Lists Of Word Pairs Research Articles

Unfamiliar Contexts Compared to Familiar Contexts Impair Learning in Humans

Re-exposure to the context that information was learned in facilitates its memory retrieval. However, the influence of context changes on the ability to learn new information is less well understood, which the present work investigated in two experiments with healthy participants (n = 40 per experiment; 20 female). In experiment 1, participants learned a list of word-pairs (A-B) in the morning, after which their memory for the word-pairs was immediately tested. In the evening, they learned and were tested on a second non-overlapping list (C-D), either in the same context or in a different context than the first list (between-subjects). We found that new learning is enhanced in the same context, and that new learning in the other context was decreased compared to baseline. In experiment 2, participants were exposed to both contexts in the morning, but only learned word-pairs in one of them. In the second learning session in the evening, this familiarization with the other context abolished differences between the same and other context group. These data point to context novelty interfering with new learning rather than context familiarity enhancing it. Importantly, the reduction of new learning in the other context in the first experiment, where the context was unfamiliar in both learning sessions, suggests mechanisms beyond attention processes that are bound by the novelty of the other context. Rather, the old context impairs the processing of the new context, possibly by biasing pattern completion and pattern separation trade-offs within the hippocampus.

Attending to encode: The role of consistency and intensity of attention in learning ability

The present study examined how variation in the amount of attention devoted to items (intensity) and the consistency with which attention is maintained on task (consistency) are related to each other and to overall learning abilities. In two experiments, participants completed measures of working memory (WM), long-term memory (LTM), motivation, and a paired associates (PA) cued recall task with thought probes embedded throughout the encoding phase of each word-pair list. In Experiment 2, pupil diameter was also simultaneously recorded during encoding of the PA task to provide an index of the intensity of attention. Results collectively suggested that the most successful learners were those who were both less susceptible to lapses of attention (high consistency) and had larger pupil dilation at encoding (high intensity). Critically, while attentional lapses and pupil dilation were negatively related to one another—both between and within subjects—each aspect of attention accounted for unique variance in associative learning even after accounting for WM, LTM, and motivation. Follow-up analyses further revealed that, while intensity and consistency were both related to motivation and (to a lesser extent) general LTM abilities, motivation was a greater determinant of the consistency of attention. Therefore, it appears that the intensity and consistency of attention are likely distinct, multifaceted constructs that are differentially influenced by a variety of factors and play an important role in learning.

The role of attentional fluctuation during study in recollecting episodic changes at test.

Changes in stimulus features across episodes can lead to proactive interference. One potential way to avoid such interference is to detect and later recollect changes. The Memory-for-Change framework assumes that attention during encoding is necessary for detecting and later recollecting change. We tested this assumption in the current experiment by assessing the covariation of attention and change recollection in a large undergraduate sample (N=132). Participants studied a list of word pairs comprised of four seamless blocks. Some word pairs repeated across all four blocks (A-B4), some were unique to each block (C-D), and some pairs repeated across the first three blocks with a changed response in the fourth block (A-B3, A-D). To measure attention during study, participants periodically responded to probes asking whether they were on- or off-task. Participants then completed a cued recall test of responses from the fourth study block. To measure change recollection, participants were asked to identify which pairs changed during study and to report the earlier responses for pairs they identified as changed. Replicating prior findings, recollecting change was associated with proactive facilitation in recall of the most recent responses. Extending these findings, the frequency of on-task reports was positively associated with cued recall accuracy and change recollection in both within- and between-subjects comparisons. Together, these findings implicate a critical role for self-reported attention during study in change recollection, which is associated with proactive facilitation in recall of changed responses.

