A Comparison between Word and Pictorial Stimuli in Creating False Recognition - Assignment Example

A Comparison between Word and Pictorial Stimuli in Creating False Recognition Abstract Objective: The ability to recall information correctly from memory relies on how the information is encoded. It is hypothesized that the usage of pictorial stimuli compared to words will reduce false recognition. Methods: The ability to be able to recognize true/false objects which were either words or pictures was tested amongst 255 participants using computers. Results: Analysis of data showed that participants were more likely to answer “old” to target items, participants were more likely to falsely recognize CDs compared to UDs and participants had a lower rate of false recognition with pictures. Conclusion: The usage of pictorial stimuli compared to words reduced false recognition but still occurs even with the usage of pictorial stimuli. Key words: false recognition; human memory; word encoding; pictorial encoding Introduction An event called the false recognition of the human mind has been studied for many years. Basically, false recognition happens when people incorrectly claim that they have encountered an item or memory in the past when what actually happened was that the item was related to another item (Underwood 1965). Many people might think that events of false recognition may be mild and they can be taken for granted but a study by Roediger and McDermott (1995) has shown that false recognition may happen at very high levels and this may complicate a person’s life. The study by Roediger and McDermott (1995) involved exposing test subject to lists of semantic associates that come together on a lure word. For example, a standard recognition experiment is carried out where the subjects are exposed to a list of words known as targets during the learning phase. Subsequently during the recognition phase, they are exposed to a test list which not only contains the target words from the learning phase but also novel words, also known as distractors which were not given during previously. Then, the participants were told to mention whether they thought that the words presented in the recognition phase were “old” (target words from the learning list) or “new” (novel distractors). During the learning phase however, the words which were given to them were from a common theme, for example words such as “pillow” and “bed” have in common a similar theme and are associated with the word “sleep.” So, when the word “sleep” is given to the subject who is asked to write down words that came into their minds, they were likely to produce words like “bed.” Some novel distractors are replaced with high associated of the target words during the recognition phase of the false recognition experiment. These are called “critical distractors”, words that were not present in the learning list but are semantically related. In some conditions, false recognition rates exceeded 80% and follow-up studies which replicated the study within college students (Mather, Henkel and Johnson 1997) as well as the elderly (Norman and Schacter, 1997) have also confirmed these findings. Schacter, Norman and Koutstall (1998) have noted that one of the reasons why there is a high rate of false recognition would be the presentation of many strong associated may have accentuated common semantic features of the words which were studied rather than the perceptual details of the particular items. It was also found that false and true recognition had to rely on memory for semantic associations rather than on memory (Schacter et all, 1998). When information about the studied words is included or study conditions in which the subjects were more likely to encode perceptive information into the words, the rates of false recognition drops (Brainerd, Reyna and Kneer, 1995 and Norman and Schacter, 1997). From the neuropsychological perspective, it has been found that people with damage to the frontal lobes have a higher level of false recognition compared to control subjects of the same age (Curran., Schacter, Norman and Galluccia, 1997). How this actually increased the possibility of false recognition include information that damage to the frontal lobes actually caused inadequate encoding of specific item details (Parkin, Ward, Bindschaedler, Squires and Powell, 1999) and a defective retrieval monitoring process (Delbecq-Derouesne, Beauvois and Shallice, 1990). As pictures are generally better remembered than words as they contain more information, we predict that there would be less false recognition for pictures than words. The superiority of pictures in regards to memory testing has been showed by studies by Paivio (1971) and Weldon and Roediger (1987). By comparing subjects who studied pictures and words and then forming distinctive perceptual representations, the subjects were more likely to ask for a specific recollection of a test item before calling it “old.” Thus, it would mean theoretically that subjects would also make lesser false alarms to related lure words after studying lists of semantic associates presented with pictures compared to standard text (Koutstall and Schacter, in press). A basic experiment which could test this theory would be by manipulating the degree of structural similarity between the CD and the targets. As noted by the example given in the coursework, apples, organs and peaches are structurally very similar (spherical) compared to pears which are slightly less similar and bananas which are very dissimilar. We hypothesize that the usage of pictures will reduce false recognition. We would compare and contrast true and false recognition in which individuals would be presented with (1) words and (2) pictures. This would allow us to compare whether visual reinstatement of pictures or words would increase the accuracy of recollecting the memory, thus reducing false recognition. Method The participants of the experiment comprised of 255 students who enrolled on a first year psychology course at the University of Sussex, United Kingdom. The participants were randomly divided into two groups (pictures or words). However, data on the age range and gender ratio were not taken into consideration. Prior to this study, a web-based pilot study was done in which each of the critical distractors (CD) was rated as to how physically or structurally similar it was to the other items in its category. Based on these ratings, CDs were classified as either “Low Structural Similarity” or “High Structural Similarity.” A mixed design was used for this study. The independent variables were the stimulus modality (pictures and words), the item type with the levels Target, UD