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Speakers frequently make subject-verb number agreement errors in the presence of a local noun with a different number from the head of the subject phrase. A series of four experiments used a two-choice response time (RT) paradigm to investigate how the latency of correct agreement decisions is modulated by the presence of a number attractor, and to investigate the relative latency of errors and correct agreement decisions. The presence of a number attractor reliably increased correct RT, and the size of this RT effect was consistently larger in conditions that also had larger effects on accuracy. Number attraction errors, however, were similar in RT to correct responses in the same experimental condition. These results are interpreted as supporting a model according to which an intervening number attractor makes the agreement computation process more difficult in general (Eberhard, Cutting, & Bock, 2005), with errors arising probabilistically. However, attraction from a non-intervening noun resulted in only mildly inflated correct RT, but dramatically inflated error RT, suggesting that non-intervening attraction errors may reflect confusion about the structure of the subject phrase.
J Mem Lang 2009 Feb
PMID:On the interpretation of the number attraction effect: Response time evidence. 2012 91

Working memory was designed to explain four benchmark memory effects: the word length effect, the irrelevant speech effect, the acoustic confusion effect, and the concurrent articulation effect. However, almost all research thus far has used tests that emphasize forward recall. In four experiments, we examine whether each effect is observable when the items are recalled in reverse order. Subjects did not know which recall direction would be required until the time of test, ensuring that encoding processes would be identical for both recall directions. Contrary to predictions of both the primacy model and the feature model, the benchmark memory effect was either absent or greatly attenuated with backward recall, despite being present with forward recall. Direction of recall had no effect on the more difficult conditions (e.g., long words, similar-sounding items, items presented with irrelevant speech, and items studied with concurrent articulation). Several factors not considered by the primacy and feature models are noted, and a possible explanation within the framework of the SIMPLE model is briefly presented.
Mem Cognit 2010 Apr
PMID:Backward recall and benchmark effects of working memory. 2208 Dec 76

Reports of superior memory for novel relative to familiar material have figured prominently in recent theories of memory. However, such novelty effects are incongruous with long-standing observations that familiar items are remembered better. In 2 experiments, we explored whether this discrepancy was explained by differences in the type of familiarity under consideration or by differences in the difficulty of discriminating targets from lures, which may lead to source confusion for familiar but not novel targets. In Experiment 1, we directly tested whether previously observed novelty effects were the result of novelty, discrimination demands, or both. We used linguistic materials (proverbs) to replicate the novelty effect but found that it occurred only when familiar items were subject to source confusion. In Experiment 2, to examine better how novelty influences episodic memory, we used experimentally familiar, pre-experimentally familiar, and novel proverbs in a paradigm designed to overcome discrimination demand confounds. Memory was better for both types of familiar proverbs. These results indicate that familiarity, not novelty, leads to better episodic memory for studied items, regardless of whether familiarity is experimentally induced or based on prior semantic knowledge. We argue that proposals that state that information is encoded better if it is novel are based on over-generalizations of effects arising from the distinctiveness of novel materials.
J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn 2010 Sep
PMID:Revisiting the novelty effect: when familiarity, not novelty, enhances memory. 2080 99

Several sources of interference in memory are identified. These sources may be grossly classified as processing interference, i.e., that due to disruption of whatever activity occurs during the input or output of to-be-remembered material, or trace interaction, i.e., that due to interference among the stored memories themselves. The latter would appear to be due to simultaneous activation of correct and incorrect associations mediated by confusion among cue stimuli. A consideration of the means by which interference is reduced suggests that interfering associates are not weakened, unlearned, or suppressed except possibly when nominal stimuli are identical and sets of target and interfering items are temporally discriminable. Discriminative encoding of cue stimuli may eliminate these associations, if it operates at the perceptual level. Otherwise, potential interfering associates are activated, but may be rendered functionally impotent by discriminating them from correct associations on the basis of either backward association with discriminative stimulus attributes or differential contextual attributes such as frequency, time, order, and strength.
Mem Cognit 1975 Mar
PMID:Interference among memory traces. 2128 53

The finding that serial recall performance for visually presented items is impaired by concurrently presented task-irrelevant speech or sounds is referred to as the irrelevant-speech/-sound effect (ISE). Substantial evidence has indicated that the impairment of serial rehearsal can result in an ISE, and this may be explained by several models. The present series of experiments has demonstrated an ISE in surprise nonserial recognition tasks in which participants were unaware of the need to maintain a large number of visual items for a later memory test, suggesting that neither the rehearsal nor maintenance of order information is necessary for observing the ISE. This effect was observed for both steady-state and changing-state irrelevant sounds, suggesting that the present results do not derive from a confusion of order information, but instead provide evidence that identity representations can also be impaired by irrelevant sound.
Mem Cognit 2012 Aug
PMID:New considerations for the cognitive locus of impairment in the irrelevant-sound effect. 2237 Nov 64

