Recall Benefit Research Articles

Self-generated cues: the role of cue quality in facilitating eyewitness recall

Purpose Witness-led techniques, informed by theory, have been recognized as best practice for eliciting information from cooperative eyewitnesses. This study aims to test a self-generated cue (SGC) mnemonic grounded in memory theory and explore the impact of three SGC mnemonics on subsequent recall performance. Design/methodology/approach Participants (N = 170) witnessed a live staged event and reported their recall using an SGC mnemonic (keywords only, event line or concept map) or control technique (other-generated cues or free recall only). These mock witness accounts were compared in terms of correct and incorrect details reported. Findings Fewer correct details were reported in the other-generated cue condition compared to the SGC event line (p = 0.018) and SGC concept map (p = 0.010). There were no significant differences between free recall alone and any other condition. The number of inaccurate details reported did not differ between conditions (p = 0.153). The findings suggest that high-quality free recall instructions can benefit recall performance above generic cues (e.g. other-generated cues) but using SGCs to support a structured recall (e.g. concept map or event line) may offer an additional recall benefit. Originality/value The findings support previous research that SGCs benefit recall beyond other-generated cues. However, by comparing different cue generation techniques grounded in the literature, we extend such findings to show that SGC generation techniques are not equally effective and that combining SGCs with structured recall is likely to carry the greatest benefit to recall.

Retrieval practice reduces relative forgetting over time

ABSTRACT There is overwhelming evidence in the literature that retrieval practice of studied material can lead to better final recall than restudy of the same material. Far less clear is whether this recall benefit is accompanied by reduced subsequent forgetting over time. This study revisited the issue in two experiments by comparing the effects of retrieval practice – with and without feedback –, restudy, and a no-practice condition on recall across different delay intervals ranging between three minutes and several days. We fitted power functions of time to the recall rates of each practice condition and compared relative forgetting rates between conditions. The comparisons showed that relative forgetting was reduced after retrieval practice relative to restudy, the relative forgetting rate after retrieval practice was unaffected by the presence of feedback, and forgetting after restudy did not differ from the no-practice condition. Together with other findings in the literature, the results provide evidence that retrieval practice reduces relative forgetting over time.

Ask for Reviews at the Right Time: Evidence from Two Field Experiments

This study examines how the timing of review reminders affects the likelihood and quality of product review postings. The authors postulate that review reminders have two distinct effects, depending on the delivery timing. On the one hand, reminders of review posting given immediately or shortly after a product experience may threaten a consumer's freedom and prompt an adverse reaction. On the other hand, as time after the product experience passes, it may be advantageous to revive memories of review posting using delayed review reminders. To evaluate the effect of review reminders, the authors conduct two randomized field experiments. The findings show that immediate reminders reduce the chance of review postings relative to a randomized immediate control group who did not receive a reminder, consistent with the notion that the reactance induced by the violation of freedom due to instant review reminders outweighs the benefit of memory recall. Conversely, delayed reminders significantly increase the likelihood of review posting compared with a randomized delayed control, suggesting that the memory recall benefit surpasses reactance. However, the timing of review reminders has little effect on review content. The study contributes to the literature on the temporal effects of marketing activities and provides practical advice for online marketplaces to collect more product reviews.

3D Model Retrieval Algorithm Based on DSP-SIFT Descriptor and Codebook Combination

Recently, extensive research efforts have been dedicated to view-based 3D object retrieval, owing to its advantage of using a set of 2D images to represent 3D objects. Some existing image processing technologies can be employed. In this paper, we adopt Bag-of-Words for view-based 3D object retrieval. Instead of SIFT, DSP-SIFT is extracted from all images as object features. Moreover, two codebooks of the same size are generated by approximate k-means. Then, we combine two codebooks to correct the quantization artifacts and improve recall. Bayes merging is applied to address the codebook correlation (overlapping among different vocabularies) and to provide the benefit of high recall. Moreover, Approximate Nearest Neighbor (ANN) is used to quantization. Experimental results on ETH-80 datasets show that our method improves the performance significantly compared with the state-of-the-art approaches.

