Probability Of Recall Research Articles

The role of duration in memory and metamemory of enacted instructions (SPTs)

Subjects enacted two series of tasks as instructed (subject-performed tasks, or SPTs). The enactions were of either short (5-s) or long (30-s) duration. The long en actions were either repetitive (e.g.,bounce a ball several times) or else nonrepetitive (e. g.,stand up, walk round the room, open the door, look out, close the door, sit down). During presentation, subjects were to rate the probability of recall of each SPT in a subsequent free-recall test. The long SPTs were given higher recall ratings than the short SPTs, but the subjects did not differentiate between the repetitive and the nonrepetitive items. Recall mirrored the ratings; the long SPTs were recalled more frequently than the short ones, with no difference between the repetitive and the nonrepetitive items. The metamemory results are discussed in relation to the notion that the memory-monitoring system is sensitive to quantitative, but not to qualitative, differences in encoding.

Associative memory in an analog iterated-map neural network.

The behavior of an analog neural network with parallel dynamics is studied analytically and numerically for two associative-memory learning algorithms, the Hebb rule and the pseudoinverse rule. Phase diagrams in the parameter space of analog gain \ensuremath{\beta} and storage ratio \ensuremath{\alpha} are presented. For both learning rules, the networks have large ``recall'' phases in which retrieval states exist and convergence to a fixed point is guaranteed by a global stability criterion. We also demonstrate numerically that using a reduced analog gain increases the probability of recall starting from a random initial state. This phenomenon is comparable to thermal annealing used to escape local minima but has the advantage of being deterministic, and therefore easily implemented in electronic hardware. Similarities and differences between analog neural networks and networks with two-state neurons at finite temperature are also discussed.

Comparison of Narrative Recall in 11-Yr.-Old Children and Adults

One issue in the development of narrative comprehension is whether cMdren initially process information at a low level, developing later the ability to build up higher units of organisation (4, 5), or whether they learn first to identify the main ideas of a passage and become increasingly able to subsume less structurally important units under them later in development (1, 3). These approaches may be described as 'bottom-up' and 'top-down' development, respectively. The present study compares the patterns of narrative recall by adults and 11-yr.-old children: taking adults' recall frequencies as an index oE the structural importance of story constituents, top-down development between these ages would predict good over-all agreement on recall frequencies, especially for the more 'important' constituents. Two groups of subjects, 22 children (M age 10.7 yr.; SD: 0.4) and 54 undergraduate students, each received the same 225-word, 30-clause narrative (passage 1A from Cornish, 2), chosen to be equally acceptable to the two age groups. Subjects were read the passage once and asked to write out as much of it as they could remember; they were discouraged from deliberate memorisation. Reproductions were scored for the number of original clauses recalled, after Cornish (2). The mean number of clauses recalled per subject was 17.9 (SD: 4.5) for the children and 23.5 (SD: 4.3) for the students. Recall probabilities were calculated for each clause separately for the two groups. There was a high product-moment correlation between the two sets of omission frequencies (fis = 0.715, p c ,001). However, inspection of the data suggested that the greatest agreement was on the most commonly recalled clauses. This was confirmed by comparing the correlations for the 15 most and 15 least frequently recalled clauses (by the adults' ratings), which were 0.429 (df= 13, p< .05) and 0.339 (df = 13, p = n.s.), respectively. Both the good agreement on the ordering of clauses by recall frequency and the greater agreement on the more frequently recalled clauses support 'top-down' development of narrative comprehension in the 11-yr. to adult age range. The children appear well able to identify structurally important narrative constituents but are less able to comprehend subsidiary material. Future work might look at younger children whose narrative development might proceed in a different manner.

A model for contextual fluctuation

Current theories of human memory frequently assume that the probability of recall depends on the similarity of the test context to the study context. A model for contextual fluctuation is developed that is based on Stimulus Sampling Theory. The model assumes that “context” can be represented by a set of so called contextual elements. Part of this set represents the current context. There is a continuous fluctuation between the active contextual elements (the current context) and the inactive contextual elements. During study, part of the current context is conditioned to (stored in) the memory trace. The model may be used to derive predictions for the overlap between the study and test contexts. The model is developed in the context of interference paradigms. It is shown that the model leads to a number of interesting predictions. The incorporation of this model in the SAM theory (Raaijmakers & Shiffrin 1981. Psychological Review 88, 93–134) enables that theory to predict such phenomena as spontaneous recovery and proactive inhibition.

