The word frequency effect for recognition memory and the elevated-attention hypothesis

Abstract

Empirical tests were conducted on the elevated-attention hypothesis that low-frequency (LF) words are better recognized than high-frequency (HF) words because LF words attract more attention than do HF words (e.g., Glanzer & Adams, 1990). The elevated-attention hypothesis predicts that the hit rate advantage for LF words should be reduced by increases in attentional strain at study. We first tested this prediction in two experiments by varying the amount of experimenter-controlled study time (on the basis of the assumption that a decrease in study time would reduce the amount of resources available for studying a word). The elevated-attention hypothesis was confirmed, but only when words were studied for relatively short durations. This finding led us to formulate an early-phase elevated-attention hypothesis that proposes that more attentional resources are allocated to LF words than to HF words only during the early phase of encoding (which produces the LF hit rate advantage in subsequent recognition) and that the allocation of attentional resources during the late phase of encoding is not greater for LF words than for HF words. An additional empirical test of this revised hypothesis was conducted: Experimenter-controlled study time and the composition of the to-be-remembered pairs of words were varied orthogonally. The results confirmed the early-phase elevated-attention hypothesis.

A Dynamic Approach to Recognition Memory

“…Regardless of response signal lag or speed vs. accuracy focus (Starns et al, 2012;Rae et al, 2014), word frequency effects persist. Thus, our investigation appears to also rule out recall-based (Reder et al, 2000), criterion-setting (Glanzer & Adams, 1990;Hintzman, 1994), and time-specific attentional (Malmberg & Nelson, 2003) accounts of the word frequency effect in recognition, unless those secondary processes occur so rapidly as to be undetectable, at which point they cease to become useful theoretical constructs.…”

“…Similarly, if the LF hit rate advantage depends on recalling a LF target trace (Reder et al, 2000), this should take additional time to manifest. If LF words attract more attentional resources by virtue of more difficult initial identification (Malmberg & Nelson, 2003), there should be an overall delay in processing LF words during that initial period, but after that the mirror effect should appear. If word frequency effects depend on interference from specific prior episodes, this should only be apparent later in processing, when enough content features are sampled to overcome the initial mismatching context features.…”

A dynamic approach to recognition memory.

“…A participant must first decide what class the item belongs to (HF or LF) such that the correct expectations can be brought to bear. A different account that nonetheless implicates attention as the source of the LF advantage is the early-phase elevated attention hypothesis (Malmberg & Nelson, 2003).…”

Frequency Effects on Memory: A Resource-Limited Theory

“…As predicted by our account, the typical LF hit rate advantage gets monotonically smaller as age increases, while the recognition of HF words does not change (Balota, Burgess, Cortese, & Adams, 2002). While this effect might be attributed to increased familiarity of LF words with age, other attentional factors also eliminate or reverse the LF hit rate advantage -for example, reducing the study time (Criss & McClelland, 2006;Malmberg & Nelson, 2003) or dividing attention during study 19 .…”

“…The next modeling challenge we chose to tackle was the finding that reducing study time reduces the hit rate advantage for LF words (Malmberg & Nelson, 2003) or even reverses it (Criss & McClelland, 2006). We chose these studies because timing is critical when we consider that WM resources recover over time.…”