Memory & Cognition最新文献

Research is lacking regarding adults' ability to determine whether children's drawings are based on an experience or not. Drawings are useful in professional settings to alleviate linguistic demands, facilitate memory, and have been used as evidence. Determining the accuracy of veracity assessments of children's drawings would inform professionals regarding their use as evidence of experiences. Twenty-eight children (14 younger, M_age = 7.53 years, SD_age = 1.19; 14 older, M_age = 11.67 years, SD = 1.27) produced drawings of two events: one staged experienced, and one narrative-based not experienced event. Fifty (Study 1, M_age = 23.72 years, SD_age = 9.70) and 63 (Study 2, M_age = 25.92, SD_age = 12.79) adults indicated whether each drawing was based on experience and their confidence in each assessment. In Study 2, additional drawing quality assessments were collected. Results indicated that adults were more accurate at distinguishing experienced than not experienced drawings for older artists. An inverse relationship was observed between confidence and accuracy-participants were more confident when they were inaccurate, especially for younger artists. Drawing quality improved with age and for drawings of experienced events. Adults tended to rate drawings of higher quality as resulting from experience leading to the highest accuracy for drawings from older artists that were based on experience. Overall, results suggest that there may be some features of drawings that allow for above chance levels of accuracy (up to 75%). However, rates are not high enough across assessments (M = 53.93%, range: 39%-75%) to reliably use them as indicators of experience.

Several studies have shown that blind people, including those with congenital blindness, can use raised-line drawings, both for "reading" tactile graphics and for drawing unassisted. However, research on drawings produced by blind people has mainly been qualitative. The current experimental study was designed to investigate the under-researched issue of the size of drawings created by people with blindness. Participants (N = 59) varied in their visual status. Adventitiously blind people had previous visual experience and might use visual representations (e.g., when visualising objects in imagery/working memory). Congenitally blind people did not have any visual experience. The participant's task was to draw from memory common objects that vary in size in the real world. The findings revealed that both groups of participants produced larger drawings of objects that have larger actual sizes. This means that the size of familiar objects is a property of blind people's mental representations, regardless of their visual status. Our research also sheds light on the nature of the phenomenon of canonical size. Since we have found the canonical size effect in a group of people who are blind from birth, the assumption of the visual nature of this phenomenon - caused by the ocular-centric biases present in studies on drawing performance - should be revised.

This study examined informative and uninformative anchoring effects on judgments of learning (JOLs), focusing on two hypotheses: the optimistic/pessimistic and differential-scaling hypotheses. The optimistic/pessimistic hypothesis states that anchoring information changes subjective confidence in memory, whereas the differential-scaling hypothesis states that anchoring information elicits a scaling bias in the conversion process of subjective internal confidence into scale JOLs (i.e., 0-100% responses). Experiment 1 focused on binary JOLs (i.e., Yes/No predictions). The results confirmed that the informative anchoring effect occurred (i.e., binary JOLs in the high anchor condition were higher than those in the low anchor condition), whereas the uninformative anchoring effect did not. Experiment 2 evaluated whether the difference in response scales between anchoring information and JOLs elicited the anchoring effect, demonstrating that the informative anchoring effect occurred when different response scales were used for the anchoring information (i.e., the number of words correctly recalled) and JOLs (i.e., 0-100% scale), and the uninformative anchoring effect did not. Experiment 3 examined whether the uninformative anchoring effect can be explained by numeric priming rather than scaling bias, demonstrating that anchoring information unrelated to test performance using a 0-100% scale did not elicit the uninformative anchoring effect. These findings suggest that the informative anchoring effect supports the optimistic/pessimistic hypothesis, whereas the uninformative anchoring effect supports the differential-scaling hypothesis. Thus, the nature of anchoring information affects the process of forming JOLs. Specifically, the uninformative anchor elicits only scaling bias, whereas the informative anchor changes subjective confidence in memory.