Directing attention to event changes improves memory updating for older adults.

People use memory for observed actions to guide current perceptions. When actions change from one situation to the next, one must register the change to update memory. Research suggests that older adults may sometimes update memory for naturalistic action changes less effectively than younger adults. We examined whether this deficit reflects age differences in attention allocation by cuing attention to changed action features and testing memory for those features. Older (N = 47) and younger (N = 73) adults watched movies of an actor performing everyday activities on two fictive "days" in her life. Some activities began identically on both days (e.g., reaching for dessert) and ended with features that changed across days (e.g., cookie vs. brownie). Half of the changed activities included audio-visual cues on both days that signaled changed features, whereas the other half did not include cues. Memory updating was assessed through cued recall and two-alternative forced choice recognition (2AFC recognition) of recent action features. Cuing attention improved cued recall but not 2AFC recognition of recent action features for both older and younger adults. These recall benefits were associated with improved recollection that changes had earlier occurred. The present findings suggest that although older adults sometimes experience deficits in aspects of attention, using cues to guide their attention to features of everyday activities can enhance their event memory updating when the later memory test emphasizes recollection-based retrieval. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Investigating the underlying mechanisms of the enactment effect: The role of action-object bindings in aiding immediate memory performance.

Previous research has established that enacted action-object phrases lead to superior immediate memory performance compared with purely verbal memory. In the current investigation, Experiment 1 examined how enactment separately affects immediate memory for actions and objects in 24 adults by presenting action-object phrases and asking participants to recall either the actions or the objects presented in correct serial order. The results showed that when employed at presentation, enactment led to superior recall performance compared with verbal repetition, but this effect was significant only for memory for actions and not objects. Enactment during immediate recall did not lead to better memory performance compared with verbal recall for either actions or objects. To examine whether the lack of an enactment at recall was due to the splitting of action-object phrases at retrieval, Experiment 2 (n = 24) examined memory for whole action-object phrases under enactment at recall. The results showed a typical enactment at recall benefit. Furthermore, a novel binding analysis suggested that enactment recall increased the likelihood of action features being remembered in a bound pair rather than alone. Together these findings suggest that action-object bindings play a crucial role in the manifestation of the enactment effect in immediate recall, especially when enactment is employed at the recall phase.

Contrastive intonation effects on word recall for information-structural alternatives across the sexes

Focus highlights the fact that contextual alternatives are relevant for the interpretation of an utterance. For example, if someone says: “The meeting is on TUESDAY,” with focus marked by a pitch accent on “Tuesday,” the speaker might want to correct the assumption that the meeting is on Monday (an alternative date). Intonation as one way to signal focus was manipulated in a delayed-recall paradigm. Recall of contextual alternatives was tested in a condition where a set of alternatives was evoked by contrastive intonation. A control condition used intonation contours reported for broad focus in German. It was hypothesized that contrastive intonation improves recall, just as focus-sensitive particles (e.g., ‘only’) do, compared to sentences without such particles. Participants listened to short texts introducing a list of three elements from taxonomic categories. One of the three elements was re-mentioned in a subsequent critical sentence, realized with either a broad (H+!H*) or with a contrastive intonation contour (L+H*). Cued recall of the list elements was tested block-wise. Results show that contrastive intonation enhances recall for focus alternatives. In addition, it was found that the observed recall benefit is predominantly driven by females. The results support the assumption that contextual alternatives are better encoded in memory irrespective of whether focus is expressed prosodically or by a focus-sensitive particle. The results further show that females are more sensitive to pragmatic information conveyed through prosody than males.

