Stimulus-based mirror effects in associative recognition revisited.

The mirror effect, the finding that a manipulation which increases the hit rate in recognition tests also decreases the false alarm rate, is held to be a regularity of memory. Neath et al. (in press) took advantage of the recent increase in the number of linguistic databases to create sets of stimuli that differed on one dimension but were more fully equated on other dimensions known to affect memory. Using these highly controlled stimulus sets, no mirror effects were observed; in contrast, using stimulus sets that had confounds resulted in mirror effects. In this article, we use their stimulus sets to examine associative recognition. Using confounded stimuli, Experiment 2 found a lower false alarm rate for high- compared to low-frequency words, replicating previous results, and Experiment 4 found a mirror effect when manipulating concreteness, also replicating previous results. Using highly controlled stimuli, Experiment 1 found no evidence that frequency affected associative recognition, and Experiment 3 found concreteness affected only the hit rate, not the false alarm rate. When highly controlled stimuli are used, frequency affects only the false alarm rate in item recognition and has no effect in associative recognition, whereas concreteness affects hit rates in both item and associative recognition. Implications for theoretical accounts are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Valence does not affect recognition.

Valence refers to the extent to which a stimulus is viewed as negative or positive. One recent model of valence, the NEVER model (Bowen et al., 2018), predicts that in general negative words will be better remembered than positive or neutral words. However, this prediction is difficult to validate for recognition tests because the literature reports inconsistent findings. Three experiments reexamined whether valence affects recognition of words by taking advantage of the recent increase in the number of high-quality norms and databases, which allow for the construct ion of three sets of stimuli that differ in valence, but are equated on numerous other dimensions known to affect memory. Experiment 1 found no difference in recognition performance between positive and negative words; Experiment 2 found no difference between positive and neutral words; and Experiment 3 found no difference between neutral and negative words. The results disconfirm a prediction of the NEVER model and suggest that previous demonstrations of an effect of valence are due to confounding other dimensions with valence. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Calculating semantic relatedness of lists of nouns using WordNet path length.

Lists of semantically related words are better recalled on immediate memory tests than otherwise equivalent lists of unrelated words. However, measuring the degree of relatedness is not straightforward. We report three experiments that assess the ability of various measures of semantic relatedness-including latent semantic analysis (LSA), GloVe, fastText, and a number of measures based on WordNet-to predict whether two lists of words will be differentially recalled. In Experiment 1, all measures except LSA correctly predicted the observed better recall of the related than the unrelated list. In Experiment 2, all measures except JCN predicted that abstract words would be recalled equally as well as concrete words because of their enhanced semantic relatedness. In Experiment 3, LSA, GLoVe, and fastText predicted an enhanced concreteness effect because the concrete words were more related; three WordNet measures predicted a small concreteness effect because the abstract and concrete words did not differ in semantic relatedness; and three other WordNet measures predicted no concreteness effect because the abstract words were more related than the concrete words. A small concreteness effect was observed. Over the three experiments, only two measures, both based on simple WordNet path length, predicted all three results. We suggest that the results are not unexpected because semantic processing in episodic memory experiments differs from that in reading, similarity judgment, and analogy tasks which are the most common way of assessing such measures.

Re-assessing age of acquisition effects in recognition, free recall, and serial recall.

Age of acquisition (AoA) refers to the age at which a person learns a word. Research has converged on the conclusion that early AoA words are processed more efficiently than late AoA words on a number of perceptual and reading tasks. However, only a few studies have investigated whether AoA affects memory on recognition, serial recall, and free recall tests, and the results are equivocal. We took advantage of the recent increase in the number of high-quality norms and databases to construct a pool of early and late AoA words that were equated on numerous other dimensions. There was a late AoA advantage in recognition using both pure (Experiment 1) and mixed (Experiment 2) lists, no effect of AoA on serial recall of either pure (Experiment 3) or mixed (Experiment 4) lists, and no effect of AoA on free recall of either pure (Experiment 5) or mixed lists (Experiment 6). We conclude that AoA does reliably affect memory on some memory tasks (recognition), but not others (serial recall, free recall), and that no current account of AoA can explain the findings.