Prior research has predominantly examined the role of working memory (WM) in tasks involving numerical information and spatial properties, such as memorizing number sequences and performing parity judgment and magnitude comparison. In contrast to focusing solely on the effect of WM on number judgment tasks, our study investigates how magnitude-space associations affect WM task performance, emphasizing long-term representations, specifically the concept of mental number line (MNL) compatibility (small items on the left, large items on the right) in long-term memory (LTM). Moving from the idea of representations within LTM contribute to the functioning of WM during task execution, we explore the effects of congruent, incongruent, and negative congruent numerical and non-numerical magnitude-space associations on magnitude-based 1-back (low WM load) and 2-back (high WM load) tasks. MNL compatible n-back and test items are congruent, MNL compatible n-back and MNL incompatible (small on the right, large on the left) test items (or vice versa) are incongruent, and MNL incompatible n-back and test items are considered negative congruent. Because negative congruent and incongruent representations may not activate existing representations in LTM, as congruent representations, we expected worse WM performance in negative congruent and incongruent trials than in congruent trials. Results reveal that congruent and incongruent representations elicit more accurate and rapid responses than negative congruents, suggesting that congruent and incongruent representations contribute to task execution. Additionally, we observe a size effect for small numerical magnitudes and a reverse size effect for large physical magnitudes, pointing towards the coactivation of LTM and WM in magnitude-space relations.

Statistical learning is a mechanism for detecting associations among co-occurring elements in many domains and species. A key controversy is whether it leads to memory for discrete chunks composed of these associated elements, or merely to pairwise associations among elements. Critical evidence for the mere-association view comes from the "phantom-word" phenomenon, where learners recognize statistically coherent but unattested items better than actually presented items with weaker internal associations, suggesting that they prioritize pairwise associations over memories for discrete units. However, this phenomenon has only been demonstrated for sequentially presented stimuli, but not for simultaneously presented visual shapes, where learners might prioritize discrete units over pairwise associations. Here, I ask whether the phantom-word phenomenon can be observed with simultaneously presented visual shapes. Learners were familiarized with scenes combining two triplets of visual shapes (hereafter "words"). They were then tested on their recognition of these words vs. part-words (attested items with weaker internal associations), of phantom-words (unattested items with strong internal associations) vs. part-words, and of words vs. phantom-words. Learners preferred both words and phantom-words over part-words and showed no preference for words over phantom-words. This suggests that, as for sequentially input, statistical learning in simultaneously presented shapes leads primarily to pairwise associations rather than to memories for discrete chunks. However, as, in some analyses, the preference for words over part-words was slightly higher than for phantom-words over part-words, the results do not rule out that, for simultaneous presented items, learners might have some limited sensitivity to frequency of occurrence.

The practice of retrieval has been shown to be highly beneficial for memory retention, but it has seldom been compared with learning strategies other than repeated study. Here, we compared the benefits of retrieval practice (without feedback) with the benefits of two elaborative encoding tasks for word pair learning. Specifically, after studying series of randomly combined word pairs, participants performed an interactive-imagery (Experiments 1-2) or sentence-generation task (Experiments 3-5), retrieval practice, and a letter-counting or a rereading task. In Experiments 1-4, the word pairs were shown after a 24-h interval for testing in its original form or with the second word replaced by the second word from another pair, and participants performed recognition (old/new) followed by associative memory tests (intact/rearranged). In Experiment 5, memory was tested in a final cued-recall task administered shortly after initial learning. The interactive-imagery task was as beneficial as retrieval practice for recognition, but consistently more beneficial than retrieval for performance at the associative task. Sentence generation, on the other hand, produced greater performances than retrieval practice in recognition, associative memory, and cued-recall tests. These findings reveal that simple elaborative encoding tasks, such as imagining scenes or generating sentences, can be more beneficial for memory retention than retrieval practice without feedback.

Stroop-like interference effects are smaller in blocks of mostly incongruent (MI) trials than in blocks of mostly congruent (MC) trials. It is unclear, though, how control processes trigger this list-wide proportion congruency effect (LWPCE). The attentional shift account posits that a memory of experiencing conflict more frequently in MI blocks than in MC blocks leads control processes to shift attention toward the target in MI blocks. The response modulation account posits that a memory of block-wide congruency statistics (e.g., mostly incongruent) leads control processes to form expectations about upcoming trial congruency independent of conflict and modulate distractor-related response activation to prepare an expected congruent response (in MC blocks) or incongruent response (in MI blocks) to the target. This modulation occurs, however, only if the system translates the distractor into a response before the target. We conducted two experiments with the prime-probe task (N = 120) to investigate the response modulation account's prediction that giving the distractor a "head start" in stimulus-response translation increases the LWPCE independent of conflict. Confirming this prediction, the LWPCE was larger when the distractor appeared before - versus simultaneously with - the target, even though the overall congruency (i.e., conflict) effect was equivalent in these conditions (Experiment 1) or smaller when the distractor appeared before the target (Experiment 2). We also observed a negative congruency effect in the MI blocks of Experiment 2, which is inconsistent with a shift of attention toward the target. We conclude that a modulation of response activation contributes to the LWPCE.