Collaborative memory for categorized lists: ongoing and lasting effects are sensitive to episodic memory tasks

Previous studies have confirmed that collaboration in memory can elicit reliable impairment (e.g. collaborative inhibition) and enhancement (e.g. error pruning and post-collaborative recall benefit). However, there is scarce research considering whether these phenomena would occur in semantically related stimuli, especially when in different episodic memory tasks. After encoding some exemplars of certain categories, participants were instructed to sequentially recall originally studied exemplars (item recall) and their encoding colors (source retrieval). The tests were performed twice (Recall 1 and Recall 2), with Recall 1 been done either individually or collaboratively, whereas Recall 2 was an individual test. We replicated the detrimental effect of collaborative inhibition, as well as two beneficial effects of error pruning and post-collaborative recall benefit. Besides, both collaborative inhibition and post-collaborative recall benefit were sensitive to episodic memory tasks; meanwhile, the indicators of both item-specific processing and relational processing were modulated by memory tasks. The novel implications are: (a) revealing that effects of collaborative memory are sensitive to memory tasks; (b) extending the occurrence of a beneficial effect of error pruning to categorized lists; as well as (c) demonstrating that collaboration can attenuate the item-specific processing but enhance the relational processing, and such influences are susceptible to memory tasks. Thus, our findings provide compelling evidence for both the dual-process memory theory and the retrieval strategy disruption hypothesis. Future research is recommended to examine more influential factors.

Dual-Task Accuracy and Response Time Index Effects of Spoken Sentence Predictability and Cognitive Load on Listening Effort.

A sequential dual-task design was used to assess the impacts of spoken sentence context and cognitive load on listening effort. Young adults with normal hearing listened to sentences masked by multitalker babble in which sentence-final words were either predictable or unpredictable. Each trial began with visual presentation of a short (low-load) or long (high-load) sequence of to-be-remembered digits. Words were identified more quickly and accurately in predictable than unpredictable sentence contexts. In addition, digits were recalled more quickly and accurately on trials on which the sentence was predictable, indicating reduced listening effort for predictable compared to unpredictable sentences. For word and digit recall response time but not for digit recall accuracy, the effect of predictability remained significant after exclusion of trials with incorrect word responses and was thus independent of speech intelligibility. In addition, under high cognitive load, words were identified more slowly and digits were recalled more slowly and less accurately than under low load. Participants’ working memory and vocabulary were not correlated with the sentence context benefit in either word recognition or digit recall. Results indicate that listening effort is reduced when sentences are predictable and that cognitive load affects the processing of spoken words in sentence contexts.

Within-session verbal learning slope is predictive of lifespan delayed recall, hippocampal volume, and memory training benefit, and is heritable

Memory performance results from plasticity, the ability to change with experience. We show that benefit from practice over a few trials, learning slope, is predictive of long-term recall and hippocampal volume across a broad age range and a long period of time, relates to memory training benefit, and is heritable. First, in a healthy lifespan sample (n = 1825, age 4–93 years), comprising 3483 occasions of combined magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans and memory tests over a period of up to 11 years, learning slope across 5 trials was uniquely related to performance on a delayed free recall test, as well as hippocampal volume, independent from first trial memory or total memory performance across the five learning trials. Second, learning slope was predictive of benefit from memory training across ten weeks in an experimental subsample of adults (n = 155). Finally, in an independent sample of male twins (n = 1240, age 51–50 years), learning slope showed significant heritability. Within-session learning slope may be a useful marker beyond performance per se, being heritable and having unique predictive value for long-term memory function, hippocampal volume and training benefit across the human lifespan.

Collaborative Remembering in Ethnically Uniform and Diverse Group Settings

In collaborative memory research, effects of ethnic diversity have not been reported despite the prevalence of ethnically diverse versus uniform groups in everyday collaborations. We compared these groups to examine three key phenomena: the counterintuitive effect known as collaborative inhibition, the more intuitive downstream memory benefits of collaborative recall, and emergence of collective memory. We also examined source memory of former collaborators. Collaborative inhibition and collective memory were comparable between ethnically Diverse triads (one Asian, Black/African American, White each) and Uniform triads (three White members). At the same time, in diverse groups Black/African American members contributed less during collaboration and did not show post-collaborative recall benefits. Ethnicity differences did not emerge within nominal diverse groups, demonstrating for the first time the negative impact of stereotype threat in collaborative remembering. Uniform groups exhibited better source memory, suggesting homophily. Our findings have applied relevance for groups in academic and workplace settings.

Surviving in the Digital Environment: Does Survival Processing Provide an Additional Memory Benefit to Password Generation Strategies?

