A direct comparison of recognition failure rates for recallable names in episodic and semanticmemory tests

Abstract

In an extension of Muter's (l978l research, subjects studied pairs of lowercase cues and uppercase targets consisting of famous names (e.g., betsy ROSS), nonfamous names (e.g., edwin CONWAY), weakly related words (e.g., grasp BABY), and unrelated words (e.g., art GO). Following recognition tests in which surname and word targets were tested in the absence of their cues, cued recall tests for the surname and word targets were given. In semantic recognition and recall tests, the response to a surname was to be made solely on the basis of its fame, regardless of whether or not it had appeared in the study list. In episodic memory tests, the response to a surname was to be made solely on the basis of whether or not it had appeared in the study list, regardless of its fame. In all tests, the response to a nonname was to be made solely on the basis of whether or not it had appeared in the study list. The Tulving-Wiseman (1975) function accurately predicted recognition failure rates for famous surnames, whether or not they were from the study list and whether the test was episodic or semantic, and for targets from the weakly related word pairs. However, recognition failure rates were lower than the Tulving-Wiseman function predicted for nonfamous surnames in the episodic memory test and for targets from unrelated word pairs. Discussion focused on these results' implications for the nature of the Tulving-Wiseman function and the psychological reality of the episodic-semantic memory distinction.According to Tulving (1972), episodic memory tasks require subjects to answer queries about when, where, or under what circumstances they experienced an event, whereas semantic memory tasks require them to answer queries about organized knowledge concerning word meanings and the relations among concepts, independent of the autobiographical context in which that knowledge was gained. Although most researchers accept Tulving's episodic-semantic distinction as a useful taxonomy for classifying different kinds of memory tasks, considerable disagreement centers on whether episodic and semantic memory tasks tap functionally different memory stores and/or retrieval processes (e.g

Becoming famous without being recognized: Unconscious influences of memory produced by dividing attention.

“…The effects of reading a name on a later judgment of its fame largely replicate results reported by Neely and Payne (1983). Those effects remain unchanged when attention is divided while one reads names, even though divided attention, in comparison with full attention, has a large effect on list-recognition performance.…”

“…Then those old names were mixed with new famous and new nonfamous names in a test of fame judgments. On the basis of earlier research (Jacoby, Kelley, Brown, & Jasechko, 1989;Neely & Payne, 1983), we expected that the familiarity of a name produced by its being read in the first phase would be mistaken for the familiarity that characterizes a famous name; that is, reading either a famous name or a nonfamous name in the first part of the experiment would produce a higher probability of calling the name "famous" on the later test. We expected that divided attention would reduce people's ability to recognize a name as previously read but would have no effect on gains in the familiarity of the name produced by its prior reading.…”

Contingent dissociation between recognition and fragment completion: The method of triangulation.

“…The major difference in the current experiments had to do with the instructions given to subjects at the time of the second test--cued recall versus word completion--while holding the physical form of the retrieval cues constant (cf. Graf, Squire, & Mandler, 1984;Neely & Payne, 1983). The retrieval cues were graphemic word fragments, that is, words with a number of letters deleted from various positions in a word (e.g., Tulving et al, 1982).…”

“…The scoring of the subjects' performance in the two retrieval tasks was also identical: Target words for which subjects were given credit were the words that had appeared on the study list. Our general plan for experiments conforms to the methodological suggestions made by Neely and Payne (1983) and follows the example set by and .…”

Adding new information to semantic memory: How much learning is enough to produce automatic priming?

“…Priming paradigms also have been used to look for dissociative effects, whereby a variable produces different effects in episodic and semantic tasks when all other factors are held constant. Evidence of dissociative effects can be used to argue in favor of the distinction (Neely & Payne, 1983), while failures of dissociation constitute evidence against the distinction (Yantis & Meyer, 1988). Although the present study is not intended as a test of the episodic-semantic distinction per se, it can be construed as looking for evidence of episodic priming in a semantic task.…”