Robert G. Crowder

Principles of learning and memory

Foreword to the Classic Edition by Henry L. Roediger, III, and James S. Nairne. Background Comments and Three Analytic Concepts. Iconic Memory. Echoic Memory. Recoding by Speech in Short-Term Memory. Nonverbal Memory. Primary Memory. Forgetting in Short-Term Memory. The Interference Theory of Forgetting in Long-Term Memory. The Effects of Repetition on Memory. The Organization of Memory in Free Recall. Retrieval. Serial Organization in Learning and Memory.

An auditory analogue of the Sperling partial report procedure: Evidence for brief auditory storage.

Abstract Three experiments are reported on the partial report of material presented auditorily over three spatially different channels. When partial report was required by spatial location, it was superior to whole report if the cue came less than four seconds after the end of the stimuli (Exp. I). When partial report was required by semantic category (letters/digits) the relation between it and whole report depended on whether the S was asked also to attribute each item to its correct spatial location. When location was required partial report was lower than whole report and showed no significant decay with delay of the partial report indicator (Exp. II), but when location was not required, partial report was superior to whole report for indicator delays of less than two seconds (Exp. III). This superiority was, however, much less than that found in Exp. I when partial report was required by spatial location. These results are compatible with a store which has a useful life of around two seconds and from which material may be retrieved more easily by spatial location than by semantic category.

The demise of short-term memory

Abstract The first wave of modern research on short-term memory was preoccupied with its existence as a valid system of memory. One subsequent development has been the application of the short-term/ long-term distinction to the study of individual and subject-population differences (aging, amnesia, and so on). Another development has been the investigation of how short-term memory articulates with such full-blown cognitive processes as reasoning, perception, and language comprehension. These efforts have now faltered, badly, in response to changing conceptions of human memory and unwelcome data. However, the properties of isolated, short-term memory subsystems continue to be identified. The sorts of evidence that have contributed to the fragmentation, if not the death, of an all-purpose short-term memory system have nonetheless advanced our knowledge of related cognitive processes. The study of such relationships is illustrated in the case of reading.

Perception of the Major/Minor Distinction: IV. Emotional Connotations in Young Children

Thirty-eight children between ages 3 and 12 listened to 12 short musical passages derived from a counterbalanced 2 × 2 arrangement of (1) major versus minor modes and (2) harmonized versus simple melodic realizations of these modes. For each passage, they pointed to one of four schematic faces chosen to symbolize happy, sad, angry, and contented facial expressions. The main result was that all children, even the youngest, showed a reliable positive-major/negative-minor connotation, thus conforming to the conventional stereotype. The possible contributions of native and experiential factors to this behavior are discussed.

Short-term memory: where do we stand?

Two empirical challenges to the traditional “modal model” of short-term memory are that neither the Brown-Peterson distractor technique nor the recency effect in recall is well accommodated by that position. Additionally, the status of memory stores as such, has declined in response to proceduralist thinking. At the same time, the concept of coding, on which the modal model is silent, is increasingly central to memory theory. People need to remember things in the short term, but a dedicated store does not need to be the agency.

The modality effect in free and serial recall as a function of phonological similarity

Subjects read lists of phonologically similar words (such as bud, cub, tuck, bug, duck, …) or lists of phonologically dissimilar words (such as bead, cab, tick, bog, deck, …) under instructions either for free or for serial recall; additionally, reading was either silent or overt. In free recall primary memory capacity was not affected by phonological similarity, whereas an advantage for the overt over the silent presentation mode was observed with the dissimilar but not the similar lists. Further, phonological similarity reduced the size of the modality effect in serial recall. Apart from its interactive effects with mode of presentation, the effect of similarity on free recall was beneficial for all except the recency items, whereas similarity reduced performance in serial recall. These results in particular allow dismissal of some hypotheses for the modality effect, and in general pose a problem for theories of how similarity affects memory.

Schedules of presentation and temporal distinctiveness in human memory.

Recency, in remembering a series of events, reflects the simple fact that memory is vivid for what has just happened but deteriorates over time. Theories based on distinctiveness, an alternative to the multistore model, assert that the last few events in a series are well remembered because their times of occurrence are more highly distinctive than those of earlier items. Three experiments examined the role of temporal and ordinal factors in auditorily and visually presented lists that were temporally organized by distractor materials interpolated between memory items. With uniform distractor periods, the results were consistent with Glenbergs (1987) temporal distinctiveness theory. When the procedure was altered so that distractor periods became progressively shorter from the beginning to the end of the list, the results were consistent for only the visual modality; the auditory modality produced a different and unpredicted (by the theory) pattern of results, thus falsifying the claim that the auditory modality derives more benefit from temporal information than the visual modality. We distinguish serial order information from specifically temporal information, arguing that the former may be enhanced by auditory presentation but that the two modalities are more nearly equal with respect to the latter.

The sound of vowels and consonants in immediate memory

When auditory and visual presentation are compared in tests of immediate ordered recall of natural-language stimuli such as digits or letters, the typical finding is better performance on the auditory than on the visual lists. This difference is located in late portions of the serial position curve, and the advantage can be partially removed by presenting a redundant stimulus suffix. In the present research this type of comparison was extended to lists of consonant-vowel (CV) syllables varying either in the initial consonant or in the terminal vowel. The finding was that memory for vowels closely matched the results with digits or letters whereas memory for consonants showed neither the basic modality effect nor the suffix effect. Thus, the special memory system associated with auditory presentation may be said to “contain” vowels but not consonants.

The role of one's own voice in immediate memory ☆

Abstract Two experiments allowed comparison of active and passive vocalization of visually presented digit series; in active vocalization S pronounces the elements as he sees them and in passive vocalization he hears E pronouncing them as he sees them. The effects of a redundant prefix were examined under the two vocalization conditions. The main findings were ( a ) either vocalization condition was superior to silent visual presentation only for the last few serial positions, ( b ) active vocalization was worse than passive vocalization only for the first few serial positions, and ( c ) the prefix requirement reduced recency only following active vocalization, as predicted. The results were discussed against a pluralistic model of coding and storage.

Categories and context in the perception of isolated steady-state vowels.

The noncategorical perception of isolated vowels has been attributed to the availability of auditory memory in discrimination. In our first experiment, using vowels from an /i/-/I/epsilon) continuum in a same-different (AX) task and comparing the results with predictions derived from a separate identification test, we demonstrated that vowels are perceived more nearly categorically if auditory memory is degraded by extending the interstimulus interval and/or filling it with irrelevant vowel sounds. In a second experiment, we used a similar paradigm, but in addition to presenting a separate identification test, we elicited labeling responses to the AX pairs used in the discrimination task. We found that AX labeling responses predicted discrimination performance quite well, regardless of whether auditory memory was available, whereas the predictions from the separate identification test were more poorly matched by the obtained data. The AX labeling reponses showed large contrast effects (both proactive and retroactive) that were greatly reduced when auditory memory was interfered with. We conclude from the presence of these contrast effects that vowels are not perceived categorically (that is, absolutely). However, it seems that by taking the effects of context into account properly, discrimination performance can be quite accurately predicted from labeling data, suggesting that vowel discrimination, like consonant discrimination, may be mediated by phonetic labels.