Raymond S. Nickerson

Retrieval inhibition from part-set cuing: A persisting enigma in memory research

When people are asked to recall words from a list they have just studied or to produce as many items as possible from a well-known category (e.g., states of the United States), having available a subset of the items as cues often does not facilitate retrieval of the remaining items and sometimes inhibits it. The finding has been obtained many times with a variety of experimental tasks including recall from categorized and noncategorized lists and retrieval from very long-term memory. This paper reviews the studies that have yielded the effect, and considers several explanations of it that have been proposed. None of these explanations is viewed to be entirely adequate and compelling.

Long-term memory for a common object ☆

Abstract A series of experiments was done to determine how completely and accurately people remember the visual details of a common object, a United States penny. People were asked to: draw a penny from unaided recall; draw a penny given a list of its visual features; choose from among a list of possible features those which do appear on a penny; indicate what was wrong with an erroneous drawing of a penny; and select the correct representation of a penny from among a set of incorrect drawings. Performance was surprisingly poor on all tasks. On balance, the results were consistent with the idea that the visual details of an object, even a very familiar object, are typically available from memory only to the extent that they are useful in everyday life. It was also suggested that recognition tasks may make much smaller demands on memory than is commonly assumed.

Why interactive computer systems are sometimes not used by people who might benefit from them

Several reasons are considered why some people who might benefit from using computer systems do not use them. The discussion is organized around examples of several classes of complaints that abstainers and dissatisfied users have been known to make regarding various aspects of the design and operation of specific computer-based systems.

A note on long-term recognition memory for pictorial material

In an earlier experiment Ss examined an extended sequence of photographs attempting to identify those photos that were occurring for the second time within the sequence. This note describes the results obtained when, after periods ranging from a day to a year, the same Ss were asked to distinguish between new photos and photos that they had seen while participating in the original experiment.

Are people's estimates of what other people know influenced by what they themselves know? ☆

Abstract An exploratory experiment was done to investigate how estimates of what other people know are influenced by what one knows oneself. Three hypotheses were of interest: (1) that people are more likely to impute a bit of knowledge to other people if they have it themselves than if they do not, (2) that people are likely to overestimate the commonality of their own knowledge, and (3) that people who are unusually knowledgeable with respect to a particular topic are likely to bias their estimates of what other people know in the direction of their personal knowledge store. Subjects answered questions selected from the set for which Nelson and Narens (1980) have provided norms. They also estimated the percentage of other people who would be likely to know the answers to these questions. The results supported the first two hypotheses, but were inconclusive with respect to the third.

SAME-"DIFFERENT" RESPONSE TIMES WITH MULTI-ATTRIBUTE STIMULUS DIFFERENCES

Ss task was to decide as quickly as possible whether two simple visual stimuli were the same or different. Stimuli varied with respect to 3 attributes: size, color, and shape. Pairs of stimuli were presented either simultaneously or in sequence. “Different” RTs varied inversely with the number of attributes with respect to which the 2 stimuli of a pair differed, d. “Same” RTs were shorter than would be expected from an extrapolation of the results with d ≥ 1 (different stimuli) to include the case of d = 0 (same stimuli). Error rates were related to d in much the same way as was RT.

RESPONSE TIME TO THE SECOND OF TWO SUCCESSIVE SIGNALS AS A FUNCTION OF ABSOLUTE AND RELATIVE DURATION OF INTERSIGNAL INTERVAL

An experiment was conducted to determine whether both the absolute and the relative duration of the S1-S2 interval would affect the response time to the second of two successive signals (RT2) separated by an interval of brief but variable duration. Four different experimental conditions sampled different but overlapping ranges of intervals, thus allowing comparisons between RTs obtained with intervals of the same absolute but different relative durations, and conversely, with the same relative but different absolute durations. Under these conditions, RT2 varied inversely with both the absolute and the relative duration of interval over the range of intervals generally associated with psychological refractory period.

On the psychological importance of time in a time sharing system.

One of the most important problems in the design and/or operation of a computer utility is to obtain dynamical characteristics that are acceptable and convenient to the on-line user. This paper is concerned with the problems of access to the computer utility, response time and its effect upon conversational use of the computer, and the effects of load on the system. Primary attention is placed upon response time; rather than a single measure, a set of response times should be measured in a given computer utility, in correspondence to the different types of operations requested. It is assumed that the psychological value of short response time stems from a subjective cost measure of the users own time, largely influenced by the value of concurrent tasks being postponed. A measure of cost (to the individual and/or his organization) of the time-on-line required to perform a task might thus be derived. More subtle is the problem of the users acceptability of given response times. This acceptability is a function of the service requested (e.g., length of computation), and variability with respect to expectations due both to uncertainty in the users estimation and to variations in the response time originated by variable loads on the system. An effort should be made by computer-utility designers to include dynamic characteristics (such as prediction of loads and their effects) among their design specifications.

RESPONSE TIMES FOR "SAME"-"DIFFERENT" JUDGMENTS

Ss task was to decide as quickly as possible whether the second of two visually presented English consonants was the same as the first. RTs associated with the decision “same” tended to be shorter than those associated with the decision “different.”

Teaching speech to the deaf:Can a computer help?

This paper describes an attempt to develop a computer-based system of speech-training aids for the deaf. Some of the problems associated with the speech of the deaf are briefly reviewed. Reasons for attempting to apply a digital computer to the problem of speech training are given. The system and its display capabilities are described. The importance of evolving such a system through a close interaction of developers and users is stressed.