Improving word embeddings projection for Turkish hypernym extraction

Corpus-driven approaches can automatically explore is-a relations between the word pairs from corpus. This problem is also called hypernym extraction. Formerly, lexico-syntactic patterns have been used to solve hypernym relations. The language-specific syntactic rules have been manually crafted to build the patterns. On the other hand, recent studies have applied distributional approaches to word semantics. They extracted the semantic relations relying on the idea that similar words share similar contexts. Former distributional approaches have applied one-hot bag-of-word (BOW) encoding. The dimensionality problem of BOW has been solved by various neural network approaches, which represent words in very short and dense vectors, or word embeddings. In this study, we used word embeddings representation and employed the optimized projection algorithm to solve the hypernym problem. The supervised architecture learns a mapping function so that the embeddings (or vectors) of word pairs that are in hypernym relations can be projected to each other. In the training phase, the architecture first learns the embeddings of words and the projection function from a list of word pairs. In the test phase, the projection function maps the embeddings of a given word to a point that is the closest to its hypernym. We utilized the deep learning optimization methods to optimize the model and improve the performances by tuning hyperparameters. We discussed our results by carrying out many experiments based on cross-validation. We also addressed problem-specific loss function, monitored hyperparameters, and evaluated the results with respect to different settings. Finally, we successfully showed that our approach outperformed baseline functions and other studies in the Turkish language.

Reminders can enhance or impair episodic memory updating: a memory-for-change perspective

ABSTRACTThe Memory-for-Change framework proposes that retrieving episodic memories can facilitate new learning when changes between existing memories and new information are integrated during encoding and later recollected. Four experiments examined whether reminders could improve memory updating and enhance new learning. Participants studied two study lists of word pairs and were given a cued recall test on responses from both lists. Reminders of List 1 words pairs (A-B) appeared immediately before List 2 words pairs that included repeated cues and changed responses (A-D). Across experiments, we varied the types of reminders to determine whether differences in their effectiveness as retrieval cues would influence memory for the list membership of responses. We found that presenting intact reminders (cue-response) enhanced the memory benefits associated with recollection-based retrieval of changes relative to when no reminders appeared and when partial reminders (cue-only) appeared with and without feedback. Importantly, cue-response reminders benefitted memory when they were recognised in List 2 and when changes were later recollected. This suggests that integrative encoding can be facilitated when substantial environmental support is available to cue retrieval of existing memories. These findings have practical implications for understanding which reminders best aid the correction of memories for inaccurate information.

The efficacy of learners' testing choices.

Practice tests provide large mnemonic benefits over restudying, but learners judge practice tests as less effective than restudying. Consequently, learners infrequently utilize testing when controlling their study and often choose to be tested only on well-learned items. In 5 experiments, we examined whether learners' choices about testing and restudying are effective for improving subsequent memory performance. Learners studied a list of word pairs and chose which items to restudy and which to test. Some of learners' choices were honored (by assigning those items to the chosen activity) and some of learners' choices were dishonored (by assigning those items to the opposite study activity). Surprisingly, and in contrast with all work to date on the metacognitive monitoring of testing effects, honoring learners' testing choices consistently resulted in better memory performance than dishonoring choices. This effect occurred principally because learners often chose to restudy difficult items, and those items did not benefit from testing. The effectiveness of learners' choices about testing casts the metacognition of testing in a new light: learners may not appreciate the benefits of testing, but they do have an understanding of circumstances in which the benefits of testing are minimal. (PsycINFO Database Record

Effects of Sleep on Word Pair Memory in Children - Separating Item and Source Memory Aspects.

Word paired-associate learning is a well-established task to demonstrate sleep-dependent memory consolidation in adults as well as children. Sleep has also been proposed to benefit episodic features of memory, i.e., a memory for an event (item) bound into the spatiotemporal context it has been experienced in (source). We aimed to explore if sleep enhances word pair memory in children by strengthening the episodic features of the memory, in particular. Sixty-one children (8–12 years) studied two lists of word pairs with 1 h in between. Retrieval testing comprised cued recall of the target word of each word pair (item memory) and recalling in which list the word pair had appeared in (source memory). Retrieval was tested either after 1 h (short retention interval) or after 11 h, with this long retention interval covering either nocturnal sleep or daytime wakefulness. Compared with the wake interval, sleep enhanced separate recall of both word pairs and the lists per se, while recall of the combination of the word pair and the list it had appeared in remained unaffected by sleep. An additional comparison with adult controls (n = 37) suggested that item-source bound memory (combined recall of word pair and list) is generally diminished in children. Our results argue against the view that the sleep-induced enhancement in paired-associate learning in children is a consequence of sleep specifically enhancing the episodic features of the memory representation. On the contrary, sleep in children might strengthen item and source representations in isolation, while leaving the episodic memory representations (item-source binding) unaffected.

