The roles of encoding strategies and retrieval practice in test-expectancy effects.

We investigated whether expectations for different kinds of memory tests induce qualitatively different encoding strategies. In Experiment 1, participants studied four lists of words and after each list completed a cued-recall test that contained either all semantic or all orthographic cues so as to build up an expectancy for receiving the same type of test for the fifth critical study list. To rule out that the test-expectancy effects in Experiment 1 were due to differences in retrieval practice, in Experiment 2, participants received three practice tests each for both cue-types. Participants' test expectancy for all lists was induced by telling them before each list the type of cue they would receive for the upcoming study list. In both experiments, the critical test contained both expected and unexpected cues. In Experiment 1, participants who expected semantic cues had better recall to the semantic cues than to the orthographic cues and vice versa for those who expected orthographic cues. However, in Experiment 2, there was no effect of test expectancy. These findings suggest that the test-expectancy effects in Experiment 1 were due to more retrieval practice on the expected than unexpected tests rather than to qualitatively different test-expectancy-induced encoding strategies.

Transfer-appropriate processing in the testing effect.

The testing effect is the finding that taking a review test enhances performance on a final test relative to restudying the material. The present experiment investigated transfer-appropriate processing in the testing effect using semantic and orthographic cues to evoke conceptual and data-driven processing, respectively. After a study phase, subjects either restudied the material or took a cued-recall test consisting of half semantic and half orthographic cues in which the correct response was given as feedback. A final, cued-recall test consisted of the identical cue, or a new cue that was of the same type or different type of cue (semantic/orthographic or orthographic/semantic) as that used for that target in the review test. Testing enhanced memory in all conditions. When the review cues and final-test cues were identical, final recall was higher for semantic than orthographic cues. Consistent with test-based transfer-appropriate processing, memory performance improved as the review and final cues became more similar. These results suggest that the testing effect could potentially be caused by the episodic retrieval processes in a final memory test overlapping more with the episodic retrieval processes in a review test than with the encoding operations performed during restudy.

The semantic priming project.

Speeded naming and lexical decision data for 1,661 target words following related and unrelated primes were collected from 768 subjects across four different universities. These behavioral measures have been integrated with demographic information for each subject and descriptive characteristics for every item. Subjects also completed portions of the Woodcock-Johnson reading battery, three attentional control tasks, and a circadian rhythm measure. These data are available at a user-friendly Internet-based repository ( http://spp.montana.edu ). This Web site includes a search engine designed to generate lists of prime-target pairs with specific characteristics (e.g., length, frequency, associative strength, latent semantic similarity, priming effect in standardized and raw reaction times). We illustrate the types of questions that can be addressed via the Semantic Priming Project. These data represent the largest behavioral database on semantic priming and are available to researchers to aid in selecting stimuli, testing theories, and reducing potential confounds in their studies.

Citation rates for experimental psychology articles published between 1950 and 2004: top-cited articles in behavioral cognitive psychology.

From citation rates for over 85,000 articles published between 1950 and 2004 in 56 psychology journals, we identified a total of 500 behavioral cognitive psychology articles that ranked in the top 0.6% in each half-decade, in terms of their mean citations per year using the Web of Science. Thirty nine percent [corrected] of these articles were produced by 78 authors who authored three or more of them, and more than half were published by only five journals.The mean number of cites per year and the total number of citations necessary for an article to achieve various percentile rankings are reported for each journal. The mean number of citations necessary for an article published within each half-decade to rank at any given percentile has steadily increased from 1950 to 2004. Of the articles that we surveyed, 11% had zero total citations, and 35% received fewer than four total citations. Citations for post-1994 articles ranking in the 50th-75th and 90th-95th percentiles have generally continued to grow across each of their 3-year postpublication bins. For pre-1995 articles ranking in the 50th-75th and 90th-95th percentiles, citations peaked in the 4- to 6- or 7- to 9-year postpublication bins and decreased linearly thereafter, until asymptoting. In contrast, for the top-500 articles, (a) for pre-1980 articles, citations grew and peaked 10-18-year postpublication bins, and after a slight decrease began to linearly increase again; (b) for post-1979 articles, citations have continually increased across years in a nearly linear fashion. We also report changes in topics covered by the top-cited articles over the decades.

A static color discontinuity can capture spatial attention when the target is an abrupt-onset singleton.

