Position distinctiveness, item familiarity, and presentation frequency affect reconstruction of order in immediate episodic memory☆
Section snippets
Experiment 1
In Experiment 1, participants rated the familiarity of 20 actors. They were then given an alphabetical list of a subset of the same actors’ names and required to reconstruct the order in which those names had occurred on the familiarity-rating task. To avoid floor-level performance on the reconstruction of order task, shorter lists were used than in the study by Healy et al. (2007). In addition, the participants were specifically instructed that during the familiarity-rating task they should
Experiment 2
To eliminate the problem in Experiment 1 concerning unequal processing time, in Experiment 2 we used a more traditional experimental procedure with a fixed presentation time interval for each actor on the list (2 s per name) and no presentation time devoted to familiarity ratings, which instead were made after the reconstruction of order task. Thus, in this case, reconstruction of order preceded the familiarity ratings, rather than followed them. Importantly, in Experiment 2 any effects of
Experiment 3
Item familiarity might not have had much of an impact in Experiments 1 and 2 simply because the actors used as stimuli did not vary much in their familiarity to the participants. Therefore, Experiment 3 was designed to study the role of item familiarity in an immediate episodic memory task with a much stronger familiarity manipulation. We also used the procedures developed by Healy et al. (2007) to investigate the role of position distinctiveness, which enabled us to assess the relative
General discussion
In all three experiments reported here, we examined episodically based reconstruction of order performance on a subset of 12 names from a list of 20 names. There were three serial position conditions depending on the subset of names included in the reconstruction of order task: Positions 1–12, Positions 5–16, and Positions 9–20. The reconstruction of order task followed the presentation of the names after a short delay in which participants engaged in an irrelevant interpolated task. The names
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Combining two separate series into a single ordering: Testing the local and global distinctiveness theories with absolute and relative judgments
2019, Consciousness and CognitionCitation Excerpt :To my knowledge, this study is the first to demonstrate the striking difference the two order-memory tests can make by using a list combination method. Although both absolute judgments and relative judgments are supposed to measure the same serial-order information, the nature of the measured order information seems to be very different, i.e., that performance in the absolute judgment or identification (and more broadly in tasks involving retrieving one item at a time) reflects the combined contributions from memories about multiple aspects of a particular item (e.g., its serial position, salient physical, or semantic features, prior familiarity, etc.) (Cunningham et al., 1998; Healy et al., 2008; Healy, Havas, & Parker, 2000). Relative judgments, on the other hand, render the non-serial-position information relatively useless and reflect more purely the effect of an item’s serial position relative to that of another item.
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2018, Journal of Memory and LanguageCitation Excerpt :Being shorter or taller by 1 or 2 steps is task-irrelevant. On the other hand, there is evidence that increasing the presentation frequency of a serial-order item increases the memory distinctiveness of that particular item and its serial position (see Healy et al., 2008). But will a point of local distinctiveness that is created by coding salience rather than by presentation repetition produce the same differential results for the absolute and comparative judgments?
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This work was supported by Army Research Institute Contract DASW01-03-K-0002 and Army Research Office Grant W9112NF-05-1-0153 to the University of Colorado. We are indebted to Lyle Bourne and other members of the Center for Research on Training for helpful comments about this research and to Bob Greene and Roddy Roediger for helpful comments on an earlier version of this manuscript.