DESIGNING A MEMORY EXPERIMENT

• Manipulation versus control• Whose memory will we study?

– Effects of age, gender, disorders, expertise

• What state are they in?– Arousal, mood, motivation

• What is the object of memory?– Verbal or nonverbal material– Simple or complex structure– Learned in the lab or elsewhere

• What are the conditions of presentation?– Visual, auditory or other modality– Number of presentations– Sequence of presentations– Time between presentations– Context of presentations

• What will they do with the material?– Intentional or incidental instructions– Special encoding tasks

• Who gets what conditions?– Between-group or within-subject

• How long is the retention interval?– Immediate (STM, seconds to tens of sec)– Recent (LTM, minutes to hours)– Remote (LTM, months to decades)

• What is the memory task?– Explicit tests of memory

• Free or cued recall• Recognition

– Implicit tests of memory• Repetition priming, fragment completion

• What attribute(s) do we test?– Identity, frequency, position, sequencing

of items

MEASURING MEMORY:THE DEPENDENT VARIABLES

• Performance measures– Accuracy, speed of response

• Potential for speed-accuracy trade-offs

Attention Condition

FullDivided

RT(ms) 620 540 errors (%) 4 6

– Types of errors• omission, commission, distortions in recall

• Hits and false alarms in recognition

Proportion “old” wordsHigh Low

Hits .80 .40False Alarms .30 .05

d’ 1.37 1.39

• Subjective judgments– Confidence

• Is confidence correlated with accuracy?– Qualitative judgments (remember-know)

• Physiological markers– Measures of CNS: Blood flow

• Positron emission tomography (PET)• Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI, fMRI)

– Measures of CNS: electromagnetic activity

• Electroencephalography (EEG, ERP)• Magentoencephaolography (MEG)• Optical imaging (EROS)

– Measures of ANS activity• Galvanic skin responses (GSR)• Muscular activity (EMG)• Heart, respiration rate

Explicit versus Implicit Memory for Spoken Words (Jacoby 83)

Study task:

Read, no context XXX – COLD NCRead, context hot - COLD CGenerate word hot - XXX G

NC C GRecognitionProb (hit) .56 .71 .78

PerceptualIdentificationPriming .23 .14 .07