Phonological similarity and orthographic similarity affect probed serial recall of Chinese characters

Strategies, debates, and adversarial collaboration in working memory: The 51st Bartlett Lecture

Frederic Bartlett championed the importance of individual strategy differences when remembering details of events. I will describe how long-running theoretical debates in the area of working memory may be resolved by considering differences across participants in the strategies that they use when performing cognitive tasks, and through adversarial collaboration between rival laboratories. In common with the established view within experimental cognitive psychology, I assume that adults have a range of cognitive functions, evolved for everyday life. However, I will present evidence showing that these functions can be engaged selectively for laboratory tasks, and that how they are deployed may differ between and within individuals for the same task. Reliance on aggregate data, while treating inter- and intra-participant variability in data patterns as statistical noise, may lead to misleading conclusions about theoretical principles of cognition, and of working memory in particular. Moreover, different theoretical perspectives may be focused on different levels of explanation and different theoretical goals rather than being mutually incompatible. Yet researchers from contrasting theoretical frameworks pursue science as a competition, rarely do researchers from competing labs work in collaboration, and debates self-perpetuate. These approaches to research can stall debate resolution and generate ever-increasing scientific diversity rather than scientific progress. The article concludes by describing a recent extended adversarial collaboration (the WoMAAC project) focused on theoretical contrasts in working memory, and illustrates how this approach to conducting research may help resolve scientific debate and facilitate scientific advance.

Charting the Diversity of Strategic Processes in Visuospatial Short-Term Memory

Despite the abundant literature on visuospatial short-term memory, researchers have devoted little attention to strategic processes: What procedures do subjects implement to memorize visuospatial material? Evidence for various strategies exists, but it is spread across a variety of fields. This integrative review of the literature brings together scattered evidence to provide an overview of strategic processes in visuospatial memory tasks. The diversity of strategies and their proposed operating mechanisms are reviewed and discussed. The evidence leads to proposing seven broad strategic processes used in visuospatial short-term memory, each with multiple variants. Strategies can vary across individuals, but the same subjects also appear to use multiple strategies depending on the perceptual features of to-be-remembered displays. These results point to a view of visuospatial strategies as a functional library of facilitatory processes on which subjects can draw to support visuospatial short-term memory performance. Implications are discussed for the difference between visual and spatial tasks, for the appropriate measurement of strategic behaviors, and for the interpretation of performance in visuospatial memory tasks.

Examining the Effect of Semantic Relatedness on the Acquisition of English Collocations

This study examines whether semantic relatedness facilitates or impedes the acquisition of English collocations by conducting two experiments respectively on Chinese undergraduates. Each experiment was composed of a reading session, a productive test, and a receptive test. Experiment 1 began with the reading session of 28 paired-up words and their collocations (in sentence context). Those words were counterbalanced between two randomly selected groups by cross-matching on semantic relatedness. Results of the productive test revealed that the participants scored significantly higher on test items that were semantically related than the randomly cross-paired counterparts. However, for the receptive test, the participants performed significantly better on semantically unrelated items. Experiment 2 was similar to Experiment 1 except that the word pairs selected were only semantically related and did not have any shared morphemes. Experiment 2 also revealed consistent results. The results of the two experiments consistently illustrate that semantic relatedness may exert a facilitatory effect on language output but an inhibitory effect on the process of language input.

Inter-character Orthographic Similarity Effects on the Recognition of Chinese Coordinative Compound Words

Chinese coordinative compound words are common and unique in inter-character semantic and orthographic relationships. This study explored the inter-character orthographic similarity effects on the recognition of transparent two-morpheme coordinative compound words. Seventy-two native Chinese readers participated in a lexical decision task. The findings demonstrated robust inhibitory inter-character orthographic similarity effects, intra-word character reversal effects, and inter-character semantic similarity effects. These results were compared to those of previous studies on coordinative compound word recognition and on the orthographic similarity phenomenon at both character and word levels. The findings were explained with the multi-level representational model of morphological processing of Chinese compound words (Zhou and Marslen-Wilson in Psychologia 43:47-66, 2000). The model was further extended by adding the activation of morpho-orthographic relationships and the mapping of morphemic orthographic information onto the semantic information of both morphemes and whole words.