Order of items within associations

Abstract Association-memory is a major focus of verbal memory research. However, experimental paradigms have only occasionally tested memory for the order of the constituent items (AB versus BA). Published models of association-memory, implicitly, make clear assumptions about whether associations are learned without order (e.g., convolution-based models) or with unambiguous order (e.g., matrix models). Seeking empirical data to test these assumptions, participants studied lists of word-pairs, and were tested with cued recall, associative recognition and constituent-order recognition. Order-recognition was well above chance, challenging strict convolution-based models, but only moderately coupled with association-memory. Convolution models are thus insufficient, needing an additional mechanism to infer constituent order, in a manner that is moderately correlated with association-memory. Current matrix models provide order, but over-predict the coupling of order- and association-memory. In a simulation, when we allowed for order to be wrongly encoded for some proportion of pairs, order-recognition could be decoupled from cued recall. This led to the prediction that participants should persist with their incorrect order judgement between initial and final order-recognition, but this was not supported by the data. These findings demand that current models be amended, to provide order-memory, while explaining how order can be ambiguous even when the association, itself, is remembered.

What moderates the accuracy of ease of learning judgments?

When people begin to study new material, they may first judge how difficult it will be to learn. Surprisingly, these ease of learning (EOL) judgments have received little attention by metacognitive researchers so far. The aim of this study was to systematically investigate how well EOL judgments can predict actual learning, and what factors may moderate their relative accuracy. In three experiments, undergraduate psychology students made EOL judgments on, then studied, and were tested on, lists of word-pairs (e.g., sun – warm). In Experiment 1, the Goodman-Kruskal gamma (G) correlations showed that EOL judgments were accurate (G = .74) when items varied enough in difficulty to allow for proper discrimination between them, but were less accurate (G = .21) when variation was smaller. Furthermore, in Experiment 1 and 3, we showed that the relative accuracy was reliably higher when the EOL judgments were correlated with a binary criterion (i.e., if an item was recalled or not on a test), compared with a trials-to-learn criterion (i.e., how many study and test trials were needed to recall an item). In addition, Experiments 2 and 3 indicate other factors to be non-influential for EOL accuracy, such as the task used to measure the EOL judgments, and whether items were judged sequentially (i.e., one item at a time in isolation from the other items) or simultaneously (i.e., each item was judged while having access to all other items). To conclude, EOL judgments can be highly accurate (G = .74) and may thus be of strategic importance for learning. Further avenues for research are discussed.

An evening milk drink can affect word recall in Indonesian children with decreased sleep efficiency: A randomized controlled trial

Study objectives: Sleep is important for memory consolidation in children. This study intended to find out whether an evening milk-based drink could influence sleep efficiency and memory recall in a group of Indonesian children (5–6 years old) with sleep deprivation.Methods: Children were randomly allocated to one of three interventions: Reference product, satiety-stimulating product, and a relaxing product. The intervention lasted for 6 weeks and children consumed two servings per day of each 200 ml, the serving in the morning being the same for all children. All measurements took place at baseline and at the end of the intervention. Sleep parameters were studied using actigraphy and a sleep diary during three consecutive days. Memory consolidation was tested using a 20 word-pair list, which was memorized the evening before being recalled the next morning at home-base. Anthropometry was measured using standard equipment.Results: The Satiety group showed a significant decrease in word recall, and a significant increase in nocturnal awakenings that was inversely associated with sleep efficiency at the end of the intervention. Sleep efficiency did not differ between the three groups being 75.5 ± 8.6% and 75.7 ± 6.3% at baseline and end of the intervention, respectively. Despite the lower energy intake in the Standard (reference) group, this condition showed the highest increase in weight.Discussion: Evening growing-up milks can affect memory recall, sleep characteristics, and growth. However, to correct sleep efficiency and sleep duration, improvement of parental behavior may be the most important factor with nutrition providing a supplementary effect.

