PubMed Health⌕ Search

Biomedical subjects

R L Widner

Publications and source records attributed to R L Widner.

5 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2000

Hypermnesia: age-related differences between young and older adults.

Hypermnesia is a net improvement in memory performance that occurs across tests in a multitest paradigm with only one study session. Our goal was to identify possible age-related differences in hypermnesic recall. We observed hypermnesia for young adults using verbal (Experiment 1) as well as pictorial (Experiment 2) material, but no hypermnesia for older adults in either experiment. We found no age-related difference in reminiscence (Experiments 1 and 2), though there was a substantial difference in intertest forgetting (Experiments 1 and 2). Older, relative to young, adults produced more forgetting, most of which occurred between Tests 1 and 2 (Experiments 1 and 2). Furthermore, older, relative to young, adults produced more intrusions. We failed to identify a relationship between intrusions and intertest forgetting. We suggest that the age-related difference in intertest forgetting may be due to less efficient reinstatement of cues at test by older adults. The present findings reveal that intertest forgetting plays a critical role in hypermnesic recall, particularly for older adults.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1999

Hypermnesia: the role of multiple retrieval cues.

We demonstrate that encoding multiple cues enhances hypermnesia. College students were presented with 36 (Experiment 1) or 60 (Experiments 2 and 3) sets of words and were asked to encode the sets under single- or multiple-cue conditions. In the single-cue conditions, each set consisted of a cue and a target. In the multiple-cue conditions, each set consisted of three cues and a target. Following the presentation of the word sets, the participants received either three cued recall tests (Experiments 1 and 2) or three free recall tests (Experiment 3). With this manipulation, we observed greater hypermnesia in the multiple-cue conditions than in the single-cue conditions. Furthermore, the greater hypermnesic recall resulted from increased reminiscence rather than reduced intertest forgetting. The present findings support the hypothesis that the availability of multiple retrieval cues plays an important role in hypermnesia.

Adult↗
PubMed1996

Feeling-of-knowing judgments from the subject's perspective.

We examined the manner in which subjects interpret experimenter-provided feeling-of-knowing (FOK) definitions. The original FOK definition proposed by Hart (1965) is a composite of two criteria: (1) A feeling that the sought-after information is known and (2) a feeling that the sought-after information can be correctly identified on a later criterion test. We hypothesized that subjects may use one or both of these criteria in reporting FOK states. We found that Goodman-Kruskal gamma correlations (Goodman & Kruskal, 1954) were substantially large when subjects attended to the predictive aspect of FOK definitions relative to subjects who assessed what they believed they knew. We argue that FOKs are more accurate when task-relevant information is incorporated into the judgment. Finally, these data weaken a cue-familiarity interpretation of the FOK phenomenon.

Adult↗
PubMed1995

Associative spread as a mediating variable in the generation effect.

Memory retention is greater for information that is subject-produced rather than experimenter-provided; this enhancement has been labelled the generation effect. One explanation of this phenomenon, the Lexical Activation Hypothesis, assumes that lexical representation is a necessary condition for emergence of the effect. A corollary to this hypothesis, the Lexical Spread Hypothesis (Nairne, Pusen, & Widner, 1985), emphasises associative spread as a mediating variable. This single-factor explanation has relied for its support exclusively on recognition performance. In the present study, four experiments examined the viability of this hypothesis, under recognition and free-recall conditions. A two-factor explanation is proposed to account for the findings of the present study. It appears that associative spread does not mediate the generation effect, when a recognition test is administered, but may mediate free-recall performance, where retrieval networks play a more significant role in memory performance. An alternative explanation, based on the benefits to memory retention obtained from disruptions of familiar orthographic patterns, is proposed to account for the recognition findings.

Adolescent↗