Visual similarity effects in immediate serial recall and (sometimes) in immediate serial recognition

Words that sound dissimilar are recalled better than otherwise comparable words that sound similar on both immediate serial recall and immediate serial recognition tests, the so-called acoustic similarity effect. Although studies using immediate serial recall have shown an analogous visual similarity effect, in which words that look dissimilar are recalled better than words that look similar, this effect has not been examined in immediate serial recognition. We derived a prediction from the Feature Model that a visual similarity effect will be observed in immediate serial recognition only when the items are acoustically dissimilar; the model predicts no effect when the items are acoustically similar. Experiments 1 and 2 used visually dissimilar and visually similar stimuli that were all acoustically similar and replicated the visual similarity effect in serial recall but revealed no effect in serial recognition. Experiments 3 and 4 used a second set of stimuli that were acoustically dissimilar and found a visual similarity effect in both serial recall and serial recognition. The experiments confirm the Feature Model's predictions and add to earlier findings that the two tests, serial recall and serial recognition, may show quite different results because the two tests are not as similar as previously thought.

Set size and long-term memory/lexical effects in immediate serial recall: Testing the impurity principle

The impurity principle (Surprenant & Neath, 2009b) states that because memory is fundamentally reconstructive, tasks and processes are not pure. This principle is based on a long line of research showing the effects of one memory system or process on another. Although the principle is widely accepted, many researchers appear hesitant to endorse it in extreme edge cases. One such case involves the effects of long-term memory and lexical factors when a small, closed set of items is used. According to this view, because the subject knows the set of items, there will be no effect of item information. In contrast, the impurity principle predicts that such effects can still be observed, because immediate serial recall with a small closed set of items is not a pure test of order information. Four experiments tested this edge case. In Experiments 1 and 2, we found concreteness effects when item uncertainty was minimized in both within-subjects (Exp. 1) and between-subjects (Exp. 2) designs. In Experiments 3 and 4, we found frequency effects when item uncertainty was minimized in both within-subjects (Exp. 3) and between-subjects (Exp. 4) designs. Analyses of intrusion and omission errors indicated that the sets of items had been learned. Analyses by experiment half also confirmed that the effects of concreteness and frequency were observable in the latter stages of the experiments, when there should have been even less doubt about the items. The results support the impurity principle and suggest that hesitation about accepting it in edge cases is unwarranted.

Recalling visual serial order for verbal sequences

We report three experiments in which participants performed written serial recall of visually presented verbal sequences with items varying in visual similarity. In Experiments 1 and 2 native speakers of Japanese recalled visually presented Japanese Kanji characters. In Experiment 3, native speakers of English recalled visually presented words. In all experiments, items varied in visual similarity and were controlled for phonological similarity. For Kanji and for English, performance on lists comprising visually similar items was overall poorer than for lists of visually distinct items across all serial positions. For mixed lists in which visually similar and visually distinct items alternated through the list, a clear “zig-zag” pattern appeared with better recall of the visually distinct items than for visually similar items. This is the first time that this zig-zag pattern has been shown for manipulations of visual similarity in serial-ordered recall. These data provide new evidence that retaining a sequence of visual codes relies on similar principles to those that govern the retention of a sequence of phonological codes. We further illustrate this by demonstrating that the data patterns can be readily simulated by at least one computational model of serial-ordered recall, the Primacy model (Page and Norris, Psychological Review, 105(4), 761–81, 1998). Together with previous evidence from neuropsychological studies and experimental studies with healthy adults, these results are interpreted as consistent with two domain-specific, limited-capacity, temporary memory systems for phonological material and for visual material, respectively, each of which uses similar processes that have evolved to be optimal for retention of serial order.

Perspectives on working memory: introduction to the special issue

More than 40 years ago, Baddeley and Hitch (1974) published an article with a wealth of experimentation and theorization on working memory, the small amount of information held in mind and often used within cognitive processes such as language comprehension and production, reasoning, and problem solving. We honor this seminal accomplishment in the present special issue, and take this opportunity to provide an introduction to our perspectives on the origin of the theory of working memory, how it has affected our work, what may be coming in the near future, and how the research articles in the present issue contribute to several related themes within the clearly thriving field of working memory.