People encouraged to think about their survival when encoding information experience a memory advantage even when compared to other tried-and-true methods. Despite the evidence in support of the survival-processing advantage, how this advantage might apply to current-day issues has received little attention. This study aimed to determine if password generation strategies modified to encourage fitness-related encoding would yield an additional benefit in password recall. Participants recruited from online and college samples generated passwords using a sentence-based mnemonic (pilot experiment and Experiment 1) or person-action-object strategy (Experiments 2 and 3), in survival or control scenarios. Results support the plausibility of implementing different strategies for password generation, particularly the person-action-object strategy, and the importance of providing users instructions with which to create their passwords. Although the results illustrated the value of using scenarios for password creation, they did not show evidence of an additional fitness-related benefit, for possible reasons that we discuss.

Benefits from morphological regularities in dyslexia are task dependent.

Are difficulties of individuals with dyslexia (IDDs) reduced or enhanced in tasks where linguistic regularities typically facilitate performance, such as vocabulary acquisition and reading? If impaired short-term memory and poor phonological decoding pose the main impediments to IDDs, then they are expected to compensate for these difficulties with a greater reliance on linguistic regularities, to reduce online load. However, if reduced benefits from regularities pose the main bottleneck, IDDs might benefit less than good readers from regularities in spite of their online difficulties. To test that, we administered two experiments. In a novel paradigm of auditory vocabulary acquisition in Hebrew, novel words were presented either with or without familiar morphological structure. Participants with dyslexia showed a reduced recall benefit from familiar structure as compared with controls. However, their recognition was facilitated by morphological structure and did not significantly differ from controls'. In the second experiment, participants read novel words with and without familiar structure. Benefit from structure familiarity for IDDs was significantly smaller than for controls, in spite of IDDs' greater potential benefit from familiar structure due to their reduced overall accuracy. However, when asked to emphasize speed in reading, structure familiarity was found to be beneficial for IDDs, without compromising accuracy. These results imply that accumulative acquisition of sublexical regularities is less efficient in dyslexia, though in some tasks this knowledge is accessible and beneficial. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Disrupters as Well as Monitors: Roles of Others During and After Collaborative Remembering in the DRM Procedure.

Influence of others on true and inauthentic memory both during and after collaborative remembering have drawn extensive attention in recent years. Collaborative research has recorded three typical effects: collaborative inhibition and error pruning (i.e., nominal groups recall more true information but also bear higher erroneous intrusions than collaborative groups) during collaboration, as well as post-collaborative recall benefit after collaboration. This study introduced Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) lists not only to investigate these phenomena in semantically related information, but also set a course to explore false memory in the collaborative context. Another issue is the sensitivity of these effects to different episodic memory tests (i.e., item memory and source memory tests). In views of these, the current study instructed participants to study several DRM lists and then recall previously studied words (item recall) together with their displayed colors (source retrieval) twice (Recall 1 and 2). Recall 1 was performed either individually or collaboratively, whereas Recall 2 was conducted individually. The cost of collaborative inhibition was obtained, along with three different beneficial effects: error pruning, false memory reduction, and post-collaborative recall benefit. Furthermore, the novel implication of the current study is that it reveals the sensitivity of collaborative inhibition and error pruning in DRM lists to testing conditions and demonstrates that the modulation of collaboration on false memory occurs in the same way both during and after collaboration. These results are discussed in terms of the retrieval strategy disruption hypothesis and other accounts.

Taking Repeated Exposure into Account: An Experimental Study of Direct-To-Consumer Prescription Drug Television Ad Effects

Introduction: Little is known about how repeated exposure to direct-to-consumer prescription drug promotion can impact consumers’ retention and perceptions of drug information. The study described here tested the effects of varied ad exposure frequency on these outcomes. Methods: In an in-person experiment, participants with seasonal allergies (n = 616) were randomized to view a mock prescription drug television ad either once, twice, or four times within 1 h of television programming, embedded with six commercial breaks. Respondents then answered a 20-min survey administered via computer. Results: Those who viewed the ad more frequently were better able to recall both risk (X2 = 20.93, p < .001) and benefit information (X2 = 9.34, p = .009) and to recognize risk (F(2,597) = 11.89, p = .001) and benefit information (F(2,597) = 3.17, p = .043) than those who viewed the ad one time. Ad exposure frequency was not associated with perceptions about the magnitude or likelihood of risks or benefits. In general, risk information seemed to require more repetitions than benefit information to be accurately remembered. The recall was mediated by elaborate processing. Discussion: Effects on memory were small; retention of both risks and benefits remained low overall even after four exposures.

