Tests of the separate retrieval of item and associative information using a frequency-judgment task

Abstract

The degree to which item and associative information can be distinguished at retrieval was assessed using a frequency-judgment task. Words were shown various numbers of times individually and as members of word pairs. At test, subjects judged the frequency of the word pairs and a word's frequency as an individual item, its frequency as a member of word pairs, or the combined frequency of the word. Subjects made all of these judgments with considerable accuracy. The frequency of presentations in the nontarget format had consistent, but small, effects on the judgments for the target frequencies. The results provide further support for the distinction between item and associative information and for the source-monitoring framework of Johnson, Hashtroudi, and Lindsay (1993), and they have important implications for global matching models of memory.Item information, the representation ofthe occurrence of a single event, and associative information, the representation ofrelationships between individual items, have been distinguished both empirically and theoretically. Empirically, recent evidence has shown that recognition memory for item and associative information have different time courses at retrieval (Dosher, 1988;Gronlund & Ratcliff, 1989), have different rates offorgetting (Hockley 1991b(Hockley , 1992Murdock & Hockley, 1989), and are differentially affected by natural language word frequency (Clark, 1992;Clark & Burchett, 1994;Clark & Shiffrin, 1992;Hockley, 1994). Recent neurophysiological evidence also supports this distinction and indicates that the hippocampal region plays a fundamental and specialized role in associative learning (Eichenbaum & Bunsey, 1995).From a theoretical perspective, the distinction between item and associative information has been formally instantiated, although in quite different ways, in the family of global matching models. The common assumption within This work was supported by a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada operating grant and a course remission grant from Wilfrid Laurier University to the first author, and an NSERC summer research scholarship awarded to the second author, who is now at the University ofOttawa. We thank Doug Hintzman, Doug Nelson, and Scott Gronlund for many constructive comments on an earlier version of this paper, including suggestions that led to Experiments 5 and 7. We also thank Mike Humphreys for his question at a presentation of a portion of this work at the 1994 meeting of the Psychonomic Society in St. Louis, which led to Experiment 6, and Joanne Bonanno and Sarah Mercer for assistance in data collection. Correspondence can be addressed to W. E. Hockley, Department of Psychology, Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, ON, Canada N2L 3C5 (e-mail: whockley@ mach I.wlu.ca).this class of models is that, at test, the output ofthe model is a familiarity value that represents the global match of the recognition probe (a single item or a pair of items) and the contents ofmemory. Three representatives ofthis family are MINERVA 2 (...

Pairs do not suffer interference from other types of pairs or single items in associative recognition

“…As discussed earlier, SR and AR are differentially sensitive to instructions (Hockley & Cristi, 1996a), have different forgetting rates (Hockley, 1992), and have different rates of improvement with study time (Clark & Shiffrin, 1992). Judgments of frequency indicate that people are generally able to make separate judgments for pairs and singles, even when they have words in common (Hockley & Cristi, 1996b). The present results fit nicely with this research, providing additional evidence for the separation of items and associations during both storage and retrieval.…”

“…However, the array of strategies used in free recall makes it difficult to come to definitive conclusions concerning the source of interference effects. Hockley and Cristi (1996b) had participants study single items and/or pairs that were repeated various numbers of times and in various combinations. In different experiments, a single item could be repeated as both a single and as part of a pair, only as part of a pair, or as part of several different pairs.…”

Parallel interactive retrieval of item and associative information from event memory

“…Exactly this result has been found (Clark & Shiffrin, 1987;Gronlund & Ratcliff, 1989;Cohn & Moscovitch, 2007), even when associative encoding is discouraged (Jou, 2010). In tasks that require separate judgments for the item and associative content of a pair (Hockley & Cristi, 1996b;Buchler et al, 2008Buchler et al, , 2011, participants could rely on the different mismatch signals to make their judgments, although the holistic match would continue to introduce a bias, exactly as has been reported.…”

On the importance of looking back: The role of recursive remindings in recency judgments and cued recall

“…Criss and Shiffrin (2005) showed that list discrimination can rely on higherorder relationships among events, rather than only relying on simple associations between items and the lists in which they occurred. As the researchers pointed out, several studies have attempted to distinguish a simple-associations assumption from a higher-order-relationships assumption, with results typically favoring the assumption of higher-order relationships (e.g., Hockley & Cristi, 1996). Hintzman (2004) has described ways in which the results produced by recollection of remindings dictate changes in models of memory, including his own MINERVA model.…”