Item-specific Cues Research Articles

Judgments of Learning in Context: Backgrounds Can Both Reduce and Produce Metamemory Illusions.

Varying item-specific features such as size (Rhodes & Castel, 2008) or blur (Yue, Castel, & Bjork, 2013) often produces metamemory illusions in which one type of item receives higher judgments of learning (JOLs) without being recalled better. In this study, we explored how similar manipulations to context would influence JOLs. When to-be-recalled words varying in size (or blur) were accompanied by backgrounds also varying in size (or blur), the traditional JOL illusions were reduced (Experiments 1, 2, 4, and 5) compared to when there were no backgrounds (Experiments 3a, 3b, and 4). Thus, the item-specific and contextual cues were used interactively. Further, the background manipulations also sometimes themselves led to metamemory illusions regarding JOLs for the to-be-remembered items. In general,there were robust individual differences in how participants used the cues, including how they incorporated the contextual cues into their JOL decisions. In part, this may explain why interactive cue utilization did not always emerge at the group level. In sum, we showed that context may affect JOLs both directly and indirectly by influencing participants' use of item-specific cues. These findings broaden our understanding of how cues may be utilized (e.g., Koriat, 1997) and integrated (e.g., Undorf, Söllner, and Bröder, 2018) in JOLs.

Towards augmented human memory: Retrieval-induced forgetting and retrieval practice in an interactive, end-of-day review.

The authors report 6 experiments that examined the contention that an end-of-day review could lead to augmentation in human memory. In Experiment 1, participants in the study phase were presented with a campus tour of different to-be-remembered objects in different university locations. Each to-be-remembered object was presented with an associated specific comment. Participants were then shown the location name and photographs of half of the objects from half of the locations, and they were asked to try to name the object and recall the associated comment specific to each item. Following a filled delay, participants were presented with the name of each campus location and were asked to free recall the to-be-remembered objects. Relative to the recall from the unpracticed location categories, participants recalled the names of significantly more objects that they practiced (retrieval practice) and significantly fewer unpracticed objects from the practiced locations (retrieval-induced forgetting, RIF). These findings were replicated in Experiment 2 using a campus scavenger hunt in which participants selected their own stimuli from experimenter’s categories. Following an examination of factors that maximized the effects of RIF and retrieval practice in the laboratory (Experiment 3), the authors applied these findings to the campus scavenger hunt task to create different retrieval practice schedules to maximize and minimize recall of items based on experimenter-selected (Experiment 4) and participant-selected items using both category-cued free recall (Experiment 5) and item-specific cues (Experiment 6). Their findings support the claim that an interactive, end-of-day review could lead to augmentation in human memory.

Examining the costs and benefits of inhibition in memory retrieval

Inhibitory control is thought to serve an adaptive function in controlling behavior, with individual differences predicting variation in numerous cognitive functions. However, inhibition is more properly construed as inducing both benefits and costs to performance. Benefits arise at the point when inhibition prevents expression of an unwanted or contextually inappropriate response; costs arise later, when access to the inhibited representation is required by other processes. Here we illustrate how failure to consider both the costs and benefits of inhibition has generated confusion in the literature on individual differences in cognitive control. Using retrieval-induced forgetting as a model case, we illustrate this by showing that changing the way that retrieval-induced forgetting is measured to allow greater expression of the benefits of inhibition together with the costs can reduce and even reverse the theoretically predicted correlation between motor and memory inhibition. Specifically, we show that when the final test in a retrieval-induced forgetting procedure employs item-specific cues (i.e., category-plus-stem cued recall and item-recognition) that better isolate the lingering costs of inhibition, better motor response inhibition (faster stop-signal reaction times) predicts greater retrieval-induced forgetting. In striking contrast, when the final test is less well controlled, allowing both the costs and benefits of inhibition to contribute, motor response inhibition has the opposite relationship with retrieval-induced forgetting. These findings underscore the importance of considering the correlated costs and benefits problem when studying individual differences in inhibitory control. More generally, they suggest that a shared inhibition mechanism may underlie people’s ability to control memories and actions.

