By varying the probabilities that a stimulus would appear at particular times after the presentation of a cue and modeling the data by the theory of visual attention (Bundesen, 1990), Vangkilde, Coull, and Bundesen (2012) provided evidence that the speed of encoding a singly presented stimulus letter into visual short-term memory (VSTM) is…

What is the relationship between magnitude judgments relying on directly available characteristics versus probabilistic cues? Question frame was manipulated in a comparative judgment task previously assumed to involve inference across a probabilistic mental model (e.g., "Which city is largest"--the "larger" question--vs.…

People can use a content-specific recapitulation strategy to trigger memories (i.e., mentally reinstating encoding conditions), but how people deploy this strategy is unclear. Is recapitulation naturally used to guide all recollection attempts, or is it only used selectively, after retrieving incomplete information that requires additional…

A classic discussion in the recognition-memory literature concerns the question of whether recognition judgments are better described by continuous or discrete processes. These two hypotheses are instantiated by the signal detection theory model (SDT) and the 2-high-threshold model, respectively. Their comparison has almost invariably relied on…

Experiments were conducted to test a modern exemplar-familiarity model on its ability to account for both short-term and long-term probe recognition within the same memory-search paradigm. Also, making connections to the literature on attention and visual search, the model was used to interpret differences in probe-recognition performance across…

Judgments of learning (JOLs) are assessments of how well materials have been learned. Although a wide body of literature has demonstrated a reliable correlation between memory performance and JOLs, relatively little is known about the nature of this link. Here, we investigate the relationship between JOLs and the memory retrieval processes engaged…

There is an intensive debate on whether memory for serial order is symmetric. The objective of this study was to explore whether associative asymmetry is modulated by memory task (recognition vs. cued recall). Participants were asked to memorize word triples (Experiments 1-2) or pairs (Experiments 3-6) during the study phase. They then recalled…

Several neuropsychological studies have reported that patients with memory deficits exhibit a dissociation of effects attributed to semantic and lexical-phonological information in verbal working memory (e.g., Reilly, Martin, & Grossman, 2005; Romani & Martin, 1999). The present study reports on 3 experiments conducted with individuals without…

In recognition memory, a classic finding is that receiver operating characteristics (ROCs) are curvilinear. This has been taken to support the fundamental assumptions of signal detection theory (SDT) over discrete-state models such as the double high-threshold model (2HTM), which predicts linear ROCs. Recently, however, Broder and Schutz (2009)…

Four experiments contrasted the predictions of a general encoding-retrieval match hypothesis with those of a view claiming that the distinctiveness of the cue-target relationship is the causal factor in retrieval. In Experiments 1, 2, and 4 participants learned the relationships between 4 targets and trios of cues; in Experiment 3 there were 3…

Research has shown that consistently right-handed individuals have poorer memory than do inconsistently right- or left-handed individuals under baseline conditions but more reliably exhibit enhanced memory retrieval after making a series of saccadic eye movements. From this it could be that consistent versus inconsistent handedness, regardless of…

Describing a face in words can either hinder or help subsequent face recognition. Here, the authors examined the relationship between the benefit from verbally describing a series of faces and the same-race advantage (SRA) whereby people are better at recognizing unfamiliar faces from their own race as compared with those from other races.…

It is widely accepted that signal-detection mechanisms contribute to item-recognition memory decisions that involve discriminations between targets and lures based on a controlled laboratory study episode. Here, the authors employed mathematical modeling of receiver operating characteristics (ROC) to determine whether and how a signal-detection…

Koen and Yonelinas (2010; K&Y) reported that mixing classes of targets that had short (weak) or long (strong) study times had no impact on zROC slope, contradicting the predictions of the encoding variability hypothesis. We show that they actually derived their predictions from a mixture unequal-variance signal detection (UVSD) model, which…

The slope of the z-transformed receiver-operating characteristic (zROC) in recognition memory experiments is usually less than 1, which has long been interpreted to mean that the variance of the target distribution is greater than the variance of the lure distribution. The greater variance of the target distribution could arise because the…