Stimulus-based mirror effects revisited.

Abstract

The mirror effect is the finding that in recognition tests, a manipulation that increases the hit rate also decreases the false alarm rate. For example, low frequency words have a higher hit rate and a lower false alarm rate than high frequency words. Because the mirror effect is held to be a regularity of memory, it has had a pronounced influence on theories of recognition. We took advantage of the recent increase in the number of linguistic databases to create sets of stimuli that differed on one dimension (contextual diversity, frequency, or concreteness) but were more fully equated on other dimensions known to affect memory. Experiment 1 (contextual diversity), Experiment 3 (frequency), and Experiment 5 (concreteness) found no evidence of a mirror effect. We also conducted parallel experiments which used previously published stimuli that could not avail of the new databases and which therefore contained confounds. Experiment 2 (contextual diversity), Experiment 4 (frequency), and Experiment 6 (concreteness) all resulted in mirror effects. If this pattern of results is replicable, it has broad implications for theories of recognition, which typically view the mirror effect as a benchmark finding. Unfortunately, few articles on the mirror effect include the stimuli, rendering the past literature of little use in testing this hypothesis. We encourage researchers to create and assess other pools of highly controlled stimuli to establish whether the stimulus-based mirror effect obtains when confounds are eliminated or whether it is due to the presence of these confounds.

Stimulus-based mirror effects in associative recognition revisited.

“…For the latter, the Bayes factor indicated positive evidence for the null hypothesis, BF 01 = 6.99. The results are the same as those observed when using highly controlled stimuli in item recognition (Neath et al, in press) and differ from the mirror effect reported with concreteness in associative recognition (Hockley, 1994).…”

“…Although subjects could potentially rely on the familiarity of the emergent associations between items, it is more likely that intact decisions are made when subjects specifically remember studying two items together (i.e., recollection). This difference in utility of familiarity and recollection for the two tests can account for the pattern of results observed here and by Neath et al (in press).…”

“…The stimuli were the high- and low-frequency words from the low-density stimulus set of Heathcote et al (2006) that were also used in Experiment 4 of Neath et al (in press). Although the words differed in frequency, they also differed on other dimensions known to affect memory; see Table A4 of Neath et al for details.…”

“…Experiment 3, like Experiment 1, used highly controlled stimuli, which was possible because of recently published norms and databases. Neath et al (in press) were unable to find a study on mirror effects in item recognition that manipulated concreteness and included the stimuli. Therefore, Neath et al created a set of stimuli that matched published summaries but which turned out to vary on dimensions other than concreteness.…”

“…The majority of studies on the mirror effect were conducted before the recent increase in the availability of high-quality databases that enable researchers to more fully equate two sets of stimuli. Neath et al (in press) took advantage of these new databases to reexamine mirror effects in item recognition. Three experiments replicated previous results showing mirror effects when manipulating contextual diversity (Experiment 2), frequency (Experiment 4), and concreteness (Experiment 6).…”