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In two experiments, we examined the effects of emotional valence and arousal on associative binding. Participants studied negative, positive, and neutral word pairs, followed by an associative recognition test. In Experiment 1, with a short-delayed test, accuracy for intact pairs was equivalent across valences, whereas accuracy for rearranged pairs was lower for negative than for positive and neutral pairs. In Experiment 2, we tested participants after a one-week delay and found that accuracy was greater for intact negative than for intact neutral pairs, whereas rearranged pair accuracy was equivalent across valences. These results suggest that, although negative emotional valence impairs associative binding after a short delay, it may improve binding after a longer delay. The results also suggest that valence, as well as arousal, needs to be considered when examining the effects of emotion on associative memory.

This study examined 2 factors contributing to false recognition of semantic associates: errors based on confusion of source and errors based on general similarity information or gist. The authors investigated these errors in patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD), age-matched control participants, and younger adults, focusing on each group's ability to use recollection of source information to suppress false recognition. The authors used a paradigm consisting of both deep and shallow incidental encoding tasks, followed by study of a series of categorized lists in which several typical exemplars were omitted. Results showed that healthy older adults were able to use recollection from the deep processing task to some extent but less than that used by younger adults. In contrast, false recognition in AD patients actually increased following the deep processing task, suggesting that they were unable to use recollection to oppose familiarity arising from incidental presentation.

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Glenberg and Epstein (1985) observed that although predictions of performance on tests of text comprehension are often poor, retrospective assessments of test performance, also known as postdictions, are more accurate. The correlation between confidence in the correctness of answers and actual test performance has been called calibration of performance (see, e.g., Glenberg, Sanocki, Epstein, & Morris, 1987); better calibration refers to more accurate estimates of test performance. We will refer to the accuracy of postdiction relative to prediction judgments as the postdiction superiority effect.Maki and Serra (1992) provided a clear example of a postdiction superiority effect in metacomprehension of text. Participants made predictions and postdiction judgments about their performance on tests of reading comprehension. Prereading judgments were given before reading texts, based only on topic familiarity of the texts. Postreading judgments were made after reading the texts, but before answering questions about the text. Posttest judgments were made after answering four test questions. Thus, in Maki and Serra's study, both prereading and postreading judgments were predictions of later performance, whereas posttest judgments were postdictions. Correlations between judgments and performance were higher for the posttest phase than for either the prereading or the postreading phases, a postdiction superiority effect.In the present study, we explore two classes of hypotheses to account for the reported postdiction superiority effects: retrieval hypotheses and test knowledge hypotheses (see Table 1). Retrieval hypotheses state that postdiction involves retrieving what happened when specific test questions were asked. For example, one version of the class of retrieval hypotheses is derived from the Glenberg et al. (1987) suggestion that participants can use self-generated feedback from answering questions to judge their confidence that answers are correct. A participant, for instance, who remembers having given what seemed like satisfactory answers to three of the four test questions would postdict that three questions were answered correctly. Another example of a retrieval hypothesis states that postdictions may be based on how plausible or difficult the participant remembers the distractors on those items to have been. In either case, the participant's assessment of prior performance is based on retrieval of events related to already experienced test items. According to this class of hypotheses, postdiction judgments should be consistently more accurate than prediction judgments because memories of answering the questions are unavailable before one takes the test.Alternatively, Maki (1998b) suggested that increased exposure to test questions may cause increases in metacomprehension accuracy as participants gain additional information about the nature of the tests. Test knowledge hypotheses are concerned with the participant's assessment of the general difficulty of the criterion test itself. One test knowledge hypothe...