Refreshing is assumed to reactivate the contents of working memory in an attention-based way, resulting in a boost of the attended representations and hence improving their subsequent memory. Here, we examined whether the refreshing-induced memory boost is a constant or a gradual, time-dependent phenomenon. If the beneficial effect of refreshing on memory performance is due to the information being selected for refreshing (i.e., selection hypothesis), a constant memory boost is expected to occur each time an item is selected for refreshing, with better memory performance for items that are selected more often. If, however, the beneficial effect of refreshing on memory performance is due to spending time in the focus of attention during refreshing (i.e., duration hypothesis), a gradual memory boost is expected, with the size of the memory boost being a direct function of how long the item has been the object of focused attention. To distinguish between these hypotheses, we instructed and guided the use of refreshing during retention through the presentation of cues, and varied the number of refreshing steps and their duration independently. The number of refreshing steps, but not their duration, had an effect on recall, in agreement with the selection hypothesis. However, some of the results were less robust than anticipated, indicating that the effect of instructed refreshing is limited to certain task parameters.

Spontaneous associative processes (e.g., mind wandering, spontaneous memory recollection) are prevalent in everyday life, yet their influence on perceptual scene memory is under debate. Given that scene perception involves extraction of contextual associations, we hypothesized that associative thought would enhance scene memory by promoting encoding of contextual associations. In an online experiment (N = 75), participants viewed scenes, and following each scene either generated chained-free associations (associative processing), or, as control, listed words that begin with a specific letter (phonological processing). Scene memory was tested after an intermediate creativity task, which is also shown to rely on associative processes. Results revealed that associative thought, regardless of its conceptual (semantic) distances between responses, enhanced scene-gist memory, but hampered memory of scene details, implying that associative thought facilitates contextual encoding. In a follow-up experiment (N = 74), we found that the effect of associative thought on scene-gist memory was mediated by scene labeling. When participants were asked to explicitly label the scene before completing an associative processing or a phonological processing task, scene-gist memory was prioritized at the expense of scene details, eliminating the memory differences between tasks. These findings imply that labeling past perceived scenes, whether explicitly or implicitly during associative thought, facilitates scene-gist memory. Lastly, in both experiments, creativity was not correlated with scene memory but was positively correlated with the semantic distances between scene-based associations, extending past findings that link creativity with the breadth of associative processes. Together, these findings highlight the likely effect of post-perceptual associative processes on higher-order cognitive functions, such as memory consolidation and creative thought.

Working memory is a cognitive system that enables the temporary retention (usually a few seconds) of a limited amount of information. However, recent evidence has posed challenges to the conventional understanding of working memory's persistence. Chen et al. (Psychological Science, 29(4), 645-655, 2018) demonstrated that participants can easily make judgments using a stimulus's identity but cannot recall from which source the information came (presented either as a written word or a color patch) just milliseconds earlier. This "Source Amnesia" carries substantial implications for working memory models but has yet to be explored within the realm of verbal information. We fill this gap by investigating the robustness and generalizability of this rapid forgetting phenomenon. We first replicate the observed effect within the visual domain (Experiment 1) and subsequently extend it to the verbal domain (Experiment 2). Finally, we test the idea that participants may instead encode a positional context (Experiment 3), in line with the Interference model (Oberauer & Lin, Psychological Review, 124(1), 21, 2017). Aligning with the work of Chen et al. (Psychological Science, 29(4), 645-655, 2018), our results consistently reveal a pronounced tendency for rapid forgetting, for both visual and verbal information regardless of whether the information is elicited for recall by format or position cues. The theoretical implications of these findings for current memory models are discussed.