Proactive interference occurs when information from the past disrupts current processing and is a major source of confusion and errors in short-term memory (STM; Wickens, Born, & Allen, Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 2:440-445, 1963). The present investigation examines potential boundary conditions for interference, testing the hypothesis that potential competitors must be similar along task-relevant dimensions to influence proactive interference effects. We manipulated both the type of task being completed (Experiments 1, 2, and 3) and dimensions of similarity irrelevant to the current task (Experiments 4 and 5) to determine how the recent presentation of a probe item would affect the speed with which participants could reject that item. Experiments 1, 2, and 3 contrasted STM judgments, which require temporal information, with semantic and perceptual judgments, for which temporal information is irrelevant. In Experiments 4 and 5, task-irrelevant information (perceptual similarity) was manipulated within the recent probes task. We found that interference from past items affected STM task performance but did not affect performance in semantic or perceptual judgment tasks. Conversely, similarity along a nominally irrelevant perceptual dimension did not affect the magnitude of interference in STM tasks. Results are consistent with the view that items in STM are represented by noisy codes consisting of multiple dimensions and that interference occurs when items are similar to each other and, thus, compete along the dimensions relevant to target selection.
Mem Cognit 2013 Jul
PMID:Escaping the recent past: which stimulus dimensions influence proactive interference? 2329 49

The neural structures that support the retention of memories over time has been a subject of intense research in cognitive neuroscience. However, recently much attention has turned to pattern separation, the putative process by which memories are stored as unique representations that are resistant to confusion. It remains unclear, however, to what extent these two processes can be neurally dissociated. The trial-unique delayed nonmatching-to-location (TUNL) task was developed to assess spatial working memory and pattern separation function using trial-unique locations on a touch-sensitive screen (Talpos, McTighe, Dias, Saksida, & Bussey, 2010). Using this task, Talpos et al. (2010) showed that lesions of the hippocampus led to both impairments with a 6s delay, and impairments in pattern separation. The present study shows that lesions of the medial prefrontal cortex lead to a different pattern of effects: impairment at the same, 6s delay, but no hint of impairment in pattern separation. In addition, rats with medial prefrontal lesions were more susceptible to interference in this task. When compared with previously published results, these data show that whereas the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus likely interact in the service of working memory across a delay, only the hippocampus and not the medial prefrontal cortex is essential for pattern separation.
Neurobiol Learn Mem 2013 Mar
PMID:Dissociation between memory retention across a delay and pattern separation following medial prefrontal cortex lesions in the touchscreen TUNL task. 2339 86

Studies were designed to compare the effects of encoding strategies on two types of interference, sensory and semantic. Paired-associate lists were learned under instructional sets encouraging interactive imagery or repetitious rehearsal. Sensory interference was created by mispairing rhymes and semantic interference was produced by mispairing associatively related words. In control lists word pairs were unrelated. The results indicated that encoding strategy did not influence amounts of sensory and semantic interference. Mispairing rhymes produced the same amount of confusion as mispairing associates whether pairs were encoded through interaction imagery or through repetitious rehearsal. These effects were found with both short and long encoding intervals. The findings are inconsistent with the idea that encoding operations or strategies applied to word pairs completely determine the type of code activated for those pairs. Both sensory and semantic codes appear to be activated under each kind of encoding strategy.
Mem Cognit 1977 Jul
PMID:Encoding strategy and sensory and semantic interference. 2420 15

Using both recognition and recall responses, confusion and intrusion errors were obtained for briefly exposed 11-letter strings. The patterns of errors were sharply dependent upon experimental variables. In Experiment I Ss made auditory and visual intrusions with recall, but neither with recognition. In Experiment II increasing exposure time and eliminating a poststimulus cue primarily increased auditory confusions. This suggests that auditory and visual confusions reflect strategy-contingentrecoding rather than modality-specificencoding.
Mem Cognit 1974 Jul
PMID:Auditory and visual confusions: Evidence against simple modality encoding hypotheses. 2420 27

Letter series completion problems varying along location of irrelevant relations (beginning, end, none) were presented to 24 Ss. A repeated-measures analysis of solution times and errors revealed that irrelevant relations at the beginning of series produced the longest latencies and the most errors. Using a pattern induction/sequence production model of serial processing, an error analysis showed production error rate remained constant across treatments, while pattern induction errors varied with confusion location. The results indicate that the difficulty of sequential processing varies with irrelevant relations only during the pattern induction phase. The findings also support a left-right generate-and-test model of pattern induction for the task.
Mem Cognit 1974 Jul
PMID:The effects of irrelevant relations on the processing of sequential patterns. 2420 52


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