Susceptibility to semantic illusions: an individual-differences perspective.

When asked How many animals of each kind did Moses take on the ark?, people frequently respond "two" even though they know it was Noah, not Moses, who took animals on the ark. We replicate previous research by showing that susceptibility to semantic illusions is influenced by the semantic relatedness of both the impostor word and the surrounding context. However, we also show that the two text manipulations make independent contributions to semantic illusions, and we propose two individual-differences mechanisms that might underlie these two effects. We propose that the ability to resist the lure of a semantically related impostor word is related to the individual's skill at accessing and reasoning about knowledge from long-term memory. And we propose that the ability to resist the lure of the surrounding sentential context is related to the individual's capacity to simultaneously process and store information in working memory.

How aging affects the reading of words in noisy backgrounds.

Young and old adults were shown simple sentences masked by visual noise. In half of the sentences, the final word was predictable; in the other half, it was not. The older participants were able to identify the same number of final words as the younger ones only when the intensity of the visual noise was significantly diminished. However, the difference in the number of correct identifications between predictable and unpredictable conditions was higher for the older observers than for the younger observers, indicating that older observers benefit from context more.

Listening to discourse in distracting settings: the effects of aging.

Younger and older adults listened to discourse in quiet and in conversational noise, before answering questions concerning the material. Some questions required listeners to recall specific details; others were of a more integrative nature. When the listening situation was adjusted for individual differences in hearing, younger and older adults were equally adept at remembering the gist of the passages in both quiet and in two levels of noise. The two age groups also did not differ with respect to memory for specific details when listening in quiet or in a moderate level of noise, even when required to perform a concurrent task. Only at the loudest noise level did younger adults tend to recall more detail than older adults. However, when no adjustments were made to compensate for the poorer hearing of older adults (all participants tested under identical listening conditions), older adults could not recall as much detail as younger adults, either in quiet or in noise. The results indicate that the speech-comprehension difficulties of older adults primarily reflect declines in hearing rather than in cognitive ability.

Facilitating Knowledge-Based Inferences in Less-Skilled Readers

The present study replicated Long, Oppy, and Seely's (1994) finding that skilled readers make knowledge-based inferences spontaneously during reading whereas less-skilled readers do not. However, the study also showed that less-skilled readers can make knowledge-based inferences with appropriate textual support. Evidence for knowledge-based inferences was obtained by examining whether readers were faster to make lexical decision responses to theme-appropriate targets (e.g., burglar) than to theme-inappropriate targets (e.g., blueprint), when reading short passages (e.g., The old woman awoke to a sound from downstairs. She reached into her purse and found only a file.). Whereas skilled readers generated knowledge-based inferences under all text conditions, less-skilled readers only showed evidence of having generated knowledge-based inferences when the text incorporated a question inviting the inference (e.g., The old woman awoke and said, 'Why is there a sound downstairs?' She reached into her purse and found only a file.) and text-presentation speed was slower. Copyright 1998 Academic Press.

Memory for unconsciously perceived events: evidence from anesthetized patients.

Studies investigating memory for events during anesthesia show a confusing pattern of positive and negative results. To establish whether there are any consistent patterns of findings across studies, we conducted a meta-analysis of the data from 2517 patients in 44 studies. The meta-analysis included two measures of the effects of positive suggestions on postoperative recovery: (a) the duration of postoperative hospitalization and (b) the amount of morphine administered via patient-controlled anesthesia, as well as two measures of memory for specific information presented during anesthesia: (c) direct tests and (d) indirect tests. The meta-analysis indicated that positive suggestions presented during anesthesia have little or no effect on postoperative recovery. On the other hand, the meta-analysis showed that specific information is remembered following surgery, as long as testing is not delayed longer than 36 h. Studies of memory for events during anesthesia provide a useful avenue for exploring unconscious cognition.

Working memory and language comprehension: A meta-analysis.

This paper presents a meta-analysis of the data from 6,179 participants in 77 studies that investigated the association between working-memory capacity and language comprehension ability. A primary goal of the meta-analysis was to compare the predictive power of the measures of working memory developed by Daneman and Carpenter (1980) with the predictive power of other measures of working memory. The results of the meta-analysis support Daneman and Carpenter's (1980) claim that measures that tap the combined processing and storage capacity of working memory (e.g., reading span, listening span) are better predictors of comprehension than are measures that tap only the storage capacity (e.g., word span, digit span). The meta-analysis also showed that math process plus storage measures of working memory are good predictors of comprehension. Thus, the superior predictive power of the process plus storage measures is not limited to measures that involve the manipulation of words and sentences.

How young and old adults listen to and remember speech in noise.

Two experiments using the materials of the Revised Speech Perception in Noise (SPIN-R) Test [Bilger et al., J. Speech Hear. Res. 27, 32-48 (1984)] were conducted to investigate age-related differences in the identification and the recall of sentence-final words heard in a babble background. In experiment 1, the level of the babble was varied to determine psychometric functions (percent correct word identification as a function of S/N ratio) for presbycusics, old adults with near-normal hearing, and young normal-hearing adults, when the sentence-final words were either predictable (high context) or unpredictable (low context). Differences between the psychometric functions for high- and low-context conditions were used to show that both groups of old listeners derived more benefit from supportive context than did young listeners. In experiment 2, a working memory task [Daneman and Carpenter, J. Verb. Learn. Verb. Behav. 19, 450-466 (1980)] was added to the SPIN task for young and old adults. Specifically, after listening to and identifying the sentence-final words for a block of n sentences, the subjects were asked to recall the last n words that they had identified. Old subjects recalled fewer of the items they had perceived than did young subjects in all S/N conditions, even though there was no difference in the recall ability of the two age groups when sentences were read. Furthermore, the number of items recalled by both age groups was reduced in adverse S/N conditions. The resutls were interpreted as supporting a processing model in which reallocable processing resources are used to support auditory processing when listening becomes difficult either because of noise, or because of age-related deterioration in the auditory system. Because of this reallocation, these resources are unavailable to more central cognitive processes such as the storage and retrieval functions of working memory, so that "upstream" processing of auditory information is adversely affected.

What eye fixations tell us about phonological recoding during reading.

Evidence for phonological recoding during reading has depended on paradigms requiring readers to make some response in addition to reading (e.g., proofreading, concurrent speaking). Our subjects simply read text for comprehension, and their eye movements were monitored for spontaneous disruptions when encountering homophonic errors (e.g., He wore blew jeans.) versus nonhomophonic errors (e.g., He wore blow jeans.). Eye fixation behaviour revealed that readers initially experienced as much difficulty when encountering a homophonic error as a nonhomophonic one; however homophony facilitated the recovery process, at least for homophones that shared the same length as their context correct mates (e.g., blew/blue but not war/wore). The results support a theory of lexical access in which phonological sources of activation and influence are delayed relative to orthographic sources, rather than a theory in which phonological codes predominate.