C. L. Folk, R. W. Remington, and J. C. Johnston's (1992) contingent involuntary orienting hypothesis states that a salient visual feature will involuntarily capture attention only when the observer's attentional set includes similar features. In four experiments, when the target's relevant feature was its being an abruptly onset singleton, attentional capture occurred for a static discontinuity cue that was the boundary between a group of red Xs contiguously joined to a group of green Os within a single row. Such an attentional capture effect is novel and contrary to Folk et al.'s (1992) hypothesis, because the attentional set for the target should have included abrupt onset but not color discontinuity, which was the feature that captured attention. These capture effects were involuntary because they occurred even when the target never appeared in the same location as the cue, and color could not have been used as a cue to signal the appearance of the target array (cf. B. S. Gibson & E. M. Kelsey, 1998).

With a letter-searched prime, boat primes float but swim and coat don't: further evidence for automatic semantic activation.

Letter search (LS) on the prime typically eliminates semantic priming (swim-float) and orthographic/ phonological (O/P) priming (coat-float) but not morphological priming (marked-mark). However, LS on the prime does not reduce semantic priming for low-frequency targets (Tse & Neely, 2007). These findings suggest that semantic activation survives LS but decays during LS to a low level that can be detected only with sensitive measures, which are afforded by low-frequency targets and morphologically related primes and targets. In the present research, we show that LS on the prime results in 0 msec of semantic priming (e.g., swim-float) and 11 msec of O/P priming (e.g., coat-float), both of which are statistically null, whereas the LS semantic+O/P priming effect for primes and targets that do not share a morpheme (e.g., boat-float) is a robust 37 msec. Discussion focuses on the automaticity of semantic activation and whether morphological priming is mediated by (1) a morphemic representation that is separate from semantic representations or (2) activation combined from semantics and orthography/phonology.

Calling all codes: interactive effects of semantics, phonology, and orthography produce dissociations in a repetition blindness paradigm.

We used the repetition blindness (RB) paradigm to examine the roles of semantics, phonology, and orthography on report from rapidly presented 5-item word lists. Semantic primes in positions 1 and 3 in the list preceded homographic homophones, homographic heterophones, and heterographic homophones as critical targets in positions 2 and 4. All codes (i.e., semantic, phonologic, and orthographic) were repeated, or meaning changed while only phonology, only orthography, or both were repeated for the critical targets. Using a scoring procedure that considered order of report, we assessed facilitation for report of the first instance of the repeated target (a novel aspect of our procedure) and RB for report of the second instance of the repeated target. Except when accompanied by a change in orthography, a change in meaning reduced RB relative to when all codes were repeated. Facilitation in the report of the first instance of the repeated item occurred only if meaning changed and phonology was repeated (independent of whether orthography changed). Finally, recall was worse for the meaning change nonrepeated control lists (which instantiated 3 unrelated meanings in the list, including the last unrelated item) than for the no-meaning change control lists (which instantiated 2 unrelated meanings). We discuss the relevance of these findings for extant accounts of repetition blindness.

Semantic priming modulates the N400, N300, and N400RP.

OBJECTIVE: To determine whether ERP components can differentiate between the semantic priming mechanisms of automatic spreading activation, expectancy, and semantic matching. METHODS: The present study manipulated two factors known to differentiate semantic priming mechanisms: associations between words (forward, backward, and symmetrical) and prime-target stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA). Twenty-six participants were tested in each SOA condition while high-density 128-channel data were collected. Principal components analysis was applied to separate the ERP components. RESULTS: Priming was observed for all conditions. Three semantic components were present: (1) the standard N400 effect for symmetric and forward priming pairs at both short and long SOAs, (2) an N300 for the long SOA symmetric priming pairs, and (3) a right-lateralized posterior N400RP for long SOA backward priming pairs. CONCLUSIONS: Results suggest that the N300 reflects expectancy, but only for categorical and/or semantic similarity priming. Results further suggest that the N400RP is a replicable ERP component that responds to semantic matching. There is also some evidence that the N400 indirectly responds to both ASA and expectancy, perhaps as part of a post-lexical updating process and that backward priming at short SOAs is different from that at long SOAs. SIGNIFICANCE: Improved understanding of the semantic properties of the N400 and related ERP components may increase their utility for understanding language processes and for diagnostic purposes.

