Psychology of Learning and Motivation (eBook)

Advances in Research and Theory

eBook Download: PDF

1998 | 1. Auflage
306 Seiten
Elsevier Science (Verlag)
9780080863894 (ISBN)

Infos

General Description of the Series
The Psychology of Learning and Motivation publishes empirical and theoretical contributions in cognitive and experimental psychology, ranging from classical and instrumental conditioning to complex learning and problem solving. Each chapter provides a thoughtful integration of a body of work.
General Description of the Volume
Volume 38 covers emotional memory, metacomprehension of text, and intertemporal choice.

Inhalt

Front Cover 1
The Psychology of Learning and Motivation: Advances in Research and Theory 4
Copyright Page 5
Contents 6
Chapter 1. Transfer-Inappropriate Processing: Negative Priming and Related Phenomena 12
I. Introduction 12
II. Transfer-Appropriate Processing 14
III. Memory: Abstraction or Instances? 19
IV. Negative Priming 21
V. Related Phenomena 32
VI. Toward a Tip-Tap Theory of Priming 44
VII. Summary 47
References 48
Chapter 2. Cue Competition in the Absence of Compound Training: Its Relation to Paradigms of Interference between Outcomes 56
I. Introduction 56
II. Cue Competition in the Absence of Compound Training: The Basic Effect 58
III. The Unlearning Explanation 66
IV. Theories of Interference between Outcomes 70
V. Competition between Elementally Trained Cues in Judgmental Tasks 77
VI. Extending Models of Competition between Outcomes to Account for Competition between Cues 84
VII. Conclusions 87
Acknowledgments 88
References 88
Chapter 3. Sooner or Later: The Psychology of Intertemporal Choice 94
I. Introduction 94
II. Violations of Normative Theory 96
III. Domain Effects 105
IV. Agreement among Measures of Time Preferences 112
V. Conclusions 119
Acknowledgment 122
References 122
Chapter 4. Strategy Adaptivity and Individual Differences 126
I. Conceptions of Individual Differences 126
II. Strategy Adaptivity in Arithmetic 128
III. Investigating Individual Differences in a More Controlled Environment 142
IV. Individual Differences in a Complex, Dynamic Task 150
V. General Discussion 158
References 161
Chapter 5. Going Wild in the Laboratory: Learing about Species Typical Cues 166
I. Introduction 166
II. Use of a Conspecific as a Conditioned Stimulus 169
III. Do Species Typical Cues Have Special Properties as Conditioned Stimuli? 181
IV. Potentiation of Responding to Species Typical Cues 186
V. Conclusion 192
Acknowledgments 194
References 194
Chapter 6. Emotional Memory: The Effects of Stress on "Cool" and "Hot" Memory Systems 198
I. Hot and Cool Memory Systems 199
II. Stress 212
III. Adaptive Significance of the Two Systems 224
IV. Conclusion 225
Acknowledgments 226
References 226
Chapter 7. Metacomprehension of Text: Influence of Abslute Confidence Level on Bias and Accuracy 234
I. Introduction 234
II. Effect of Expectancy and Processing on Metacomprehension Measures 239
III. Recommendations for Metacomprehension Measures 224
References 257
Chapter 8. Linking Object Categorization and Naming: Early Expectations and the Shaping Role of Language 260
I. Introduction 260
II. The Developmental Process: A Dynamic Interplay between the Constraints in the Learner and the Amount and Information Present in the Environment 261
III. A Vignette 262
IV. The Relation between Object Categorization and Naming: Background Issues 263
V. Developmental and Crosslinguistic Considerations 266
VI. Empirical Evidence 270
VII. Integrating the Developmental and Crosslinguistic Evidence 282
Conclusion 294
References 294
Index 304
Contents of Recent Volumes 314

Textauszug

Transfer-Inappropriate Processing

Negative Priming and Related Phenomena

W. Trammell Neill; Katherine M. Mathis

I Introduction

Learning, memory, and cognition are fundamentally dependent on a sensitivity to repetition. Without the ability to detect that a present event is the same as, or similar to, previously experienced events, it would be impossible to learn the regularities of one’s environment or to form coherent conceptual categories in which instances are related by similarity. It is hardly surprising that much of the research on learning, memory, and cognition, both historical and contemporary, has been concerned with effects of repeated stimuli on performance.

