A rational approach to memory search termination

Davelaar, Eddy J.; Yu, Erica C.; Harbison, J. Isaiah; Hussey, Erika; Dougherty, Michael R.

doi:10.1016/j.cogsys.2012.12.012

Cited by 4 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 35 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…A ubiquitous aspect of searching through a pile of papers or through memory is the decision to give up the search. Search termination decisions in memory search are under intense investigation (Davelaar, Yu, Harbison, Hussey, & Dougherty, 2013;Harbison et al, 2009;Unsworth, Brewer, & Spiller, 2011). With the cRAT, giving up the search might induce new stages of the search process, such as allowing the activation of competitor items to fully decay.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Semantic Search in the Remote Associates Test

Davelaar

2015

Topics in Cognitive Science

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Searching through semantic memory may involve the use of several retrieval cues. In a verbal fluency task, the set of available cues is limited and every candidate word is a target. Individuals exhibit clustering behavior as predicted by optimal foraging theory. In another semantic search task, the remote associates task (RAT), three cues are presented and a single target word has to be found. Whereas the task has been widely studied as a task of creativity or insight problem solving, in this article, the RAT is treated as a semantic retrieval task and assessed from the perspective of information foraging theory. Experiments are presented that address the superadditive combination of cues and the anti-clustering behavior in the recall sequence. A new type of search behavior in the RAT is put forward that involves maximizing the difference in activation between target and distractors. This type of search is advantageous when the target is weak and cue patches are contaminated with strong competitors.

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Semantic Search in the Remote Associates Test

Davelaar

2015

Topics in Cognitive Science

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Perhaps, under the proper experimental demands, stopping rules may be measured using a closed-interval design wherein subjects are motivated to continue searching throughout the entirety of the retrieval period by being rewarded for every item produced. Evidence for this stems from recent work demonstrating that employing a cost/benefit structure influences retrieval dynamics especially when correct retrievals are rewarded (Davelaar, Yu, Harbison, Hussey, & Dougherty, 2013). Despite this, another possible drawback of the closed-interval design is that under certain conditions, it may have less ecological validity than an open-ended paradigm.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Retrieval Dynamics in Self-Terminated Memory Search

Hussey

Dougherty

Harbison

et al. 2014

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Most free-recall experiments employ a paradigm in which participants are given a preset amount of time to retrieve items from a list. While much has been learned using this paradigm, it ignores an important component of many real-world retrieval tasks: the decision to terminate memory search. The present study examines the temporal characteristics underlying memory search by comparing within subjects a standard retrieval paradigm with a finite, preset amount of time (closed interval) to a design that allows participants to terminate memory search on their own (open interval). Calling on the results of several presented simulations, we anticipated that the threshold for number of retrieval failures varied as a function of the nature of the recall paradigm, such that open intervals should result in lower thresholds than closed intervals. Moreover, this effect was expected to manifest in interretrieval times (IRTs). Although retrieval-interval type did not significantly impact the number of items recalled or error rates, IRTs were sensitive to the manipulation. Specifically, the final IRTs in the closed-interval paradigm were longer than those of the open-interval paradigm. This pattern suggests that providing participants with a preset retrieval interval not only masks an important component of the retrieval process (the memory search termination decision), but also alters temporal retrieval dynamics. Task demands may compel people to strategically control aspects of their retrieval by implementing different stopping rules.

show abstract

“…In a separate study, Davelaar et al (2013) found that termination decisions were sensitive to variations in payoffs for retrieving items. As shown in Figure 4a, when the payoffs were favorable (i.e., +150 points per correct retrieval and −50 points for every second spent on search), participants had longer exit latencies and spent longer searching memory than when payoffs were unfavorable (i.e., +50 points per correct retrieval and −150 points for every second spent on search).…”

Section: What Factors Compel People To Persist In or Truncate Search?mentioning

confidence: 93%

“…This rule also captures how people perform in free recall from semantic memory ; but see Abbott, Austerweil, & Griffiths, 2012) and terminate external visual search for uniformly distributed targets (Wolfe, 2013), but deviations have been observed when there is large variability in patch quality (Cain, Vul, Clark, & Mitroff, 2011;Wolfe, 2013). In addition, the total-failures rule can be viewed as a special case of a rational model that explicitly accounts for gains associated with successful retrieval and costs associated with time spent retrieving, but in situations in which gains and losses are symmetrical (Davelaar et al, 2013). The important similarity is that every newly retrieved item is subjectively less rewarding, and therefore marginal utility decreases as a function of the number of items retrieved.…”

Section: Stopping Decisions In Other Domainsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Fig.4. Mean total time and exit latency for participants in the favorable and unfavorable payoff conditions inDavelaar, Yu, Harbison, Hussey, and Dougherty (2013; a) and predictions of the total-failures rule for two stopping thresholds (b). Note that our simulation used the same model and same relative probability of sampling and recovery as those used for Figure3; the only change was in the stopping threshold.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Optional Stopping and the Termination of Memory Retrieval

Dougherty

Harbison

Davelaar

2014

Curr Dir Psychol Sci

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Recent years have seen an increased interest in understanding memory-retrieval dynamics and, in particular, what makes a person decide to terminate the memory-search process. We review research that has employed the openended retrieval paradigm (Dougherty & Harbison, 2007) and focus on the behavioral regularities it has revealed. The main finding of this research is that people's memory-search behavior follows a lawful pattern of a convex decreasing relation between exit latency, or the time between the final retrieval and the decision to terminate search, and the number of items retrieved. Theoretical work has converged on a stopping rule that treats the retrieval process as a costly cognitive process that is truncated on the basis of a comparative judgment of perceived relative benefit. Parallels with other search domains are highlighted.

show abstract

A rational approach to memory search termination

Cited by 4 publications

References 35 publications

Semantic Search in the Remote Associates Test

Semantic Search in the Remote Associates Test

Retrieval Dynamics in Self-Terminated Memory Search

Optional Stopping and the Termination of Memory Retrieval

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About