Semantic priming from letter-searched primes occurs for low- but not high-frequency targets: automatic semantic access may not be a myth.

Letter-search (LS) within a prime often eliminates semantic priming. In 2 lexical decision experiments, the authors found that priming from LS primes occurred for low-frequency (LF) but not high-frequency (HF) targets whether the target's word frequency was manipulated between or within participants and whether the prime-target pairs were associated symmetrically or forward asymmetrically. For the LF targets, LS priming was (a) equivalent for forward asymmetric and symmetric pairs and (b) equal to silent-read (SR) priming for forward asymmetric pairs but less than SR priming for symmetric pairs. The typical finding of greater SR priming for response times for LF than for HF targets occurred for symmetric priming but not for forward asymmetric priming, which showed the interaction for errors. The authors consider their findings' implications for various accounts of how LS affects priming and explain the findings within J. H. Neely and D. E. Keefe's (1989) 3-process model as follows: (a) LS eliminates expectancy and semantic matching but does not reduce semantic activation and (b) expectancy contributes to SR priming for HF targets but not for LF targets, whereas the opposite is so for semantic matching.

Involuntary capture of visual-spatial attention occurs for intersections, both real and "imagined".

In three spatial precuing experiments, we demonstrate attentional capture by an intersection that occurs (1) between two lines that are not part of an enclosed object, and (2) between a line in the cuing array that is not physically present during target search and the invisible circumference of a perceptual circle formed by the elements in the target array. This capture effect conceptually replicates Cole, Gellatly, and Blurton's (2001) corner enhancement effect, in which responses are faster for targets presented near an object's corners rather than along its straight edges. However, it extends that effect by showing that it occurs even when the intersection is not part of an enclosed object and is not physically present during target search. More important, our capture effect occurred even though the target's position was not designated by a perceptually distinctive feature and was not predicted by the intersection's position. Thus, it seems that a line intersection--whether it be real or imaginary-automatically captures visual-spatial attention, contrary to Folk, Remington, and Johnston's (1992) and Gibson and Kelsey's (1998) views that such an involuntary capture of spatial attention is contingent on attentional control settings.

Testing enhances both encoding and retrieval for both tested and untested items.

In forward testing effects, taking a test enhances memory for subsequently studied material. These effects have been observed for previously studied and tested items, a potentially item-specific testing effect, and newly studied untested items, a purely generalized testing effect. We directly compared item-specific and generalized forward testing effects using procedures to separate testing benefits due to encoding versus retrieval. Participants studied two lists of Swahili-English word pairs, with the second study list containing "new" pairs intermixed with the previously studied "old" pairs. Participants completed a review phase in which they took a cued-recall test on only the "old" pairs or restudied them. In Experiments 1a, 1b, and 2, the review phase was given either before or after the second study list. Testing benefited memory to the same degree for both "new" and "old" pairs, suggesting that there were no pair-specific benefits of testing. The larger benefit from testing when review was given before rather than after the second study list suggests that the memory enhancement was due to both testing-enhanced encoding and testing-enhanced retrieval. To better equate generalized testing effects for "new" and "old" pairs, Experiment 3 intermixed them in the review phase. A statistically significant pair-specific testing effect for "old" items was now observed. Overall, these results show that forward testing effects are due to both testing-enhanced encoding and retrieval effects and that direct, pair-specific forward testing benefits are considerably smaller than indirect, generalized forward testing benefits.

Does testing increase spontaneous mediation in learning semantically related paired associates?

Carpenter (2011) argued that the testing effect she observed for semantically related but associatively unrelated paired associates supports the mediator effectiveness hypothesis. This hypothesis asserts that after the cue-target pair mother-child is learned, relative to restudying mother-child, a review test in which mother is used to cue the recall of child leads to (a) greater activation of the mediator (father), and (b) greater strengthening of the links in the cue-to-mediator (mother-father) and mediator-to-target (father-child) associative chain. This chain is then spontaneously used for recalling child when mother is given as the cue in a final test. The mediator effectiveness hypothesis is supported by the finding that relative to review restudying, mother-child review testing leads to better recall of the target child in the final test when cued by either mother or father. The present Experiment 1 examined an alternative account of this testing effect for mediator-to-target recall. By this account, when given as a cue, the mediator elicits the original cue, which in turn covertly cues the target via a test-strengthened cue-target association. Contrary to this account, the mediator-to-target testing effect did not depend on the preexisting mediator-cue associative strength. Experiment 2 provided a more direct test of the mediator effectiveness hypothesis by having participants recall the mediator and then the target in the final test. Contrary to predictions made by the mediator effectiveness hypothesis, (a) the cue-to-target testing effect was of the same magnitude whether the mediator was recalled or not, and (b) overall target recall was lower, not higher, when participants recalled the mediator. Thus, spontaneous mediation does not underlie the testing effect that occurs for semantically related but associatively unrelated paired associates. (PsycINFO Database Record

Priming effects on temporal order judgments about words: perceived temporal priority or response bias?

