Biomedical subjects

Jason C K Chan

Publications and source records attributed to Jason C K Chan.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2006

Retrieval-induced facilitation: initially nontested material can benefit from prior testing of related material.

Classroom exams can assess students' knowledge of only a subset of the material taught in a course. What are the implications of this approach for long-term retention? Three experiments (N = 210) examined how taking an initial test affects later memory for prose materials not initially tested. Experiment 1 shows that testing enhanced recall 24 hr later for the initially nontested material. This facilitation was not seen for participants given additional study opportunities without initial testing. Experiment 2 extends this facilitative effect to a within-subjects design. Experiment 3 demonstrates that this facilitation can be modulated by conscious strategies. These results have implications for educational practice and the theoretical developments of the testing effect, associative memory, and retrieval inhibition.

Adult↗

PubMed2006

Effects of repetition on memory for pragmatic inferences.

Social interaction requires active inferential processing on the part of the listener. Such inferences can affect memory. For example, after hearing the karate champion hit the cinder block, one might erroneously recollect having heard the verb broke (Brewer, 1977)--a reasonable inference, but one not logically necessitated. The mechanisms behind this type of erroneous recollection have not been much explored. Experiments in the present article assessed the influence of repetition, response deadline, and age (cf. Jacoby, 1999), in an effort to demonstrate the dual contributions of familiarity and recollection underlying this phenomenon. For older adults, repetition at encoding increased the later likelihood of erroneously recognizing pragmatic inferences. For younger adults, repetition exerted the opposite effect. Both age groups, however, benefited from a second study-test trial. Experiment 2 demonstrated a similar interaction on a cued recall test for younger adults, whereby repetition exerted different influences as a function of time permitted during retrieval. Implications for theories of memory and discourse processing are considered.

Adolescent↗

PubMed2005

The importance of material-processing interactions in inducing false memories.

Deep encoding, relative to shallow encoding, has been shown to increase the probability of false memories in the Deese/Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm (Thapar & McDermott, 2001; Toglia, Neuschatz, & Goodwin, 1999). In two experiments, we showed important limitations on the generalizability of this phenomenon; these limitations are clearly predicted by existing theories regarding the mechanisms underlying such false memories (e.g., Roediger, Watson, McDermott, & Gallo, 2001). Specifically, asking subjects to attend to phonological relations among lists of phonologically associated words (e.g., weep, steep, etc.) increased the likelihood of false recall (Experiment 1) and false recognition (Experiment 2) of a related, nonpresented associate (e.g., sleep), relative to a condition in which subjects attended to meaningful relations among the words. These findings occurred along with a replication of prior findings (i.e., a semantic encoding task, relative to a phonological encoding task, enhanced the likelihood of false memory arising from a list of semantically associated words), and they place important constraints on theoretical explanations of false memory.

Humans↗

PubMed2003

Modulation of word-reading processes in task switching.

The authors examined modulation of the simple act of word naming induced by the conflict arising when that task competes with color naming in a task-switching paradigm. Subjects alternated between naming a word printed in black and naming the color of a stimulus in 2 conditions. In the incongruent condition, the colored stimulus was an irrelevant word generating conflict, and in the neutral condition, color was carried by a row of asterisks. Subjects took substantially longer to name a word printed in black in the incongruent condition, implying a form of suppression. This modulation of the word-naming response was adaptive in that it led to more efficient color naming. The modulation effect was replicated using phoneme detection instead of word naming but not with lexical decision or visual comparison, implicating a phonological encoding process.

Adult↗