The effect of normative context variability on recognition memory.

Abstract

According to some theories of recognition memory (e.g., S. Dennis & M. S. Humphreys, 2001), the number of different contexts in which words appear determines how memorable individual occurences of words will be: A word that occurs in a small number of different contexts should be better recognized than a word that appears in a larger number of different contexts. To empirically test this prediction, a normative measure is developed, referred to here as context variability, that estimates the number of different contexts in which words appear in everyday life. These findings confirm the prediction that words low in context variability are better recognized (on average) than words that are high in context variability.In a typical recognition memory experiment, a list of words is studied, and memory is tested subsequently by showing subjects both words that were studied (i.e., targets) and words that were not studied (i.e., foils). The subject's task is to discriminate the targets from the foils. Of course, subjects have encountered words a large number of times in many different contexts prior to the experiment. Hence, the subject's rather daunting task is to discriminate the most recent encounter with a word from all prior encounters.Theories of memory usually address this issue by making a distinction between item and context information (e.g., Anderson & Bower, 1972;Dennis & Humphreys, 2001;Humphreys, Bain, & Pike, 1989;Jacoby, 1991;Maddox & Estes, 1997;McGeoch, 1942;Mensink & Raaijmakers, 1988;Raaijmakers & Shiffrin, 1981;Shiffrin & Steyvers, 1997): Item information represents a studied stimulus (e.g., a word), and context information represents the environment in which the stimulus was encountered. According to these theories, when an item is studied, both item and context information are stored in an episodic trace, and when recognition memory is tested, memory is probed with a retrieval cue consisting of both item and context information. The critical role context plays in the retrieval cue is to restrict the probe to the relevant subset of memory traces (as defined by the task). Those episodic traces that contain context information similar to the retrieval cue might become members of the "activated" subset of memory and contribute information to the recognition decision. Hence, the to-be-remembered encounter with a word can, in principle, be isolated from prior encounters according to the similarity between the context used in the retrieval cue and context information stored in memory.

Discriminating between changes in bias and changes in accuracy for recognition memory of emotional stimuli

“…This may be because arousing words are more distinctive than nonarousing words (e.g., Malmberg, Steyvers, Stephens, & Shiffrin, 2002;Schmidt, 1991) or because they tend to occur in fewer different contexts than do nonarousing words (Dennis & Humphreys, 2001;Steyvers & Malmberg, 2003). Enhanced processing during study then increases the familiarity of highly arousing targets to a greater degree than it does that of less arousing targets, but not to the degree that would produce a greater mean familiarity of highly arousing targets, as compared with the mean familiarity of less arousing targets.…”

Word frequency and word likeness mirror effects in episodic recognition memory

“…Our finding that frequency produces a mirror effect when density is controlled is added to a list of recent demonstrations that the word frequency effect is not due to correlated characteristics such as letter frequency (Malmberg et al, 2002), the normative frequency of contexts in which a word occurs (Steyvers & Malmberg, 2003), age of acquisition (Dewhurst, Hitch, & Barry, 1998), or the richness of associative connectivity (Nelson, Zhang, & McKinney, 2001). Estes and Maddox (2002) formulated their hypothesis to accommodate findings of a parallel effect of short-term familiarization (see also Chalmers & Humphreys, 1998;Maddox & Estes, 1997), on the basis of the assumption that familiarization training is an experimental analogue of normative word frequency.…”

“…In order to remove the confounding of density by type and token bigram frequency, we selected subsets of responses for each participant in Experiments 1 and 2 (see also Steyvers & Malmberg, 2003). The subsets were created by selecting equal numbers of responses to new and old test words with the highest bigram frequencies for low-density words and the lowest bigram frequencies for high-density words.…”

A dynamic approach to recognition memory.

“…Just as adding more list traces-which match in context, but not content-leads to a mirror effect, adding more history traces will do the same by increasing the odds that one of those traces was formed in a context similar to the experimental study context (higher false alarms to HF words) and introducing many poor matches that swamp the influence of a well-matching target trace (lower hit rate to HF words; Nelson & Shiffrin, 2013). Regardless of implementation, the contexts in which a word appears in prior life history affect episodic recognition: When normative word frequency is held constant but contextual diversity is varied, words that occur in more diverse contexts have a lower hit rate and higher false alarm rate than words that only occur in a few contexts (Steyvers & Malmberg, 2003).…”