The immediate benefits and long-term consequences of briefly presented masked primes on episodic recollection

Abstract Within-trial priming paradigms have been widely used to measure lexical retrieval and familiarity-based processes in speeded pronunciation, perceptual identification, lexical decision, lexical retrieval, and episodic recognition tasks. Here, we introduce a novel within-trial priming paradigm to examine cued recall, which is considered a more recollection-based task. In each experiment, participants initially studied a list of paired-associates (e.g., BADGE-gold). During each recall test trial, 500 ms after the onset of the stimulus cue (BADGE-??????), a pattern-masked prime was briefly presented for either 48 ms or 125 ms, with the task to recall the word (e.g., gold) paired with the cue (BADGE). Across seven experiments, the primes were identical (gold), semantically related (silver), orthographically related (good), or unrelated (chair) to the to-be-recalled response item (gold). The results consistently indicated that the masked identity primes benefited immediate recall at both the 48 ms and 125 ms durations. There was no benefit from the orthographically related prime condition, suggesting that participants were not using partial letter information as an additional cue for memory retrieval. Semantically related primes only produced a benefit in immediate recall at the 125 ms prime duration. Delayed cued recall performance indicated that the facilitatory priming effects observed in immediate recall were eliminated. In addition, results from conditional analyses suggest that the benefits of retrieval in an immediate recall condition are reversed in the delayed recall condition. We consider multiple interpretations of these delayed recall results and argue that the results are in part due to priming influencing an activation-based mechanism in the immediate recall task, which decreases the retrieval demands for the response item to the paired associate cue, and hence, decreases the long-term benefits of retrieval practice.

Speech Perception in Noise and Listening Effort of Older Adults With Nonlinear Frequency Compression Hearing Aids.

The purpose of this laboratory-based study was to compare the efficacy of two hearing aid fittings with and without nonlinear frequency compression, implemented within commercially available hearing aids. Previous research regarding the utility of nonlinear frequency compression has revealed conflicting results for speech recognition, marked by high individual variability. Individual differences in auditory function and cognitive abilities, specifically hearing loss slope and working memory, may contribute to aided performance. The first aim of the study was to determine the effect of nonlinear frequency compression on aided speech recognition in noise and listening effort using a dual-task test paradigm. The hypothesis, based on the Ease of Language Understanding model, was that nonlinear frequency compression would improve speech recognition in noise and decrease listening effort. The second aim of the study was to determine if listener variables of hearing loss slope, working memory capacity, and age would predict performance with nonlinear frequency compression. A total of 17 adults (age, 57-85 years) with symmetrical sensorineural hearing loss were tested in the sound field using hearing aids fit to target (NAL-NL2). Participants were recruited with a range of hearing loss severities and slopes. A within-subjects, single-blinded design was used to compare performance with and without nonlinear frequency compression. Speech recognition in noise and listening effort were measured by adapting the Revised Speech in Noise Test into a dual-task paradigm. Participants were required trial-by-trial to repeat the last word of each sentence presented in speech babble and then recall the sentence-ending words after every block of six sentences. Half of the sentences were rich in context for the recognition of the final word of each sentence, and half were neutral in context. Extrinsic factors of sentence context and nonlinear frequency compression were manipulated, and intrinsic factors of hearing loss slope, working memory capacity, and age were measured to determine which participant factors were associated with benefit from nonlinear frequency compression. On average, speech recognition in noise performance significantly improved with the use of nonlinear frequency compression. Individuals with steeply sloping hearing loss received more recognition benefit. Recall performance also significantly improved at the group level, with nonlinear frequency compression revealing reduced listening effort. The older participants within the study cohort received less recall benefit than the younger participants. The benefits of nonlinear frequency compression for speech recognition and listening effort did not correlate with each other, suggesting separable sources of benefit for these outcome measures. Improvements of speech recognition in noise and reduced listening effort indicate that adult hearing aid users can receive benefit from nonlinear frequency compression in a noisy environment, with the amount of benefit varying across individuals and across outcome measures. Evidence supports individualized selection of nonlinear frequency compression, with results suggesting benefits in speech recognition for individuals with steeply sloping hearing losses and in listening effort for younger individuals. Future research is indicated with a larger data set on the dual-task paradigm as a potential cognitive outcome measure.