Performance often benefits from repetition. Most obviously, recall or recognition of a studied item usually improves with repeated study of the same item (e.g., Ebbinghaus, 1885). In reaction-time tasks, a subject responds much faster to a stimulus (e.g., naming it) if he or she has just responded to an identical stimulus (the stimulus-repetition effect) (Bertelson, 1963; Hyman, 1953; Keele, 1969). Beller (1971) introduced the term priming to describe the facilitatory effect of a preexposed stimulus (without an overt response) on responding to a subsequent similar stimulus (see also Neely, 1977; Posner & Snyder, 1975). Repetition priming refers to the facilitatory effect on responding to an identical stimulus. However, facilitatory effects also often occur for stimuli that share only certain attributes, for example, perceptual, orthographic, phonological, morphological, syntactic, or semantic similarity. For this reason, the presence or absence of priming for a specific level of similarity is frequently used to index what kind of information about a stimulus has been encoded. If the task does not explicitly require recollection of the prior exposure, stimulusrepetition and priming effects demonstrate implicit memory for the exposure (Richardson-Klavehn & Bjork, 1988; Schacter, 1987).

Contrary to the common wisdom, there are also many circumstances in which an identical or similar repetition may hamper performance. The most prominent historical example is the interference that occurs when people learn similar lists of items for a subsequent recall test. Such interference effects were most thoroughly investigated in paired associate learning, in which subjects are required to learn pairings of items (e.g., SHOE–PENCIL) and are then tested for recall of the item that was paired with a cue (e.g., SHOE–?). In the “A–B, A–D” condition, subjects learn two lists of paired items in which the cue items are the same, but the target items are changed (e.g., SHOE–PENCIL in List 1, but SHOE–BΑΝΑΝΑ in List 2). In a control condition (“A–B, C–D”), subjects learn two lists in which the cues, as well as the targets, are different. Subjects who learned both lists with the same cue items recall the List 1 targets more poorly than subjects in the control condition (McGeoch, 1932; Melton & Irwin, 1940; Underwood, 1945). In other words, more recent learning can interfere with recall of earlier material (retroactive interference). Furthermore, the subjects who learned both lists are also less likely to recall the List 2 items (Melton & von Lackum, 1941; Underwood, 1945, 1948). Hence, earlier learning can also interfere with recall of more recent material (proactive interference). Or, stated more generally, repetition of identical stimuli can hurt performance if the repetitions require association with different responses.

In the classic studies of proactive interference, a repeated stimulus is studied in two different contexts and then is tested for recall or recognition at a later point in time. Hence, it is ambiguous whether the first occurrence interferes with the “on-line” processing of the second occurrence or whether the interference reflects processes required for retrieval at the later time. The present chapter is concerned with several phenomena in which an initial occurrence interferes with the immediate response to the second occurrence of an identical or similar stimulus. The prototypical case, negative priming, occurs when a stimulus is first deliberately ignored on a prime trial and then reappears as a target requiring a response on a probe trial (Neill, 1977b; Tipper, 1985). Research on the causes of negative priming suggests a general theoretical framework (transfer-inappropriate processing) that may in turn apply to other phenomena in which repetition hampers performance, including “repetition blindness” (Kanwisher, 1987), the “before-disruption effect” (Smith, Haviland, Reder, Brownell, & Adams, 1976),and “inhibition of return” (Posner & Cohen, 1980, 1984).

