Lists Of Word Pairs Research Articles

Event-related potential correlates of gist and verbatim encoding

The neural correlates of gist and verbatim encoding of episodes sharing semantically related components were investigated. At study, participants were presented with lists of word pairs formed by pairing one of two associated words with different associates of an unstudied theme word. At test, participants discriminated Old pairs from rearranged pairs generated by re-pairing study pairs belonging to the same study list (Intra pairs) or different study lists (Inter pairs). ERPs were recorded for each study pair. For the study pairs that later served as Old pairs, the ERPs were more positive when these pairs were subsequently correctly identified than when they were incorrectly rejected. For the study pairs containing words that subsequently appeared in Intra pairs, the ERPs were also more positive when the Intra pair was correctly rejected than when it was incorrectly accepted. However, the topographies of the subsequent memory effects for accepted Old pairs and rejected Intra pairs were different. We argue that specific information is more important for rejecting Intra pairs than accepting Old pairs. The different topographies of these two subsequent memory effects therefore reflect qualitatively distinct encoding operations for specific and non-specific information.

REM-dependent repair of competitive memory suppression

Memories are enhanced during sleep through memory consolidation processes. A recent study reported that sleep increases competitive forgetting in the absence of sleep-dependent consolidation of the target memory (Racsmany et al. in Psychol Sci 21:80-85, 2010). Here, using a modified retrieval-induced forgetting task, we examined whether sleep-dependent modulation of forgetting occurs concurrently with the consolidation of related target memories. Participants encoded a word-pair list and then practiced retrieving a portion of these pairs. Following a break with sleep or wake, recall of all pairs was tested. As expected, recall for practiced pairs was greater following sleep relative to wake. Contrary to Racsmany et al. (Psychol Sci 21:80-85, 2010), competitive forgetting decreased following sleep. Moreover, recall for practiced pairs correlated with slow wave sleep (SWS) while forgetting of competing targets correlated negatively with REM, suggesting a novel function of these sequential brain states on memory processing.

Developmental differences in the use of recognition memory rejection mechanisms.

The current experiment examined the use of plausibility judgments by children to reject distractors presented on yes/no recognition memory tests. Participants studied two lists of word pairs that shared either a categorical or rhyme association, which constituted the global nature of the two study conditions. During the recognition memory tests, participants were presented with distractors that were either consistent or inconsistent with the global nature of the study environment. Five-year-old children did not engage in plausibility-based rejections in either the rhyme or category condition, whereas children 7 years of age and older engaged in plausibility-based rejections in the rhyme condition. However, it was not until children were 12 years old that they engaged in plausibility-based rejections in the category condition. Such data demonstrate global gist to be necessary but insufficient for children to reject recognition test items on the basis of their plausibility.

Learners’ choices and beliefs about self-testing

Students have to make scores of practical decisions when they study. We investigated the effectiveness of, and beliefs underlying, one such practical decision: the decision to test oneself while studying. Using a flashcards-like procedure, participants studied lists of word pairs. On the second of two study trials, participants either saw the entire pair again (pair mode) or saw the cue and attempted to generate the target (test mode). Participants were asked either to rate the effectiveness of each study mode (Experiment 1) or to choose between the two modes (Experiment 2). The results demonstrated a mismatch between metacognitive beliefs and study choices: Participants (incorrectly) judged that the pair mode resulted in the most learning, but chose the test mode most frequently. A post-experimental questionnaire suggested that self-testing was motivated by a desire to diagnose learning rather than a desire to improve learning.

Divided attention at encoding: Effect on feeling-of-knowing

This research investigated the effect of divided attention at encoding on feeling-of-knowing (FOK). Participants had to learn a 60 word-pair list under two experimental conditions, one with full attention (FA) and one with divided attention (DA). After that, they were administered episodic FOK tasks with a cued-recall phase, a FOK phase and a recognition phase. Our results showed that DA at encoding altered not only memory performance, but also FOK judgments and FOK accuracy. These findings throw some light on the central role of the quality of memory encoding to make accurate FOK judgments and provide new evidence supporting the relationship between memory and metamemory judgments.

A stability bias in human memory: Overestimating remembering and underestimating learning.

The dynamics of human memory are complex and often unintuitive, but certain features--such as the fact that studying results in learning--seem like common knowledge. In 12 experiments, however, participants who were told they would be allowed to study a list of word pairs between 1 and 4 times and then take a cued-recall test predicted little or no learning across trials, notwithstanding their large increases in actual learning. When queried directly, the participants espoused the belief that studying results in learning, but they showed little evidence of that belief in the actual task. These findings, when combined with A. Koriat, R. A. Bjork, L. Sheffer, and S. K. Bar's (2004) research on judgments of forgetting, suggest a stability bias in human memory--that is, a tendency to assume that the accessibility of one's memories will remain relatively stable over time rather than benefiting from future learning or suffering from future forgetting.

