Montefinese M, Vinson D, Ambrosini E. Pupil response to false memory modulated by feature similarity (PrePrint)

Abstract

Differences in pupil dilation are observed for studied compared to new items in recognition memory. According to cognitive load theory, this effect reflects the greater cognitive demands of retrieving contextual information from study phase. Pupil dilation can also occur when new items conceptually related to old ones are erroneously recognized as old, but the aspects of similarity that modulate false memory and related pupil responses remain unclear. We investigated this issue by manipulating the degree of featural similarity between new (unstudied) and old (studied) concepts in an old/new recognition task. We found that new concepts with high similarity were mistakenly identified as old and had greater pupil dilation than those with low similarity, suggesting that pupil dilation reflects the strength of evidence on which recognition judgments are based and, importantly, greater locus coeruleus and prefrontal activity determined by the higher degree of retrieval monitoring involved in recognizing these items.

The Croatian psycholinguistic database: Estimates for 6000 nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs

“…The values of all word features are comparable to values available in databases for other languages cited earlier. AoA means in our study may seem somewhat higher than those obtained in other studies using a continuous AoA measure for French (Ferrand et al, 2008), Italian (Montefinese et al, 2019) and Dutch (Moors et al, 2013). However, given that AoA correlates with word length across languages (shorter words tend to be acquired at younger ages), the differences may, in part, be ascribed to word length.…”

“…All the correlations obtained in the data follow the expected pattern found in previous studies and databases (e.g. Altarriba et al, 1999;Bird et al, 2001;Cameirão & Vicente, 2010;Desrochers & Thompson, 2009;Montefinese et al, 2019;Paivio et al, 1968;Soares et al, 2017;Stadthagen-Gonzalez & Davis, 2006), whereby words rated as more concrete are generally likely to be more highly imageable, shorter, acquired earlier and having a higher subjective frequency rating. What is perhaps more surprising is the order of the reported AoA and subjective frequency, starting with adverbs and verbs, followed by nouns, and ending with adjectives.…”

“…To our knowledge, reports of rated AoA and word class interactions are infrequent in the literature. In a recent study on Italian (Montefinese et al, 2019), the order of mean AoA for verbs, nouns and adjectives was the same as the one obtained in the present study. A study for Portuguese (Cameirão & Vicente, 2010) reports adverbs being acquired earliest.…”

“…Human ratings of these and other characteristics appear in databases for a number of languages, for instance English (Bird et al, 2001;Brysbaert et al, 2014b;Coltheart, 1981;Paivio et al, 1968), Spanish (Duchon et al, 2013;Guasch et al, 2016), Italian (Della Rosa et al, 2010;Montefinese et al, 2019;Rofes et al, 2018), French (Desrochers & Thompson, 2009), Dutch (Brysbaert et al, 2014a), Portuguese (Soares et al, 2017), Polish (Imbir, 2016) and Chinese (Yee, 2017). Most of them are freely available, but some are only available as lists rather than downloadable datasets.…”