Knowing the crowd within: Metacognitive limits on combining multiple judgments

We investigated how decision-makers use multiple opportunities to judge a quantity. Decision-makers undervalue the benefit of combining their own judgment with an advisor's, but theories disagree about whether this bias would apply to combining several of one's own judgments. Participants estimated percentage answers to general knowledge questions (e.g., What percent of the world's population uses the Internet?) on two occasions. In a final decision phase, they selected their first, second, or average estimate to report for each question. We manipulated the cues available for this final decision. Given cues to general theories (the labels first guess, second guess, average), participants mostly averaged, but no more frequently on trials where the average was most accurate. Given item-specific cues (numerical values of the options), metacognitive accuracy was at chance. Given both cues, participants mostly averaged and switched strategies based on whichever yielded the most accurate value on a given trial. These results indicate that underappreciation of averaging estimates does not stem only from social differences between the self and an advisor and that combining general and item-specific cues benefits metacognition.

Categorization of birds, mammals, and chimeras by pigeons

Identifying critical features that control categorization of complex polymorphous pictures by animals remains a challenging and important problem. Toward this goal, experiments were conducted to isolate the properties controlling the categorization of two pictorial categories by pigeons. Pigeons were trained in a go/no-go task to categorize black and white line drawings of birds and mammals. They were then tested with a variety of familiar and novel exemplars of these categories to examine the features controlling this categorization. These tests suggested the pigeons were segregating and using the principal axis of orientation of the animal figures as the primary means of discriminating each category, although other categorical and item-specific cues were likely involved. This perceptual/cognitive reduction of the categorical stimulus space to a few visual features or dimensions is likely a characteristic of this species’ processing of complex pictorial discrimination problems and is a critical property for theoretical accounts of this behavior.

Context-dependent switching between proactive and reactive working memory control mechanisms in the right inferior frontal gyrus

A critical feature of higher cognitive functioning is the capacity to flexibly tailor information processing and behaviors to current situational demands. Recent neurocognitive models have been postulated to account for the dynamic nature of human executive processing by invoking two dissociable cognitive control modes, proactive and reactive control. These may involve partially overlapping, but temporally distinct neural implementation in the prefrontal cortex. Prior brain imaging studies exploring proactive control have mainly used tasks requiring only information about single-items to be retained over unfilled delays. Whether proactive control can also be utilized to facilitate performance in more complex working memory tasks, in which concurrent processing of intervening items and updating is mandatory during contextual cue maintenance remains an open question. To examine this issue and to elucidate the extent to which overlapping neural substrates underlie proactive and reactive control we used fMRI and a modified verbal 3-back paradigm with embedded cues predictive of high-interference trials. This task requires context information to be retained over multiple intervening trials. We found that performance improved with item-specific cues predicting forthcoming lures despite increased working memory load. Temporal dynamics of activation in the right inferior frontal gyrus suggest flexible switching between proactive and reactive control in a context-dependent fashion, with greater sustained responses elicited in the 3-back task involving context maintenance of cue information and greater transient responses elicited in the 3-back task absent of cues.

Grapheme–color synesthesia can enhance immediate memory without disrupting the encoding of relational cues

Previous evidence has suggested that grapheme-color synesthesia can enhance memory for words, but little is known about how these photisms cue retrieval. Often, the encoding of specific features of individual words can disrupt the encoding of ordered relations between words, resulting in an overall decrease in recall accuracy. Here we show that the photisms arising from grapheme-color synesthesia do not function like these item-specific cues. The influences of high and low word frequency on the encoding of ordered relations and the accuracy of immediate free recall were compared across a group of 10 synesthetes and 48 nonsynesthetes. The main findings of Experiment 1 showed that the experience of synesthesia had no adverse effect on the encoding of ordered relations (as measured by input-output correspondence); furthermore, it enhanced recall accuracy in a strictly additive fashion across the two word frequency conditions. Experiment 2 corroborated these findings by showing that the synesthetes only outperformed the nonsynesthetes when the materials involved words and letters, not when they involved digits and spatial locations. Altogether, the present findings suggest that synesthesia can boost immediate memory performance without disrupting the encoding of ordered relations.