Process demands of rejection mechanisms of recognition memory.

A surge of research has been conducted to examine memory editing mechanisms that help distinguish accurate from inaccurate memories. In the present experiment, the authors examined the ability of participants to use novelty detection, recollection rejection, and plausibility judgments to reject lures presented on a recognition memory test. Participants studied a list of word pairs that were arranged in a category relationship (both words from the same category) or an unrelated relationship (both words from different categories) under full or divided attention. At test, participants were given a yes/no recognition test in which they were to respond after seeing the test items for 400 ms or 2,800 ms. Some of the test items were rearranged word pairs that were consistent with the study relationship, whereas others were inconsistent with the study relationship. The results demonstrate that the participants required full attention at study to use novelty detection, recollection rejection, and plausibility judgments to reject lures. Moreover, the results indicate that a long response deadline at test was needed for participants to use both recollection rejection and plausibility judgments to reject lures.

Paying attention to binding: Further studies assessing the role of reduced attentional resources in the associative deficit of older adults

The present experiments investigated whether the observed associative deficit in older adults' episodic memory is mediated by a reduction of attentional resources. Using a dual-task procedure, younger and older participants studied lists of word pairs either under full attention or while performing a concurrent task. Both experiments showed that dividing attention did not cause a greater impairment to memory for associations than to memory for items in either age group. Furthermore, an analysis of concurrent task performance revealed that older adults' attentional costs for both learning and binding items were not larger than for learning items alone, relative to younger adults. These data provide support for a multicausal interpretation of older adults' memory deficits in which common, depleted attentional resources may be a mechanism that reduces memory for components of an episode in both older and younger adults under divided attention at encoding. In addition, older adults have a unique deficit in memory for the associations between the components, which does not seem to be resource dependent.

Retrograde facilitation under midazolam: The role of general and specific interference

In a double-blind, placebo-controlled experiment that used midazolam, a benzodiazepine that creates temporary amnesia, we compared acquisition and retention of paired associates of different types. Some word pairs were studied before the injection of saline or midazolam, and two lists of word pairs were studied after the injection. Critical comparisons involved retention of pairs that were practiced on all three lists, pairs studied on only one list, and pairs that involved recombining cue and response terms from one list to the next, as a function of drug condition. Previous research with benzodiazepines had found retrograde facilitation for material acquired prior to injection, compared with the control condition. One explanation for this facilitation is that the anterograde amnesia produced by the benzodiazepine frees up the hippocampus to better consolidate previously learned material (Wixted, 2004, 2005). We accounted for a rich data set using a simple computational model that incorporated interference effects (cue overload) at retrieval for both general (experimental context) interference and specific (stimulus term) interference without the need to postulate a role for consolidation. The computational model as an Excel spreadsheet may be downloaded from www.psychonomic.org/archive.

Sleep's function in the spontaneous recovery and consolidation of memories.

Building on 2 previous studies (B. R. Ekstrand, 1967; B. R. Ekstrand, M. J. Sullivan, D. F. Parker, & J. N. West, 1971), the authors present 2 experiments that were aimed at characterizing the role of retroactive interference in sleep-associated declarative memory consolidation. Using an A-B, A-C paradigm with lists of word pairs in Experiment 1, the authors showed that sleep provides recovery from retroactive interference induced at encoding, whereas no such recovery was seen in several wake control conditions. Noninterfering word-pair lists were used in Experiment 2 (A-B, C-D). Sleeping after learning, in comparison with waking after learning, enhanced retention of both lists to a similar extent when encoding was less intense because of less list repetition and briefer word-pair presentations. With intense encoding, sleep-associated improvements were not seen for either list. In combination, the results indicate that the benefit of sleep for declarative memory consolidation is greater for weaker associations, regardless of whether weak associations result from retroactive interference or poor encoding.

