one disease is far more likely than another, the model predicts that subjects will substantially overestimate the diagnosticity of the more valid symptom for the rare disease. The results of Experiments 1 and 2 provide clear support for this prediction in contradistinction to predictions from probability matching, exemplar retrieval, or simple prototype learning models. Experiment 3 contrasted the adaptive network model with one predicting pattern-probability matching when patients always had four symptoms (chosen from four opponent pairs) rather than the presence or absence of each of four symptoms, as in Experiment 1. The results again support the Rescorla-Wagner LMS learning rule as embedded within an adaptive network model.

Cognitive perspectives on emotion and motivation

I Motivation and Goal-Setting.- 1. Motivation and Emotion from a Biological Perspective.- 2. Self-Regulation of Motivation and Action through Goal Systems.- 3. A Motivational Approach to Volition: Activation and De-activation of Memory Representations Related to Uncompleted Intentions.- II Antecedents of Emotion.- 4. Criteria for Emotion-Antecedent Appraisal: A Review.- 5. Preattentive Processes in the Generation of Emotions.- 6. A State-Based Approach to the Role of Effort in Experience of Emotions.- 7. What are the Data of Emotion?.- III Cognitive Effects of Emotion And Motivation.- 8. Emotional and Motivational Determinants of Attention and Memory.- 9. The Instrumental Effects of Emotional Behavior - Consequences for the Physiological State.- 10. Emotion and Argumentation in Expressions of Opinion.- 11. Anxiety and the Processing of Threatening Information.- IV AI Models of Emotions.- 12. Artificial Intelligence Models of Emotion.- 13. Subjective Importance and Computational Models of Emotions.- 14. Plans and the Communicative Function of Emotions: A Cognitive Theory.- V Culture and Language of Emotion.- 15. The Semantics of the Affective Lexicon.- 16. Ethnographic Perspectives on the Emotion Lexicon.- VI Exercise in Synthesis.- 17. A Unifying Information Processing System: Affect and Motivation as Problem-Solving Processes.

Remembering information related to one's self ☆

Abstract How does memory for an incident vary depending on whether, and how, the person relates the information to himself? Trait adjectives are better remembered if they were judged in reference to oneself rather than judged for meaning or sound. Our first experiment found a similar mnemonic advantage of referring a described episode or object to some event from ones life. Pleasant events were remembered better than unpleasant ones. A second experiment found incidental memory for trait adjectives was equally enhanced by judging each directly in reference to ones self-concept or indirectly by retrieving an episode either from ones life or from ones mothers life. Contrariwise, memory was poorer when traits were judged in reference to a less familiar person. Thus, good memory depends on relating the inputs to a well-differentiated memory structure.

Mood effects on subjective probability assessment

Abstract A persons mood may directly affect a judgment of the uncertainty of a future event. Subjective probabilities were reported by subjects in a happy, neutral, or sad mood for personal and nonpersonal events. Two moods were induced by having the subject focus on particularly happy and sad personal experiences. Large, consistent mood effects are indicated. Relative to control subjects, happy people are “optimistic;” i.e., they report higher probabilities for positive events and lower probabilities for negative events. Conversely, sad people are “pessimistic,” providing lower (higher) probabilities for positive (negative) events. Mood-state-dependent retrieval of information is indicated.

Organizational factors in memory

Abstract The research reviewed illustrates how the structural organization of material influences the way in which it is learned and recalled by the person. Specific factors investigated concerned relational rules and perceptual-conceptual groupings as these appeared in various laboratory learning tasks. The influence of relational rules was illustrated in paired-associate learning in which a list rule, stipulating a particular relation between the nominal stimulus and response terms, enhanced performance and reduced interference from other learning. The apparent role of the S-R pairing rule, inferred from studies of rhyming rules, is to enable restriction of the range of response alternatives which the person needs to consider at crucial points in his recall. The role of perceptual groupings was examined in immediate recall of digit series; conceptual groupings were examined in free recall of word lists. By one or another means, the learning materials are segmented by the subject into integrated groups which become his functional recall units. Recall suffers if the subject is made to adopt new groupings of the same material. The results on digit series were interpreted by the “reallocation” hypothesis, which ties together the perceptual coding of a string and the “memory location” at which its trace is stored, with implications about recognition memory and trial-by-trial increments in recall of the same string. In free recall, the stable groupings of list words which develop are often supplemented by the subject developing a higher-order retrieval scheme to guide his reproduction of the many items on the list. The nature and influence of several retrieval schemes is reviewed, including interchunk associations, pegword mnemonics, semantic category cuing, and hierarchically embedded category systems. These basic schemes provide implicit cues to guide the persons search through memory. Hierarchical schemes, based on recursive associative decoding, are particularly effective retrieval plans. The results are discussed in terms of the advantages of common strategies preferred by human learners, viz., the tendency to subdivide and group material, and to do this recursively, producing a hierarchical organization of the information to be learned.