検索誘導性忘却における抑制と解除への加齢の影響

Retrieving information from memory can cause forgetting of related information in memory. This phenomenon is known as retrieval-induced forgetting. In this experiment, we examined age-related differences of inhibitory function in retrieval-induced forgetting by using a cued recall test. Following the cued recall test, a recognition test was conducted to examine the release of inhibition. In the cued recall test, the same amount of retrieval-induced forgetting effect was observed in younger and older people. This result suggests that both younger and older people have an inhibitory function and that this inhibitory function does not decline with age. In the recognition test, for younger people, retrieval-induced forgetting was not observed in both recognition accuracy and reaction time. However, for older people, retrieval-induced forgetting was observed in both accuracy and reaction time. These results suggest that inhibition in retrieval-induced forgetting is gradually released by item-specific cues and that the function of release inhibition may decline with age.

Inhibition and Retrieval of Facts in Young and Older Adults

Inhibition is considered to have an important role in memory retrieval. However, many experimental results suggest that its efficiency declines with aging. In this study, the authors tested this hypothesis by using the retrieval-practice task. The retrieval-induced forgetting (RIF) observed with this paradigm is normally explained in terms of inhibition. Young (mean age 21.5 years) and older (mean age 71.6 years) adults studied sets of four shared-subject sentences. A retrieval-practice phase required participants to repeatedly recall a subset of the studied sentences. In the final test, participants were provided item-specific cues and told to recall all the studied sentences. RIF was similar for both age groups, suggesting comparable inhibitory efficiency in young and older adults.

Retrieval-induced forgetting in recall and recognition of thematically related and unrelated sentences

In three experiments, we assessed the effects of type of relation and memory test on retrieval-induced forgetting of facts. In Experiments 1 and 2, eight sets of four shared-subject sentences were presented for study. They were constructed so that half were thematically related and half were unrelated. A retrieval practice phase required participants to recall a subset of the studied sentences. In the final test, the participants were prompted to recall all the sentences (character cued in Experiment 1 and character plus stem cued in Experiment 2). The results showed that the retrieval-induced forgetting (RIF) effect was similar for thematically related and unrelated sentences, indicating that the presence of episodic relations among the sentences was sufficient to produce the effect. In Experiment 3, a recognition task was introduced and the RIF effect emerged in accuracy as well as in latency measures. The presence of this effect with item-specific cues is difficult to accommodate for noninhibitory theories of retrieval.

Retrieval-induced forgetting occurs in tests of item recognition.

Using the retrieval-practice paradigm (Anderson, R. A. Bjork, & E. L. Bjork, 1994), we tested whether or not retrieval-induced forgetting could be found in item recognition tests. In Experiment 1, retrieval practice on items from semantic categories depressed recognition of nonpracticed items from the same categories. Similar results were found in Experiment 2 in a more stringent source test for practiced, nonpracticed, and new items. These results conceptually replicate those of previous retrieval-induced forgetting studies done with cued recall (e.g., Anderson et al., 1994). Our findings are inconsistent with the hypothesis that item-specific cues during retrieval will eliminate retrieval interference in the retrieval-practice paradigm (Butler, Williams, Zacks, & Maki, 2001). We discuss our results in relation to other retrieval interference and inhibition effects in recall and recognition.

A limit on retrieval-induced forgetting.

Retrieving some members of a memory set impairs later recall of semantically related but not unrelated members (M. C. Anderson, R. A. Bjork, & E. L. Bjork, 1994; M. C. Anderson & B. A. Spellman, 1995). The authors investigated whether this retrieval-induced forgetting effect would generalize to testing procedures other than category-cued recall. Although the authors demonstrated a retrieval-induced forgetting effect using a category-cued recall task, they failed to show retrieval-induced forgetting on several different memory tests that used item-specific cues, including a category-plus-stem-cued recall test, a category-plus-fragment-cued recall test, a fragment-cued recall test, and a fragment completion task.