DESIGNING A MEMORY EXPERIMENT

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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

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• 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

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MEASURING MEMORYTHE DEPENDENT VARIABLES

• Performance measures
• Accuracy, speed of response
• Potential for speed-accuracy trade-offs Attenti
  on Condition Full Divided
• RT(ms) 620 540 errors () 4 6
• Types of errors
• omission, commission, distortions in recall
• Hits and false alarms in recognition Proportion
  old words High Low Hits .80
  .40False Alarms .30 .05
• d 1.37 1.39

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• 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

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Explicit versus Implicit Memory for Spoken Words
(Jacoby 83)
Study task Read, no context XXX COLD
NC Read, context hot - COLD C Generate
word hot - XXX G NC C G Recognition
Prob (hit) .56 .71 .78 Perceptual Identificati
on Priming .23 .14 .07