Following instructions in a dual-task paradigm: Evidence for a temporary motor store in working memory.

Evidence from dual-task studies suggests that working memory supports the retention and implementation of verbal instructions. One key finding that is not readily accommodated by existing models of working memory is that participants are consistently more accurate at physically performing rather than verbally repeating a sequence of commands. This action advantage has no obvious source within the multi-component model of working memory and has been proposed to be driven by an as yet undetected limited-capacity store dedicated to the temporary maintenance of spatial, motoric, and temporal features of intended movements. To test this hypothesis, we sought to selectively disrupt the action advantage with concurrent motor suppression. In three dual-task experiments, young adults’ immediate memory for sequences of spoken instructions was assessed by both action-based and spoken recall. In addition to classic interference tasks known to tax the phonological loop and central executive, motor suppression tasks designed to impair the encoding and retention of motoric representations were included. These required participants to produce repetitive sequences of either fine motor gestures (Experiment 1, N = 16) or more basic ones (Experiments 2, N = 16, and 3, N = 16). The benefit of action-based recall was reduced following the production of basic gestures but remained intact under all other interference conditions. These results suggest that the mnemonic advantage of enacted recall depends on a cognitive system dedicated to the temporary maintenance of motoric representations of planned action sequences.

Exploring the sentence advantage in working memory: Insights from serial recall and recognition

Immediate serial recall of sentences has been shown to be superior to that of unrelated words. This study was designed to further explore how this effect might emerge in recall and to establish whether it also extends to serial recognition, a different form of response task that has relatively reduced output requirements. Using auditory or visual presentation of sequences, we found a substantial advantage for sentences over lists in serial recall, an effect shown on measures of recall accuracy, order, intrusion, and omission errors and reflected in transposition gradients. In contrast however, recognition memory based on a standard change detection paradigm gave only weak and inconsistent evidence for a sentence superiority effect. However, when a more sensitive staircase procedure imported from psychophysics was used, a clear sentence advantage was found although the effect sizes were smaller than those observed in serial recall. These findings suggest that sentence recall benefits from automatic processes that utilise long-term knowledge across encoding, storage, and retrieval.

A role for consolidation in cross-modal category learning

The ability to categorize objects and events is a fundamental human skill that depends upon the representation of multimodal conceptual knowledge. This study investigated the acquisition and consolidation of categorical information that required participants to integrate information across visual and auditory dimensions. The impact of wake- and sleep-dependent consolidation was investigated using a paradigm in which training and testing were separated by a delay spanning either an evening of sleep or daytime wakefulness, with a paired-associate episodic memory task used as a measure of classic sleep-dependent consolidation. Participants displayed good evidence of category learning, but did not show any wake- or sleep-dependent changes in memory for category information immediately following the delay. This is in contrast to paired-associate learning, where a sleep-dependent benefit was observed in memory recall. To replicate real-world concept learning, in which knowledge is acquired across multiple distinct episodes, participants were given a second opportunity for category learning following the consolidation delay. Here we found an interaction between consolidation and learning; with greater improvements in category knowledge as a result of the second learning session for those participants who had a sleep-filled delay. These results suggest a role for sleep in the consolidation of recently acquired categorical knowledge; however this benefit does not emerge as an immediate benefit in memory recall, but by enhancing the effectiveness of future learning. This study therefore provides insights into the processes responsible for the formation and development of conceptual representations.