Metamemory for words and enacted instructions: predicting which items will be recalled.

Subjects can predict, during word list acquisition, which items they will subsequently recall. When the list items are subject-performed tasks (SPTs), recall prediction is totally inaccurate. Delaying the rating of recall probability (actually, trace strength rating) until list acquisition was complete did not affect the accuracy of the ratings. Word recall was predictable; SPT recall was not. When encoding was systematically manipulated, the effects of the manipulations on recall were accompanied by parallel effects on the strength ratings for SPTs, as well as for words. Several explanations for the data are discussed, the most probable being that of a mismatch between those characteristics of the SPTs that underlie strength ratings and those that determine recall.

SAM and the effects of precuing in probed recall: A comment on ‘The time course of precueing effects in probed immediate recall’, by A.J.P. Hendrikx

Hendrikx (1987) observed that precuing in the positional probe paradigm leads to faster responses but not to a higher probability of correct recall. He claimed that the SAM theory proposed by Raaijmakers and Shiffrin (1980, 1981) predicts an advantage for both latency and accuracy. Hence, these results were believed to be incompatible with the SAM theory. It is shown that this claim is false and is based on an incorrect analysis of the experimental paradigm. The SAM theory is shown to be able to give a simple explanation for these data.

Memorability functions as an indicator of qualitative age differences in text recall.

An analysis in which the probability of text unit recall for older adults [p(Re/O)] is plotted as a function of this probability for the young [p(Re/Y)] is considered as one way to assess whether there are qualitative differences in text recall for young and old. The application of this relative memorability analysis to previously reported data dealing with the immediate recall of spoken sentences (Stine, Wingfield, & Poon, 1986) revealed that although older adults show qualitative recall similar to younger adults when informational density is low, they show less discrimination among text elements when informational density is increased.

Habituation as a necessary condition for maintenance rehearsal

In two experiments using maintenance rehearsal procedures, the attempt was made to manipulate the orienting response elicited by common nouns. In Experiment 1, placing an additional target word in a list prior to a critical target eliminated any detectable effect of rehearsal duration of the critical target on subsequent recall. Experiment 2 used lists and procedures identical to those of Experiment 1, except that irrelevant auditory and visual events accompanied the presentation of the critical target. In Experiment 2, there was a strong effect of rehearsal duration on recall. It is suggested that the results of Experiment 1 resulted from rapid habituation to the task, and that the results of Experiment 2 resulted from dishabituating effects of the irrelevant events. The results, together with previous findings, suggest that habituation may be necessary for maintenance rehearsal to occur. Obversely, increased probability of long-term recall may be an automatic consequence of rehearsal under higher attention levels.

Consumption and Unemployment

This paper examines consumption changes of workers following experiences of unemployment in different stochastic environments. The model developed in the paper predicts that consumption changes following unemployment spells should be small for workers the higher are their layoff and recall probabilities. These predictions are confirmed in estimates with panel data.

Interevent differences in event memory: why are some events more recallable than others?

Interitem differences in the free recall of action events were studied in five experiments. The action events were presented in three different formats: minitasks performed by the subjects in response to verbal instructions from the experimenter (SPTs), minitasks performed by the experimenter (EPTs), and task instructions (TIs). Not only were reliable interevent differences in recall probability demonstrated within each format, but these differences tended to correlate across formats, especially between the SPTs and EPTs; thus, a highly recallable SPT also tended to be a highly recallable EPT. Attempts to explain interitem recall differences in terms of differences in familiarity, vividness, and the availability of environmental cues were largely unsuccessful. An experimental analysis of the action events into action and object components showed the recall probabilities of our events to be mainly dependent on the recall probabilities of their action components, with only a minor dependence on the recall probabilities of their object components.

Presentation factors and driver characteristics affecting road-sign registration

Perception of road signs was investigated on a stretch of Belgrade suburban road on which a temporary road sign was set up before a bend. Sign registration was investigated for three signs in five situations using three display conditions (each sign separately, simultaneous presentation of two different signs, and successive presentation of the same sign). The results showed that the probability of sign recall was low and there were large differences between the three different road signs. The simultaneous presentation of two signs did not not result in a higher registration compared with that of the more effective of the two signs presented on its own. Simultaneous presentation enhanced performance only for the less effective of the two signs. However, successive presentation of the same sign in a short spatial interval did considerably increase sign registration. Also, it was found that sign registration was related to driver's age, professional status, kind of driving and mileage driven annually. Young...