In a temporal order judgment task, in which observers select which of two words appeared first, Stolz (1999) found that observers were more likely to select the word that had been semantically primed. Using repetition priming, we replicated Stolz's finding and extended her results by demonstrating that the effect was due to both (1) repetition priming causing the primed item to be perceived as having occurred earlier and (2) a response bias to guess the repetition primed item as the correct response. We discuss our new finding that priming induces an attentional precedence effect in the context of previous research suggesting that exogenous spatial cuing induces an attentional precedence effect but identity or semantic priming may not.

Attentional control and asymmetric associative priming.

Participants completed a battery of 3 attentional control (AC) tasks (OSPAN, antisaccade, and Stroop, as in Hutchison, 2007) and performed a lexical decision task with symmetrically associated (e.g., sister-brother) and asymmetrically related primes and targets presented in both the forward (e.g., atom-bomb) and backward (e.g., fire-blaze) directions at either a 250- or 1,250-ms stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA). As predicted, high-AC individuals showed greater forward priming than low-AC individuals. There was also some evidence that low-AC individuals exhibited greater backward priming than high-AC individuals, and this difference was most pronounced in the later portions of the reaction time distribution. These results suggest that high-AC individuals are more likely to prospectively generate and maintain expected targets in working memory, whereas low-AC individuals are more likely to rely on a retrospective semantic matching or integration processes. These findings support the distinction between proactive and reactive forms of cognitive control embodied in Braver, Gray, and Burgess's (2007) dual-mechanism model of cognitive control.

Null category-length and target-lure relatedness effects in episodic recognition: a constraint on item-noise interference models.

There are two main classes of model of interference effects in recognition memory: item-noise and context-noise. Item-noise models predict that a loss of memory discriminability will occur with an increase in the number of studied items from the same taxonomic category (category length, CL) and that forced-choice recognition performance will be higher when the target and lure are related rather than unrelated. Context-noise models, however, predict null effects for both of these manipulations. Although results from some recent experiments suggest that CL and target-lure relatedness have a trivial or no effect on memory discriminability when the related items from the same taxonomic category are "not back to back in the study list but are separated (spaced) by interleaving items from other semantic categories," these experiments have methodological limitations that were eliminated in the present experiment in which exemplars representing category lengths of 2, 8, or 14 were presented spaced apart within the same study list. Recognition was tested using a yes/no recognition test or a two-alternative forced-choice recognition test in which the target and lure were either related or unrelated. In yes/no recognition, d' decreased as CL increased, replicating prior research. However, when the slope of the z-ROC function is less than 1.0, as is typically so and was so in the present results, d' differences can arise due to criterion shifts and are not necessarily due to memory discriminability differences. When the more appropriate measure of memory discriminability, d a , was computed, CL had no effect in yes/no recognition, nor did it have an effect in forced-choice recognition, which also was not affected by target-lure relatedness. Thus, the present results are congruent with context-noise models and pose a challenge for item-noise models.

Fast trial pacing in a lexical decision task reveals a decay of automatic semantic activation.

We report an experiment showing that reducing attentional resources by presenting trials with a short, 400 ms intertrial interval (ITI) (a) did not affect semantic priming at a 160 ms prime-to-target stimulus-onset asynchrony (SOA), relative to a 2500 ms ITI, and (b) eliminated the priming that occurred at a 1200 ms SOA when the ITI was 2500 ms. However, the elimination of priming at the 1200 ms SOA occurred only when the relatedness proportion (RP, proportion of related primes and targets) was .25 and not when it was .75. We interpret these results as showing that attentional/strategic priming occurs with an RP as low as .25, but only when sufficient attentional resources are available. Equally important, this is the first direct evidence that automatic semantic activation decays within 1200 ms in the standard semantic-priming/lexical-decision paradigm when attentional resources are not being used to maintain the goal of sustaining prime activation. We further argue that the frequent occurrences of related primes and targets with a high RP serve as reminders to maintain that goal such that cognitive load does not reduce long-SOA priming when the RP is high.

