Stimulus-based mirror effects in associative recognition revisited.

Abstract

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. Public Significance StatementIn an associative recognition test, people are asked to indicate which words were paired together on the study list. We equated high-and low-frequency words on more dimensions known to affect memory than previous researchers and found, contrary to previous articles, frequency does not affect associative recognition.

Valence does not affect recognition.

“…Similarly, MacMillan et al (2021) observed differences in d a when manipulating age of acquisition it item recognition. MacMillan et al (2022) found differences in concreteness using associative recognition. Studies using highly controlled stimuli with immediate serial recall tests have observed effects of frequency (Neath & Surprenant, 2019), concreteness (Neath & Surprenant, 2020), neighborhood size (Guitard et al, 2018), and visual similarity (Chubala et al, 2020).…”

The block order effect in reconstruction of order tasks and metacognitive processing.

“…As a second example, there is a high-frequency advantage on serial recall tests with standard forward recall but no effect of frequency with backward recall (Hulme et al, 1997). As a third example, there is a low-frequency advantage on item recognition tests (Gorman, 1961; Schulman, 1967), but the most common result on associative recognition tests is a high-frequency advantage (Aue et al, 2018), although a number of studies report no effect of frequency (Hockley, 1994; MacMillan et al, 2022). As a final example, there is no effect of frequency on serial recognition tests (Chubala et al, 2019).…”

“…This pattern of variability stands in stark contrast to other manipulations. For example, when memory for concrete and abstract words is examined, there is a concreteness advantage for free recall (Paivio & Csapo, 1969), for both forward and backward serial recall (Walker & Hulme, 1999), for both item (Gorman, 1961; Neath et al, 2021) and associative recognition (MacMillan et al, 2022), and also for serial recognition (Chubala et al, 2019).…”