Predicting which words get recalled: measures of free recall, availability, goodness, emotionality, and pronunciability for 925 nouns.

To investigate the properties that make a word easy to recall, we added to existing norms for 925 nouns measures of availability, goodness, emotionality, pronunciability, and probability of recall in multiple-trial free recall. Availability, imagery, and emotionality were found to be the best predictors of which words were recalled. This result, which is stable across recall data collected in three separate laboratories, argues for the importance of availability as a predictor of recall and questions the role of the correlated variables of word frequency and meaningfulness. Consistent with earlier work on a smaller sample of words, six factors describe the numerous properties of words studied by psychologists. The six factors are composed of variables based on orthography, imagery and meaning, word frequency, recall, emotionality, and goodness.

Immediate memory span for two-dimensional spatial arrays: Effects of pattern symmetry and goodness

Two hundred dot patterns set in a 5 × 5 matrix were constructed with array sizes from 1 to 11 and five amounts of whole and part symmetry. In experiment 1 judged pattern goodness was shown to be a highly reliable increasing function of array size and amount of symmetry, the two effects being independent. In experiment 2 subjects attempted graphic reproduction of each pattern following a 1-sec exposure. Within array sizes the probability of correct pattern reproduction was a robust positive function of amount of symmetry and judged goodness, and this finding confirms the pattern goodness effect on a very general basis. Values of the immediate memory span (size of array for which the probability of correct recall was 0.5) were interpolated from fitted quadratic curves. The resulting values of immediate memory span increased dramatically with amount of symmetry, and ranged from 4.0 for quasi-random patterns to 10.8 for wholly symmetrical ones. Two points were argued in the Discussion. First, that the capacity of primary memory is about three spatial locations, and that such capacity is very effectively increased by retrieval of visual and verbal information from secondary memory. Second, that the differential recall effects originate during encoding rather than as a result of either short-term forgetting or response bias.

A comparison of three predictors of an individual's memory performance: the individual's feeling of knowing versus the normative feeling of knowing versus base-rate item difficulty.

Distinctions are drawn between different predictors of an individual's memory performance, with emphasis on the notion of privileged access to idiosyncratic knowledge. Research is reported in which undergraduates attempted to recall the answers to general-information questions, then made feeling-of-knowing judgments on nonrecalled items, and subsequently had a criterion test (relearning, perceptual identification, or one of two versions of recognition). For predicting an individual's criterion performance, the individual's own feeling-of-knowing predictions were intermediate between two kinds of normative predictions: The individual's feeling-of-knowing predictions were more accurate than predictions derived from normative feeling-of-knowing ratings but were less accurate than predictions derived from base-rate item difficulty (normative probabilities of correct recall). Subsidiary analyses showed that factors other than unreliability are responsible for the partial inaccuracy of the individual's feeling of knowing. Ramifications are discussed for possible ways to improve the accuracy of an individual's feeling-of-knowing predictions.

Short-term memory capacity: magic number or magic spell?

Previous experiments have found that memory span is greater for items that can be pronounced more quickly. For a variety of materials the span equals the number of items that can be pronounced in about 1.5 s, presumably the duration of the verbal trace. This suggests a model for immediate recall: The probability of correctly recalling a list equals the probability that the time to recite the list is less than the variable duration of the trace. Recall probability for lists of various lengths was determined for six materials. Later, subjects read the lists aloud. The standard normal deviates corresponding to probability of correct recall were linear in pronunciation time. Evidently, over subjects, a normal distribution is a reasonable approximation of the distribution of the trace duration. The mean and variance of the trace duration were estimated. The mean (1.88 s) agrees well with previous estimates, and the model accounts for 95% of the variance in immediate recall.

Memorability as a measure of processing: a unit analysis of prose and list learning.