II Transfer-Appropriate Processing

The phrase transfer-appropriate processing was introduced into contemporary cognitive psychology by Morris, Bransford, and Franks (1977) as an alternative to the “levels of processing” framework proposed by Craik and Lockhart (1972). According to the levels-of-processing hypothesis, as originally stated, retention improves with the degree of abstraction (or “depth”) to which a stimulus is processed. Hence, if a subject’s attention is oriented toward the meaning of a word, subsequent recall or recognition memory is likely to be better than if the subject’s attention is oriented toward more superficial attributes like the number of letters or presence or absence of a specific letter (e.g., Hyde & Jenkins, 1969, 1973).

Morris et al. (1977) argued that memory performance cannot be attributed entirely to how the studied items are encoded in memory; equally important is whether the encoded information is appropriate to the type of test used to measure retention. Standard recall and recognition tests presumably depend most on semantic information (for whatever reason); therefore, they benefit from processing of meaning. However, other tests of retention may well depend on other information, and thereby benefit most from orienting tasks at study that emphasize attributes other than meaning. Accordingly, Morris et al. demonstrated that orienting subjects toward phonological information (rhymes) produced superior recognition memory for phonologically similar words. In a series of experiments, subjects judged whether target words were consistent with a sentence frame. Some frames required judgment of meaning, for example, “The _____ has feathers: EAGLE.” Other frames required judgment of phonology, for example, “_____ rhymes with legal: EAGLE.” Subjects were afterward given an unexpected recognition memory test for either the studied words (e.g., EAGLE), or for words that rhymed with studied words (e.g., REGAL). Recognition of the studied words was better if subjects had initially been oriented toward the words’ meanings, as would be predicted by the levels-of-processing hypothesis. However, recognition of rhyming words was better if subjects had initially judged other rhymes.

In the absence of further elaboration, “transfer-appropriate processing” risks circularity: If study condition A results in better performance on a given test than study condition B, then the processing under condition A is by definition more “transfer-appropriate.” It is implicit in the transfer-appropriate processing approach that different kinds of memory tests depend on different kinds of information and that different study conditions may or may not effectively encode the subsequently required information. However, this is really just what we mean by “memory”: one does not prepare for a Geography exam by studying one’s Biology notes!

The difficulty of independently defining transfer appropriateness is illustrated by an experiment by Neill (1977a): Subjects were shown 18 animal names and 18 inanimate-object names, one at a time and in random order. A random half of each set was presented in uppercase, and the other half in lowercase. Each word was preceded by a randomly selected question word, ANIMAL?, OBJECT?, UPPER?, or LOWER? Subjects first pronounced the word, and then pressed a key for “yes” or “no,” corresponding to whether the word agreed with the question. The exposure times, determined by the subjects’ responses, were slightly longer for case-oriented words (M = 2.19 s) than for meaning-oriented words (2.14 s). Subjects then received an unexpected recognition test in which each word was presented in its original case and its opposite case. Case recognition was above chance for both meaning-oriented words (p = .65) and case-oriented words (p = .62). Although the correct recognition proportions did not differ significantly between the two study conditions, correct recognition latencies were significantly faster to semantically oriented words (M = 3.40 s) than to case-oriented words (3.97 s). In other words, attention to meaning appears to be more “transfer-appropriate” to a case-recognition test than attention to case!

The results of Neill (1977a) are deceptive, though, because the memory test did...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 22.7.1998
• Mitarbeit: Herausgeber (Serie): Douglas L. Medin
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Psychologie ► Allgemeine Psychologie
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Psychologie ► Biopsychologie / Neurowissenschaften
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Psychologie ► Pädagogische Psychologie
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Psychologie ► Sozialpsychologie
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Psychologie ► Verhaltenstherapie
• Themenwelt: Naturwissenschaften ► Biologie ► Humanbiologie
• Themenwelt: Naturwissenschaften ► Biologie ► Zoologie
• ISBN-13: 9780080863894 / 9780080863894