An event-related potential study of two kinds of source judgment errors

The neural correlates of source judgment errors for confusable and nonconfusable source–item pairings were investigated. At study, subjects were presented with a series of lists of word pairs. Word pairs belonging to the same list were formed by pairing one of two associated words with different associates of an unstudied theme word (e.g., ship–frost, captain–chilly, ship–freeze, captain–frigid, etc., in one list; wife–pane, husband–glass, wife–curtain, husband–sill, etc., in another list). At test, subjects discriminated ‘Old pairs’ (e.g., ship–frost) from ‘Intra’ rearranged pairs (e.g., ship–chilly), ‘Inter’ rearranged pairs (e.g., ship–pane), and ‘Old–New’ pairs (e.g., ship–bulb). Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded for each class of test item. Similar proportions of ‘yes’ responses to Old and Intra rearranged pairs were observed, but the false alarm rate for Inter rearranged pairs was markedly lower. ERPs elicited by correctly classified Old pairs and false alarms to Intra rearranged pairs were indistinguishable and exhibited ‘left parietal’ and ‘right frontal’ effects, characteristic of recollection-based recognition. ERPs for false alarms to Inter rearranged pairs did not show these effects. It is concluded that source judgment errors for confusable source–item pairings are mediated by the same processes that support correct source judgments. Such errors reflect recollection of gist information which is nondiagnostic with respect to source.

Context effects in recognition memory: The role of familiarity and recollection

A variant of the process dissociation procedure was coupled with a manipulation of response signal lag to assess whether manipulations of context affect one or both of the familiarity and search processes described by the dual process model of recognition. Participants studied a list of word pairs (context + target) followed by a recognition test with target words presented in the same or different context, and in the same or different form as study (singular/plural). Participants were asked to recognize any target word regardless of changes to form (inclusion), or to only recognise words that were presented in the same form (exclusion). The standard context reinstatement effect was evident even at the short response lags. Analyses of the estimates of the contributions of familiarity and search processes suggest that the context effect demonstrated here can be attributed in part to the influence of familiarity on recognition, whereas the effect on recollection was less clear.

Comparison Between Three Memory Tests: Cued Recall, Priming and Saving Closed-Head Injured Patients and Controls

Twenty closed-head injured (CHI) patients and 20 matched controls were tested with three different memory tasks: cued recall, word stem completion (WSC), and saving. Saving is defined as the advantage of relearning of a list of word pairs, in terms of the number of learning trials to the criterion of one errorless trial, over the original learning of the same list. It was predicted that CHI patients' explicit memory (i.e., cued recall), but not implicit memory (i.e., WSC), would be impaired. The question addressed in this study is whether the memory of CHI patients will be impaired when memory is tested with a saving task, with 2 weeks delay between original learning and relearning. The findings confirm impairment of CHI patients in explicit memory, although the learning rate is preserved. Implicit memory is preserved in CHI patients only when based on reactivation of preexisting knowledge, but not when dependent on forming new associations. Finally, the CHI patients, even after 2 weeks delay, demonstrated a significant saving in relearning old, as compared to new, pairs of words. The clinical contribution of this study is the delineation of those aspects of memory that are impaired and those that are preserved in CHI patients. The theoretical implications of the finding that memory could be preserved in CHI patients when measured by saving, are discussed in terms of the relationship between implicit memory and saving.

Bilingual Knowledge Maps (BiK-Maps) in Second-Language Vocabulary Learning

Bilingual knowledge maps (BiK-maps) were investigated as tools for learning German-English word pairs. Seventy-two undergraduate students participated in the 2-session experiment. They studied 32 word pairs in 1 of 4 conditions, each distinguished by the presentation format for the vocabulary: The 1st group received BiK-maps (word pairs embedded in a spatial and semantic array); the 2nd group studied lists of word pairs; and the 3rd and 4th groups were identical to the 1st and 2nd groups except for the addition of semantic emphasis materials. Free-recall, cued-recall, and multiple-choice tests were taken in Sessions 1 and 2 (48 hr later). BiK-map learners outperformed list learners on all dependent measures. Semantic emphasis negatively affected performance over time.

Chapter 5 Understanding failures of learning: Hebbian learning, competition for representational space, and some preliminary experimental data

This chapter discusses the reason of difficulty in paired associate learning in amnesics. In an experiment described in the chapter, the subject receives a list of, say, 12 word pairs (including, for example, locomotive-dishtowel and table-banana, among others). After a slight delay, the experimenter presents the first word in one of the pairs, and asks the subject to recall the word that was previously paired with it in the experiment. Because of the subject's amnesia, the subject may not remember even that there was a list of word pairs. Nevertheless, as is standard in paired-associate learning, the subject is encouraged to guess a response. Given the arbitrary pairing of the words, table is unlikely to come to mind in the context of banana as a cue, and hence the stimulus is likely to elicit some other response. If learning is Hebbian, it is this response that will be strengthened, thereby leading to interference. There is experimental support for the idea that forcing amnesics to make their own responses to items leads to interference.