Brain–behavior relationships in source memory: Effects of age and memory ability

There is considerable evidence for age-related decrements in source memory retrieval, but the literature on the neural correlates of these impairments is mixed. In this study, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to examine source memory retrieval-related brain activity, and the monotonic relationship between retrieval-related brain activity and source memory accuracy, as a function of both healthy aging (younger vs older) and memory ability within the older adult group (Hi-Old vs Lo-Old). Participants studied lists of word pairs, half visually, half aurally; these were re-presented visually in a scanned test phase and participants indicated if the pair was ‘seen’ or ‘heard’ in the study phase. The Lo-Old, but not the Hi-Old, showed source memory performance decrements compared to the Young. During retrieval of source memories, younger and older adults engaged lateral and medial prefrontal cortex (PFC) and medial posterior parietal (and occipital) cortices. The groups differed in how brain activity related to source memory accuracy in dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, precuneus/cuneus, and the inferior parietal cortex; in each of these areas, greater activity was associated with poorer accuracy in the Young, but with higher accuracy in the Hi-Old (anterior cingulate and precuneus/cuneus) and Lo-Old (inferior parietal lobe). Follow-up pairwise group interaction analyses revealed that greater activity in right parahippocampal gyrus was associated with better source memory in the Hi-Old, but not in the Lo-Old. We conclude that older adults recruit additional brain regions to compensate for age-related decline in source memory, but the specific regions involved differ depending on their episodic memory ability.

“Never too late to spot a difference”: the development of L2 speech perception in adults

Abstract Learning correct pronunciation of a second/foreign language always represents a considerable challenge for language learners (e.g. Rojczyk, 2010a), especially for adults (e.g. Flege, 2007). There is an abundance of studies (e.g. Nowacka, 2010; Flege, 1991) showing that second language learners whose first language (L1) phonetic system has only one sound where L2 is characterized by noticeable richness of separate sound categories, encounter serious problems when they try to distinguish those new sounds and, moreover, they tend to apply their native vowels or consonants in L2 speech. It may be easily audible in the case of vowels and actually a lot of studies on L2 learners’ production and perception of L1 and L2 vowels have been carried (e.g. Flege, 1992; Nowacka, 2010; Rojczyk, 2010a; Rojczyk, 2010b). The aim of this study was to examine elementary learners’ perception of 4 German vowels, namely: /ɪ/, /iː/, /ʏ/ and /yː/. They were organized as two sets of minimal pairs, namely /ɪ/ vs. /ʏ/ and /iː/ vs. /yː/. The aforementioned sounds were chosen for the study since /ʏ/ and /yː/ are considered to be very difficult vowels for Polish learners (e.g. Bęza, 2001). Twelve elementary, adult (29-52 years old) Polish learners of German agreed to participate in the study. The subjects had just began their A2-level language course, however they had been taught the basics of German pronunciation for a year, during their A1-level course. They were presented a printed list of word pairs and listened to the recorded words. Then they were asked to circle the right option in each pair. The results revealed that although all study participants were adults when they started learning German and they were still just elementary users of the language, they were already able to distinguish correctly a considerable number of words. It may suggest that proper pronunciation training during a FL/L2 course can provide language learners with measurable benefits.

Identifying the Impact of Semantic Similarity in Semantic Social Media through Evolving Term for Effective Web Mining

Objective: Computing semantic similarity is a significant objective in Information Retrieval (IR) due to the emerging web searching process and the demand of fast and efficient result provisioning. Methods: Exploiting static lexical resources leads most of the conventional semantic similarity measurement techniques to ignore temporal aspects of concepts. Later, to resolve the temporal constraint, the research works exploit independent sources like Newspaper articles, television documentaries, and books. However, these methods meet the data-sparsity problem, since the independent sources are too restrictive and exclude articles that are worthy of notice. Findings: In order to provide the precise result for recent trend concepts, this paper utilizes the social media as the robust and dynamic source, often reflect public opinion. This work introduces an ideNtifying nEw concept Evolution thRough semantIC Social media temPoral analYsis (NEOTERICSPY) model incorporating two phases, namely semantic relatedness measurement in a time series and examining temporal fluctuations between time series. Initially, the NEOTERIC-SPY measures the semantic relatedness of a word-pair using normalized distance measurement in a time series and facilitates the identification of temporal fluctuations. It reduces the word-pair list of a concept among the overall possible word-pairs and provides a good trade-off between the execution time and accuracy. Secondly, it identifies the new concepts using temporal correlation analysis of the semantic similarity measurement between the time series. It employs the weighing function of the temporal dynamics to find the recent changes than the ancient changes of the concepts. The experimental results show that the NEOTERIC-SPY approach significantly outperforms the conventional method and illustrates the consistent improvements of its performance. Application/ Improvements: The NEOTERIC-SPY leads the IR system to provide the desired information to the users in a short-time period, ensuring the precise result pertaining to the recent concept.

