Biomedical subjects

Murray Singer

Publications and source records attributed to Murray Singer.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2006

Effect of delay on recognition decisions: evidence for a criterion shift.

Recent evidence indicates that in intermixed recognition testing of different stimulus classes, people can apply different decision criteria (a criterion shift) to stimulus classes distinguished by the study-test delay (Singer, Gagnon, & Richards, 2002), but not by a conspicuous strength manipulation (Stretch & Wixted, 1998b). In an attempt to reconcile these differences, we applied Singer et al.'s text retrieval method to word recognition. People first studied blocked items from each of five categories. After a delay, five new category lists were presented. After each one, the participants recognized intermixed targets and distractors from the current category and one of the earlier ones. At delays of up to 40 min, the answering criteria for immediate and delayed categories were indistinguishable. At delays of 2 days, in contrast, however, both yes-no and confidence-rating data indicated that more lenient criteria were applied to delayed than to immediate test items. This suggests that people can use the delay between study and test to flexibly adjust the decision criteria of word recognition.

Adolescent↗

PubMed2004

Retrieving text inferences: controlled and automatic influences.

Bridging inferences contribute to text coherence by identifying the connections among ideas, whereas elaborative inferences simply specify sensible extrapolations from text. Bridging inferences have been indistinguishable from explicit text ideas on numerous measures, suggesting similar longterm memory (LTM) representations for the two, whereas elaborative inferences are inferior. To evaluate the LTM representations of text ideas, we used the extended process-dissociation procedure (Buchner, Erdfelder, & Vaterrodt-Plunnecke, 1995; Jacoby, 1991) to partition the controlled, recollective contributions to text retrieval from the automatic, familiarity-based contributions. The automatic contribution to the recognition of implied concepts was consistently negligible, an outcome consistent with the absence of perceptual processing of those concepts during the original reading. In addition, the controlled basis of recognition was consistently higher for explicit than for implicit concepts, which suggests a more robust conceptual representation for explicit text ideas (Yonelinas, 2002). These results were interpreted to reflect the asymmetric representation of explicit ideas and inferences (elaborative and even bridging inferences) in the surface, propositional textbase, and situational levels of text representation.

Automatism↗

PubMed2002

Strategies of text retrieval: a criterion shift account.

This study scrutinized people's ability to apply different strategies to randomly intermixed immediate and delayed test items. In three experiments, participants first read one set of stories. Later, they read more stories, and after each one, answered intermixed questions about that story and one of the earlier ones. The experiments cumulatively manipulated amount of delay, test probe plausibility, probe relation (explicit, paraphrase, inference), and testing procedure (mixed versus uniform delay). Using signal detection response criterion as the index of strategy, we contrasted the single criterion hypothesis, according to which one text retrieval criterion is applied to all test items, and a multiple-criterion hypothesis. The results consistently favoured the multiple-criterion hypothesis. The results also indicated that the presence of immediate and delayed probes mutually influence one another: Less extreme signal detection criteria were adopted under mixed than uniform testing. It was concluded that text retrieval strategy is continually calibrated with reference to the quality of the test probes.

Adult↗