The influence of contextual similarity on children's recognition memory performance was examined using a retroactive interference paradigm. In the study, 9- and 12-year-olds were randomly assigned to one of two contextual conditions. In both conditions, target and interfering information were presented in distinctive contexts by using different…

Recent research has shown contextual diversity (i.e., the number of passages in which a given word appears) to be a reliable predictor of word processing difficulty. It has also been demonstrated that word-frequency has little or no effect on word recognition speed when accounting for contextual diversity in isolated word processing tasks. An…

Using a procedure of Hay and Jacoby [Hay, J. F., & Jacoby, L. L. (1999). "Separating habit and recollection in young and older adults: Effects of elaborative processing and distinctiveness." "Psychology and Aging," 14, 122-134], Korsakoff patients' capacity to encode and retrieve elaborative, semantic information was investigated. Habits were…

Acute alcohol intoxication effects on memory were examined using a recollection-based word recognition memory task and a repetition priming task of memory for the same information without explicit reference to the study context. Memory cues were equivalent across tasks; encoding was manipulated by varying the frequency of occurrence (FOC) of words…

Describes an experiment designed to test predictions derived from a model of recognition memory that assumes no retrieval processes. It is argued that context effects do not necessarily imply retrieval processes in recognition. (Author/AM)

Recent evidence suggests that rats require an intact hippocampus in order to recognize familiar objects when they encounter them again in a different context. The two experiments reported here further examined how changes in context affect rats' performance on the novel-object preference (NOP) test of object-recognition memory, and how those…

The purpose of these studies was to test a theory of associative context (defined as the association between two words in a pair) on recognition memory. The theory states that culturally associated words in a pair and nonassociated words in a pair differ after a single study trial in terms of their frequency representation in memory. Two…

Age-related deficits may exist in episodic memory (knowledge of the context in which an item appeared previously) and semantic memory (knowledge of an item's meaning independent of the context). In order to examine adult age differences in semantic priming effects and subsequent episodic retention for visually presented words, 24 young (18-22…

Studies on human and animals shed light on the unique hippocampus contributions to relational memory. However, the particular role of each hippocampal subregion in memory processing is still not clear. Hippocampal computational models and theories have emphasized a unique function in memory for each hippocampal subregion, with the CA3 area acting…

This 21st annual progress report summarizes research activities on speech perception and spoken language processing carried out in the Speech Research Laboratory, Department of Psychology, Indiana University in Bloomington. As with previous reports, the goal is to summarize accomplishments during 1996 and 1997 and make them readily available. Some…

Two major hypotheses are currently at issue concerning the effects of semantic context on ambiguous word recognition: (1) the selective-retrieval hypothesis (SRH) maintains that a single meaning is retrieved from memory, and (2) the nonselective-retrieval hypothesis maintains that all meanings are retrieved from memory. To help clear up this…

Subjects read passages taken from Bransford and Johnson's materials either with or without the context-inducing title provided. The presence of the title increased comprehension and recall but had no effect on recognition. Activation of relevant information already stored in memory may not be essential to the encoding process. (Author/RD)

Printed words that have a transposed-letter (TL) neighbor (e.g., angel has the TL neighbor angle) have been shown to be more difficult to process, in a range of paradigms, than words that do not have a TL neighbor. However, eye movement evidence suggests that this processing difficulty may occur on only a subset of trials. To investigate this…

The encoding specificity principle predicts that a change in context between input and test will adversely affect recognition memory. Experiment I tested this with sentences from a prose passage and no context effects were obtained. Experiments II, III, and IV compared context effects for words in random sentences versus connected discourse. In…

Two experiments tested for effects of intralist cues upon recognition probability. Categorized and random lists were each tested, with targets appearing with zero, one or three intralist cues. Experiments showed substantial effects of trials and list type, but not of intralist context. (CHK)