Learning style, judgements of learning, and learning of verbal and visual information.

The concept of learning style is immensely popular despite the lack of evidence showing that learning style influences performance. This study tested the hypothesis that the popularity of learning style is maintained because it is associated with subjective aspects of learning, such as judgements of learning (JOLs). Preference for verbal and visual information was assessed using the revised Verbalizer-Visualizer Questionnaire (VVQ). Then, participants studied a list of word pairs and a list of picture pairs, making JOLs (immediate, delayed, and global) while studying each list. Learning was tested by cued recall. The results showed that higher VVQ verbalizer scores were associated with higher immediate JOLs for words, and higher VVQ visualizer scores were associated with higher immediate JOLs for pictures. There was no association between VVQ scores and recall or JOL accuracy. As predicted, learning style was associated with subjective aspects of learning but not objective aspects of learning.

The Limited Capacity of Sleep-Dependent Memory Consolidation

Sleep supports memory consolidation. However, the conceptually important influence of the amount of items encoded in a memory test on this effect has not been investigated. In two experiments, participants (n = 101) learned lists of word-pairs varying in length (40, 160, 320 word-pairs) in the evening before a night of sleep (sleep group) or of sleep deprivation (wake group). After 36 h (including a night allowing recovery sleep) retrieval was tested. Compared with wakefulness, post-learning sleep enhanced retention for the 160 word-pair condition (p < 0.01), importantly, this effect completely vanished for the 320 word-pair condition. This result indicates a limited capacity for sleep-dependent memory consolidation, which is consistent with an active system consolidation view on sleep’s role for memory, if it is complemented by processes of active forgetting and/or gist abstraction. Whereas the absolute benefit from sleep should have increased with increasing amounts of successfully encoded items, if sleep only passively protected memory from interference. Moreover, the finding that retention performance was significantly diminished for the 320 word-pair condition compared to the 160 word-pair condition in the sleep group, makes it tempting to speculate that with increasing loads of information encoded during wakefulness, sleep might favor processes of forgetting over consolidation.

Bi-frontal transcranial alternating current stimulation in the ripple range reduced overnight forgetting

High frequency oscillations in the hippocampal structures recorded during sleep have been proved to be essential for long-term episodic memory consolidation in both animals and in humans. The aim of this study was to test if transcranial Alternating Current Stimulation (tACS) of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) in the hippocampal ripple range, applied bi-frontally during encoding, could modulate declarative memory performance, measured immediately after encoding, and after a night's sleep. An associative word-pair learning test was used. During an evening encoding phase, participants received 1 mA 140 Hz tACS or sham stimulation over both DLPFCs for 10 min while being presented twice with a list of word-pairs. Cued recall performance was investigated 10 min after training and the morning following the training session. Forgetting from evening to morning was observed in the sham condition, but not in the 140 Hz stimulation condition. 140 Hz tACS during encoding may have an effect on the consolidation of declarative material.

Memory consequences of looking back to notice change: Retroactive and proactive facilitation.

Three experiments contrasted recollection of change with differentiation as means of avoiding retroactive interference and proactive interference. We manipulated the extent to which participants looked back to notice change between pairs of cues and targets (A-B, A-D) and measured the effects on later cued recall of either the first or second response. Two lists of word pairs were presented. Some right-hand members of pairs were changed within List 2, whereas others were changed between lists. Participants in a Within-List Back condition were instructed to detect changes that occurred only during List 2, in an effort to reduce noticing changes in pairs between lists while simultaneously differentiating the 2 lists. In contrast, participants in an N-Back condition were instructed to detect both within-list and between-list changes. Recall of first list responses that changed between lists produced retroactive facilitation for the N-Back condition but not for the Within-List Back condition. Similarly, recall of second list responses that changed between lists produced proactive facilitation for the N-Back condition but not for the Within-List Back condition. The greater extent of looking back increased detection of change and later recollection of change, which produced facilitation. When change was not recollected, detected change produced proactive interference. The recursive reminding produced when change is noticed contrasts with the simple associations of classic interference theory, and memory performance when change is recollected contrasts with the predictions of interference theory.