Priming of new associations in reading time: What is learned?

The priming of new associations has been a controversial topic, with some studies finding significant effects but others failing to replicate these results. Three studies investigated the priming of new associations in a reading time task, presenting lists of word pairs that were read aloud as quickly as possible. In Experiment 1, significant priming of new associations was found after two study presentations, replicating similar results by Moscovitch, Winocur, and MacLachan (1986). In Experiment 2, reading time was facilitated for intact pairs when word positions remained constant relative to when word positions were reversed. This suggested that the associative priming effect was related to specific lower level features of the word pairs rather than to abstract associations. In Experiment 3, the insertion of the wordand between test words eliminated the pairing-specific effect, placing the locus of new association priming at the transition between words within pairs. These findings demonstrate that the knowledge that supports priming of new associations in the reading time task involves perceptual or articulatory information about the transitions between words rather than abstract associative knowledge.

List learning of second language vocabulary

ABSTRACTThe learning of second language vocabulary in lists of word pairs is a widespread practice. A basic practical question in this respect is whether it is more effective for nonfluent bilinguals to learn word pairs in first language–second language order (Ll–L2), or vice versa. To date, experimental psychology has not given a clear answer to this question, partly because it has not addressed the relevant issues directly. This article reviews some aspects of psychology that are relevant to L2 vocabulary list learning and reports on an experiment conducted with comprehensive (high) school students, aged 11–13, who were learning French. The experiment examined the presentation of vocabulary items to be learned. It was found that presenting items in L1–L2 order was the more versatile form of presentation if both production and comprehension of L2 items were required on the part of the learner. The theoretical implications of the findings, relating to the structure of the bilingual lexicon, are also discussed.

Lateralized free-association priming: Implications for the hemispheric organization of semantic memory

The organization of semantic memory in intact cerebral hemispheres was examined by a free-association priming task. Normal subjects studied a list of word pairs where the semantic relations were either coordinate (e.g. saw-axe) or locative (e.g. bear-forest). Priming of the word pairs was tested by presenting test cues (initial words of the pairs) to the left or to the right visual field. Results showed an interaction between visual field and word pair type, suggesting a qualitative difference in the semantic organization of the hemispheres. Specifically, the results support the view that coordinate relations are represented in both hemispheres whereas locative relations are represented mainly in the right hemisphere.

Repetition priming for newly formed and preexisting associations: Perceptual and conceptual influences.

Three experiments demonstrate that association-specific repetition effects can be obtained for both newly formed and preexisting associations and that these effects are sensitive to modality of presentation. After studying a list of word pairs, participants were shown the original intact pairs and pairs formed by recombining the original pairs. In a lexical-decision task in which participants were asked to indicate whether both items were words, responses were faster to newly formed associations in the intact than in the recombined condition. This association-specific repetition priming effect was also observed for preexisting associations when a speeded relatedness judgment task was used. Both effects were found to be attenuated under cross-modal presentation. Finally, an explicit speeded recognition task revealed an associative effect that was not attenuated when modality was crossed for newly formed associations and was actually exaggerated for preexisting associations, suggesting that the repetition priming effects were not produced by conscious recollection. Results are discussed in terms of frameworks that are based either on perceptual representation systems or on a transfer-appropriate processing model.

Encoding strategy dynamics: When relationships between words determine strategy use

A number of questions remain largely unanswered about when subjects are likely to employ imagery as opposed to verbal encoding and the subsequent effect this will have on recall. The present experiments examined some of the factors determining such use. Subjects were asked to learn mixed lists of word pairs which were either spatially related (i.e. their referents normally appear in spatial contiguity) or categorically related (their referents are members of a shared superordinate category) using either imagery or verbal mediators throughout. For half the pairs the encoding instructions were appropriate to the relationship between words (e.g. the use of imagery for spatially related pairs) and for the other pairs the instructions were inappropriate (e.g. the use of imagery for categorically related pairs). Subjects were not influenced by experimental instructions under these conditions but overwhelmingly used encodings appropriate to the relationship between words. Furthermore, it was found that subjects were able to adjust encoding strategies from one pair to the next in a flexible manner in accordance with the nature of the relationship between words. What determines strategy use at a given instant appears to result from the interaction of cues provided by the experimental materials with prior world knowledge relating to individual words or combinations of words. Recall for categorically related pairs was better than for spatially related pairs despite the fact that imagery was used more frequently for spatially related pairs and both types of pair were rated equally for concreteness and imageability. Alternative explanations for this finding are discussed.