Robert A. Malmi

Composition of episodic memory

Abstract : The primary purpose of the study was to examine the interrelationships among a number of episodic memory tasks, with a special interest in determining the correlations among various attributes of memory. The attributes investigated included imagery, associative, acoustic, temporal, affective, and frequency. The tasks were free recall, paired associates, serial, verbal-discrimination, classical recognition, and memory span, as well as less frequency used tasks. The 200 college-student subjects were tested for 10 sessions, and 28 different measures of episodic memory were obtained from the tasks. In addition, five measures of semantic memory were available. All scores were initially intercorrelated. Measures of episodic memory and semantic memory were generally unrelated.

Human Memory: An Introduction to Research and Theory

Introduction. Sensory registers: visual and acoustic stores. Primary memory. The role of rehearsal. Memory consolidation. Principles of forgetting: interference and altered stimulus conditions. Evidence for encoding on multiple dimensions. Memory for frequency of events. Distribution of practice. Recall, recognition and relearning. Metamemory: knowing about knowing. Levels of processing. Mnemonics. Constructive and reconstructive processes in memory. Individual differences in remembering. Appendix. References. Name index. Subject index.

The spacing effect: Additions to the theoretical and empirical puzzles

Four studies examined the MP-DP effect (spacing effect) in four quite different situations: recognition of letters, verbal discrimination, short free recall lists, and recall of MP items presented twice, with an intervening interval inserted to produce forgetting. MP-DP differences were found in all studies. Of particular interest were three interactions. Subjects with a low criterion of responding in the letter study lost the MP-DP effect over a 30-sec delay, and subjects with a high criterion did not. A clear MP-DP effect, but no lag effect, was found only with unmixed verbal discrimination lists. In free recall, a sharp lag effect was shown for words presented three times but not for words presented twice. A forgetting interval inserted between the two occurrences of an MP item did not appreciably aid its recall. The results were found to pose severe problems for current theoretical ideas about the spacing effect.

An Evaluation of Measures Used in Studying Temporal Codes for Words within a List.

Experiment I evaluated three response measures which have been used in the study of temporal codes for memories. The three measures were judgments of recency, position, and lag. Earlier studies had suggested that subjects could make valid position judgments without being able to make valid lag judgments. This finding was confirmed; although the subjects learned a great deal about temporal ordering when asked to use lag judgments, the lag judgments per se were very poorly related to true lag. Transfer from lag judgments to recency judgments and from position judgments to recency judgments was essentially 100%. Transfer from recency judgments and lag judgments to position judgments was partial. It appeared that recency judgments can be mediated with little knowledge of the absolute position in the study list held by one or both of the items in the recency test pairs. Experiment II demonstrated that, under certain circumstances, lag judgments could be valid. The results raised the possibility that when lag judgments are not valid the magnitude of the lag judgments may be influenced by certain contrast effects. The data also suggested that serial learning can be directly implicated in recency judgments, hence, in temporal coding.

Intuitive covariation estimation

Six experiments concerned peoples ability to estimate the degree and sign of covariation represented in a bivariate distribution of stimuli with which they had just been presented as a series of pairs of stimuli. The stimuli were pairs of numbers, pairs of lines of variable lengths, or word-line pairs. In the latter case, subjects were asked to think of the words in terms of either pleasantness or familiarity; hence, the covariation relationship was between the normative pleasantness or familiarity value of the word and a line of variable length. In the sixth experiment, subjects were presented with two word-line pairs and were asked to access the covariation of both simultaneously. In most cases, the estimates reflected the sign and degree of covariation of the stimuli quite well. The estimates did not reflect accurately the stimulus covariation when the stimuli were numerical and the sign of the correlation of the stimuli was negative. A distinction is made between intuitive and strategic processes in the assessment of covariation.

Context effects in recognition memory: The frequency attribute

The first experiment determined whether frequency context would affect recognition memory decisions and frequency judgments. In the high-frequency context condition, 5 words were presented at study six times each prior to the section of the list containing the target items. In the low- frequency context condition, 30 words were presented at study one time each prior to the targets. The items tested were the same in the two conditions and were presented one, two, or three times each. Recognition performance and the judged frequency of target items presented once at study was higher in the high-frequency context condition than in the low-frequency context condition, but the opposite was true for items presented three times at study. The results of three subsequent recognition memory experiments suggested that encoding processes were critically involved.

Sources of Facilitation in Learning Conceptually Structured Paired-Associate Lists.

Abstract : The report discusses the thesis that if words are presented in a series so that their order or position in the series corresponds to a hierarchical-conceptual structure, learning is facilitated. The present experiment is concerned with particular aspects of the structure which are involved in the facilitation. The lists for the present study were patterned after those used in previous and referenced study.

Forgetting after simultaneous learning: Retrieval cues and proactive interference

The rate of forgetting a verbal task learned simultaneously with other verbal tasks is lower than that of a task learned singly: this is known as the simultaneous acquisition retention phenomenon (SARP). Three tasks were learned simultaneously and recall of a critical task was taken after 24 hr. in Experiment 1. When items from the other two tasks were provided as cues during recall of a critical task, forgetting was essentially eliminated. The effect seemed to be all-or-none, since recall was not affected by the provision of cues from only one of the other tasks during recall of the critical task. However, when no cues were present during recall in Experiment 1, 24-hr. retention measured after simultaneous and single task learning did not differ: SARP was not replicated. The failure to replicate was shown to be the result of using subjects naive to list learning experiments in Experiment 1. Experiment 2 demonstrated SARP when subjects were given list learning experience (representing proactive interference) prior to the critical experimental conditions of Experiment 1. Proactive interference (PI) had little effect on the cueing effect after simultaneous learning. It was concluded that PI is critical to SARP and the cueing effect is not. This report concerns a recently discovered (Underwood & Lund, 1979) phenomenon in the study of forgetting: the simultaneous acquisition retention phenomenon (SARP). The phenomenon is defined as the difference in the rate of forgetting associated with a verbal task learned simultaneously with several other verbal tasks relative to the forgetting of a task learned singly. Measures of the forgetting of a common task acquired in the two situations indicate that less information is forgotten over a 24-hr. interval after simultaneous learning than after single-task learning. The importance of SARP to the study of forgetting can be viewed within the historical perspective of the attempts to understand longterm retention loss. Different generations of the interference theory of

The Simultaneous Acquisition of Multiple Memories

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses the simultaneous acquisition of multiple memories. The differences in performance observed for Condition FRD (simultaneous learning) and Condition F-R-D (sequential learning) are minor. The performance on all tasks is essentially equivalent for Conditions FRD and FRD(S). This indicates different classes of material within a slide of no consequence for learning. The incidental learning observed, does allow the conclusion, which can sometimes be drawn following the use of more conventional techniques for studying incidental learning. The incidental learning for all four tasks is always lower than that for intentional learning. The lack of correlations among the scores on the tasks may be because of the differences in the materials, not to the differences in the type of retention tests.

Transfer from recency learning to corresponding two-category classification learning

This experiment tested the hypothesis that recency judgments, used to measure temporal coding, were a special case of two-category classification (TCC) learning. Following four recency-learning trials on a 60-word list, the subjects learned to classify each item as an underlined item or as a nonunderlined item. The underlined items had been the correct items on the recency trials, the nonunderlined items had been incorrect. A small amount of negative transfer was found. Although the performances on unrelated recency-learning tasks and on TCC tasks were substantially correlated, there was no consistency in the correlations when the two tasks were related as described above. It was concluded that the TCC task cannot be used as a model for recency learning. Word frequency was manipulated as a secondary variable; neither TCC learning nor recency learning was influenced by it.