The percentage of subjects recalling each unit in a list or prose passage is considered as a dependent measure. When the same units are recalled in different tasks, processing is assumed to be the same; when different units are recalled, processing is assumed to be different. Two collections of memory tasks are presented, one for lists and one for prose. The relations found in these two collections are supported by an extensive reanalysis of the existing prose memory literature. The same set of words were learned by 13 different groups of subjects under 13 different conditions. Included were intentional free-recall tasks, incidental free recall following lexical decision, and incidental free recall following ratings of orthographic distinctiveness and emotionality. Although the nine free-recall tasks varied widely with regard to the amount of recall, the relative probability of recall for the words was very similar among the tasks. Imagery encoding and recognition produced relative probabilities of recall that were different from each other and from the free-recall tasks. Similar results were obtained with a prose passage. A story was learned by 13 different groups of subjects under 13 different conditions. Eight free-recall tasks, which varied with respect to incidental or intentional learning, retention interval, and the age of the subjects, produced similar relative probabilities of recall, whereas recognition and prompted recall produced relative probabilities of recall that were different from each other and from the free-recall tasks. A review of the prose literature was undertaken to test the generality of these results. Analysis of variance is the most common statistical procedure in this literature. If the relative probability of recall of units varied across conditions, a units by condition interaction would be expected. For the 12 studies that manipulated retention interval, an average of 21% of the variance was accounted for by the main effect of retention interval, 17% by the main effect of units, and only 2% by the retention interval by units interaction. Similarly, for the 12 studies that varied the age of the subjects, 6% of the variance was accounted for by the main effect of age, 32% by the main effect of units, and only 1% by the interaction of age by units.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)

Generality of a strength model for three conditions of repeated recall

A Markovian model of repeated recall is presented that is based on four memory processes: (a) a presentation increment that strengthens the memory trace of a word when the word is shown to a subject, (b) a recall increment that strengthens the trace when the subject successfully recalls the word, (c) a cueing decrement that weakens the trace as contextual cues for retrieving a word change over successive trials of attempted recall, and (d) a sampling rule that translates the strength of a memory trace into a probability of recall. Mathematically, the model predicts the relative frequencies of the recall patterns that are defined by sequences of recalls and forgets for individual words over trials. According to the model, the recallability of a word depends on its state, which is a function of (a) whether the word has been recalled for the first time, and if so, then (b) how many consecutive forgets of the word immediately precede the current trial, (c) how many successful recalls of the word have accumulated, and (d) how many previous trials of attempted recall have elapsed. Paradigms that were well described by the model were (a) no reminding, in which words were presented once and then recalled repeatedly without additional presentations; (b) restricted reminding, in which words were presented before each trial of attempted recall up to their first successful recall but not thereafter; and (c) complete reminding, in which all words were presented befor each attempted recall, whether previously recalled or not. Differences in recall among these conditions were explained in terms of differences in values of the model's parameters.

The informational basis of social judgments: Memory for informative and uninformative arguments

This study investigates the encoding and retrieval of arguments in an opinion formation task. It is based on a model of opinion formation that partitions the latter process into initial encoding, elaborative encoding, integration, and decision. According to this model elaborative encoding depends on two factors: (i) the informativeness of the arguments and (ii) their thematic relatedness. Since it is reasonably well established that the likelihood of retrieving an argument is an increasing function of the amount of elaboration performed on it, the first hypothesis is straightforward, namely, that the memory for an argument will increase with its informativeness and with its thematic relatedness to other arguments. The second hypothesis assumes that by dint of their closer association with the decision, informative arguments occupy a more central position in the representation of an opinion than uninformative ones. This implies that an informative argument should be accessed and reported prior to an uninformative argument, even when differences in retrievability (i.e., probabilities of recall) are controlled. The findings were consistent with such an analysis.

A spreading activation theory of memory

The ACT theory of factual memory is presented. According to this theory, information is encoded in an all-or-none manner into cognitive units and the strength of these units increases with practice and decays with delay. The essential process to memory performance is the retrieval operation. It is proposed that the cognitive units form an interconnected network and that retrieval is performed by spreading activation throughout the network. Level of activation in the network determines rate and probability of recall. With these assumptions in place, the ACT theory is shown to predict interference results in memory, judgements of associative relatedness, impact of extensive practice on memory, the differences between recognition and recall, effects of elaborative processing, and effects of reconstructive recall.

Depression and the accessibility of memories. A longitudinal study.

A group of depressed patients and a group of normal subjects were assessed on two occasions. On each they were required to recall past real life experiences associated with a series of stimulus words. Subjects were subsequently required to rate each experience for happiness and pleasantness. The depressives showed an increased probability of recalling sad memories; within this group there was a significant relationship between severity of depressed mood and the percentage of sad memories recalled. The extent of reduction in depressed mood from occasion 1 to occasion 2 was significantly related to the increase in accessibility of happy memories and the decrease in recall of sad memories. For those patients who improved between the two occasions there was a significant reduction in the probability of recall of a very unhappy memory. The results extend the previous findings on the effect of mood state on the accessibility of memories of differing affective tone. The findings are discussed in terms of context specific encoding and retrieval.