Imagery as a relational organizer in associative learning

Mental imagery improves paired-associate (PA) learning relative to overt rehearsal. The effect might be due to increased reliability of stimulus encoding or to increased relational association produced by imagery. These hypotheses expect different outcomes when imagery and rote-rehearsal Ss are compared on memory tests of stimulus recognition and on recall of the response term conditional upon stimulus recognition. The Ss learned PAs using one of three methods--rote repetition, interactive imagery, or separation imagery. Associative recall was highest for interactive-imagery Ss and lower and equal for rote- and separationimagery Ss. No differences in stimulus recognition appeared. Such evidence supports the relational-organizing interpretation of the PA effect of imagery in opposition to the stimulus-distinctiveness or reliable-encoding explanations.

Selectivity of learning caused by affective states

We investigated how emotional states influence learning and memory. Specifically, we asked whether peoples remembering of a text varies with their emotional mood at the time they read or recall a text, A theoretical framework is proposed that represents an emotion as a unit within a semantic network that encodes memories. It also assumes that by spreading activation, a dominant emotion will enhance the availability of emotion-congruent interpretations and the salience of congruent stimulus materials for learning. To collect relevant observations, powerful moods were induced by posthypnotic suggestions. Experiment 1 found that happy or sad readers identified with, and recalled more facts about, a character who is in the same mood as they are. In Experiment 2, this selective recall by character could not be produced by inducing the mood at recall after subjects had read the story in a neutral mood. In Experiment 3, subjects read a text wherein one character described many unrelated happy and sad incidents from his life. Readers were made to feel happy or sad while reading and, independently, while recalling this text. Mood during reading caused selective learning of mood-congruent incidents, but mood during recall had little effect. Experiment 4 replicated with this one-character narrative the finding that inducing the mood during recall only produced no selective recall of its happy versus sad incidents. Experiment 5 pitted the happy-sad nature of the incidents against the mood of the character narrating them. Readers learned more mood-congruent than mood-incongruent incidents, but did not learn more about the mood-congruent character. Thus, rather than identifying exclusively with the same-mood character, subjects selectively learned whatever affective material was congruent with their emotional state. The mood-congruity effect is consistent with the network theory of emotion and memory. Several more specific hypotheses were proposed. One is that mood-congruent material is more memorable because it elevates the intensity of the subjects feelings, whereas mood-incongruent material diminishes mood intensity. A second is that subjects focus on moodcongruent material in order to explain and justify their hypnotically instructed emotion. But further results did not support this attribution hypothesis. A third hypothesis is that mood-congruent material may be more likely to remind the reader of a similar experience, and this promotes learning.

A Multicomponent Theory of The Memory Trace

Publisher Summary This chapter presents a hypothesis concerning the formal structure of a memory trace. It seems reasonable to tie the memory trace of an event to the variables operating in the perception of that event. If it is supposed that the person does not store the literal input stimulus, but rather some encoded representation of it, then the representation stored is either the primary code by which the event is recognized or a secondary code that labels the primary code. In either event, the representation stored is sufficient to the degree that when it is fed into a motor–output system, salient features of the original input event can be reconstructed and output. It is supposed that what is stored in memory is the primary code, the secondary code, or both. That is, a memory trace is represented as an ordered list of attributes with their corresponding values. There are two ways to represent information redundancy in an individual memory trace. One representation of redundancy supposes that more information components are encoded and stored in the memory trace than are minimally required to select the initiating event from its appropriate ensemble. This is called the excess components idea. The other idea is to represent redundancy in terms of intercorrelations among the component values of a trace. This is called the intercorrelation idea.

Mood and self-efficacy: Impact of joy and sadness on perceived capabilities

We examined the impact of happy and sad moods on efficacy judgments concerning a variety of activities. The mood was induced by having hypnotized subjects recall and revive their feelings about a romantic success or failure. Changes in efficacy that these memories induced were not restricted to the romantic domain but were also seen on interpersonal, athletic, and other activities remote from romance. The results suggested that emotional states have widespread impact on judgments by making mood-congruent thoughts more available. Implications for self-efficacy theory and practical applications are discussed.