Modernising historical Slovene words

AbstractWe propose a language-independent word normalisation method and exemplify it on modernising historical Slovene words. Our method relies on character-level statistical machine translation (CSMT) and uses only shallow knowledge. We present relevant data on historical Slovene, consisting of two (partially) manually annotated corpora and the lexicons derived from these corpora, containing historical word–modern word pairs. The two lexicons are disjoint, with one serving as the training set containing 40,000 entries, and the other as a test set with 20,000 entries. The data spans the years 1750–1900, and the lexicons are split into fifty-year slices, with all the experiments carried out separately on the three time periods. We perform two sets of experiments. In the first one – a supervised setting – we build a CSMT system using the lexicon of word pairs as training data. In the second one – an unsupervised setting – we simulate a scenario in which word pairs are not available. We propose a two-step method where we first extract a noisy list of word pairs by matching historical words with cognate modern words, and then train a CSMT system on these pairs. In both sets of experiments, we also optionally make use of a lexicon of modern words to filter the modernisation hypotheses. While we show that both methods produce significantly better results than the baselines, their accuracy and which method works best strongly correlates with the age of the texts, meaning that the choice of the best method will depend on the properties of the historical language which is to be modernised. As an extrinsic evaluation, we also compare the quality of part-of-speech tagging and lemmatisation directly on historical text and on its modernised words. We show that, depending on the age of the text, annotation on modernised words also produces significantly better results than annotation on the original text.

Negative Emotional Arousal Impairs Associative Memory Performance for Emotionally Neutral Content in Healthy Participants.

The effect of emotional arousal on memory presents a complex pattern with previous studies reporting conflicting results of both improved and reduced memory performance following arousal manipulations. In this study we further tested the effect of negative emotional arousal (NEA) on individual-item recognition and associative recognition of neutral stimuli in healthy participants, and hypothesized that NEA will particularly impair associative memory performance. The current study consists of two experiments; in both, participants studied a list of word-pairs and were then tested for items (items recognition test), and for associations (associative recognition test). In the first experiment, the arousal manipulation was induced by flashing emotionally-negative or neutral pictures between study-pairs while in the second experiment arousal was induced by presenting emotionally-negative or neutral pictures between lists. The results of the two experiments converged and supported an associative memory deficit observed under NEA conditions. We suggest that NEA is associated with an altered ability to bind one stimulus to another as a result of impaired recollection, resulting in poorer associative memory performance. The current study findings may contribute to the understanding of the mechanism underlying memory impairments reported in disorders associated with traumatic stress.

Menstrual cycle effects on cortisol responsivity and emotional retrieval following a psychosocial stressor

This article is part of a Special Issue “Estradiol and cognition”.Laboratory-induced stress produces elevations in cortisol and deficits in memory, especially when stress is induced immediately before retrieval of emotionally valent stimuli. Sex and sex steroids appear to influence these stress-induced outcomes, though no study has directly compared the effects of laboratory-induced stress on cortisol and emotional retrieval across the menstrual cycle. We examined the effect of psychosocial stress on cortisol responsivity and emotional retrieval in women tested during either the follicular phase (low estradiol and progesterone) or the luteal phase (higher estradiol and progesterone). Forty women (50% White; age 18–40years) participated in the study; 20 completed the task during the luteal phase and 20 during the follicular phase. Psychosocial stress was induced with the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST). On the day before the TSST, participants learned two lists of word pairs to 100% criterion. The next day, participants recalled one list after the control condition and the other after the TSST. Women in the follicular phase, but not the luteal phase, demonstrated a significant cortisol response to the TSST. There was a stress-induced decrease in emotional retrieval following the TSST, but this effect was not modified by menstrual phase. However, regression and correlational analyses showed that individual differences in stress-induced cortisol levels were associated with impaired emotional retrieval in the follicular phase only. The present findings indicate that cortisol responsivity and the impairing effects of cortisol on emotional memory are lower when levels of estradiol and progesterone are high compared to when levels are low.