Stimulus-driven attentional capture by a static discontinuity between perceptual groups.

After C. L. Folk, R. W. Remington, and J. C. Johnston (1992) proposed their contingent-orienting hypothesis, there has been an ongoing debate over whether purely stimulus-driven attentional capture can occur for visual events that are salient by virtue of a distinctive static property (as opposed to a dynamic property such as abrupt onset). The present study identified 3 methodological criteria for establishing that attentional capture is stimulus driven and not contingent on top-down attentional control settings. In 5 experiments, attentional capture occurred for a static discontinuity at the boundary between one group of homogeneous items (red Xs) abutted next to a group of homogeneous items that were featurally different (green Xs) within a single row. Experiment 1 intentionally violated one of the criteria for demonstrating stimulus-driven capture so as to establish that contingent attentional capture can occur for this novel type of static cue. In the remaining 4 experiments, even with all 3 criteria for stimulus-driven capture partially or completely satisfied, the static discontinuity captured attention. These attentional capture effects are the first to be obtained when all 3 criteria for establishing that they are purely stimulus driven have been satisfied.

Category length produces an inverted-U discriminability function in episodic recognition memory.

Four experiments used signal detection analyses to assess recognition memory for lists of words consisting of differing numbers of exemplars from different semantic categories. The results showed that recognition memory performance, measured by d(a), (a) increased as category length (CL, the number of study-list items selected from the same semantic category) increased from 1 to 8 but then decreased as CL further increased from 8 to 14, (b) was greater when 2 studied items from the same category occurred back to back, rather than being separated by 5-11 items from other categories, and (c) was greater for the first studied 2 exemplars than for the last studied 2 exemplars from blocked categories with CLs of 8 or 14. For all CLs, all z-coordinate receiver operating characteristic (z-ROC) functions were linear with slopes significantly less than 1.0, and none had a significant quadratic component. These results pose a challenge for three major classes of recognition memory models: item-noise, context-noise, and dual-process models.

Semantic and repetition priming effects for Deese/Roediger-McDermott (DRM) critical items and associates produced by DRM and unrelated study lists.

Two lexical decision experiments investigated priming for a critical item (CI, sleep) and its related yoked associate (YA, blanket) when one had been studied in a related Deese/Roediger-McDermott (DRM) list (Experiments 1 & 2) or a list of totally unrelated words (Experiment 2) and the other had been nonstudied. Semantic priming from the related DRM list occurred for nonstudied CIs (but not YAs) regardless of whether the CI received within-test priming from its studied related YA during the lexical decision task, though the effect in the absence of within-test priming averaged across experiments was only significant by a one-tailed test. Also averaged across experiments, repetition priming occurred for both studied CIs and YAs when they had been studied in related DRM lists whether or not there was also within-test priming from a nonstudied related yoked pairmate, though individual effects within the two experiments were sometimes not significant. Repetition priming boosted semantic priming from related DRM lists less for CIs than for YAs, similar to the finding that memory discriminability is poorer for CIs than for YAs in episodic recognition. This smaller repetition priming boost for CIs than for YAs occurred to the same degree when the CIs or YAs were studied in an unrelated list. When nonstudied CIs and YAs were totally unrelated to all previously studied items and separated by 3-7 items in the lexical decision task, aYA produced a small 16 msec priming effect for its CI, averaged across both experiments. The implications of these results for the activation account of the DRM false-memory effect and for single-prime versus multiple-prime long-term semantic priming effects are discussed. The online addendum may be downloaded from www.psychonomic.org/archive.

The English Lexicon Project.

The English Lexicon Project is a multiuniversity effort to provide a standardized behavioral and descriptive data set for 40,481 words and 40,481 nonwords. It is available via the Internet at elexicon.wustl.edu. Data from 816 participants across six universities were collected in a lexical decision task (approximately 3400 responses per participant), and data from 444 participants were collected in a speeded naming task (approximately 2500 responses per participant). The present paper describes the motivation for this project, the methods used to collect the data, and the search engine that affords access to the behavioral measures and descriptive lexical statistics for these stimuli.