and CD as well as the time each item appeared on screen. Dependent variables included the proportion of items to which participants responded “old”, decision time, the confidence data as well as the structural similarity data. For this study, computers with an experimental software recorded the decisions made by the participants and also compiled the results. During the learning phase, nine lists were presented in three blocks of three lists and each list comprised of nine exemplars from a semantic category e.g. kitchen utensils, items of clothing, modes of transportation. Each item appeared on screen for 2000 msec during the learning phase with a 1000msec inter-trial interval. The order of the lists during the learning phase was rotated across all participants. During the recognition phase, nine lists were also constructed. Each list contained three targets (items which were on the study lists), four critical distractors (CDs) (items which were not presented but were also exemplars from one of the nine categories used in the learning phase) and three unrelated distractors (UDs) (novel items which were not related to any categories). Each item remained on screen until the participant responded either “old” or “new”, or 5000 msec had elapsed, after which the item was replaced with a prompt to respond “old” or “new”. “Old” would be represented by pressing the “o” key whereas “New” would be represented by pressing the “n” key on the computer keyboard. Two parallel sets of study lists and recognition tests were created, one using colour drawings of the objects measuring up to 9cm by 9cm, the other containing the written name of the object in black 32 pt Arial font. The experimental design was mixed with modalities (words or pictures) as a between subjects factor and item type (Target, UD, CD) as a within subjects factor. During the time where the participants responded by pressing the keys, they were also asked to rate their confidence level in their decision on the scale of 1-5 with 1 being “guess” and 5 being “completely sure”. For each participant, the following variables were calculated via Microsoft Excel: the proportion of old responses to Targets, UDs and CDs; the average confidence for responding old to targets and CDs; the average decision time for responding old to targets and CDs and the proportion of old responses to CDs that were either low or high in perceptual similarity to the items in the study phase. Individual data was collated into a group spreadsheet. The final sample was 126 participants in the word condition and 129 participants in the picture condition. Data analysis was conducted within the Microsoft Excel. Results The graph above shows the average proportion of “old” responses people made to the Targets (words/pictures that were shown in the learning phase); the Uncritical Distractors (UDs- novel words/pictures that were not related to the targets) and the Critical Distractors (CDs- word/pictures that were taken from the same categories as the targets but were not shown during the learning phase). It is important to note that excessive decision times (>10000 msec) were removed prior to the analysis of the data. This was because we wanted a spontaneous and standardized decision. Longer decision times may start to involve more complex cognition processes, something which this experiment was not meant to analyze. By comparing the height of the first two columns (Targets) with the remaining four columns (UD and CD), we can see that they are much higher which shows that participants were more likely to answer “old” to the item which was a target rather than items that were not targets. By comparing the first column itself, the responses to pictures (0.90) were better words (0.83), which confirmed the hypothesis that participants were more likely to correctly recognize pictures. By comparing the height of the UDs (0.15/0.05) to the CDs (0.24/0.16), we can see that participants were more likely to false recognize CDs compared to UDs. This also proved that critical lure words managed to trick the human memory into falsely recognizing those words and even pictures. Within the CDs itself, we can see that participants had a lower rate of false recognition with pictures (0.16) compared to words (0.24). When UDs were used, the rate of false recognition amongst participants were even lower, and as expected, the rate of false recognition for pictures (0.05) was lower than that for words (0.15) One of the other dependent variables in the experiment was the confidence data in which participants responded by choosing on a scale of 1-5 how confident they were when making a decision during the recognition phase. Comparing the height of the 2 columns on the left which are the “Hits” (4.5/4.59), the confidence level of the participants were higher compared to when CDs (3.33/3.43) were used. This showed that the CDs might have destabilized the participant’s confidence by confusing the cognition process. In real life situations, we too would hesitate and be less confident when we are faced with situations of uncertainty. By comparing the confidence level between the usage of words versus pictures, pictures offered the participants a higher level of confidence (4.59 and 3.43) versus (4.5 and 3.33) respectively. Discussion The main results of the study were that participants were more likely to answer “old” to target items, participants were more likely to falsely recognize CDs compared to UDs and participants had a lower rate of false recognition with pictures. This confirmed the hypothesis as well as information obtained from previous studies. As mentioned by Mather, Henkel and Johnson (1997), people are more likely to say “old” to critical distractors rather than to say “old” to standard novel distractors and pictures are more likely to be better and correctly remembered than words (Paivio,1971, Weldon and Roediger, 1987). Studying pictures managed to allow people to enhance their ability to differentiate between old and new items and this was translated into being able to remember the studied items and prevented people from falsely remembering lure items. The inference gathered from this study can be used to conceptualize item-specific, similar or generalized information. As noted by Brainerd, Reyna and Kneer (1995), item-specific depictions can assist and encourage correct recognition. As words lacked specific information, something which pictures provide, people would be able to encode information better. But when words are made the basis of recognition, people would be more likely to have a liberal recognition standard. However, it is important to note that although the study has showed that the usage of pictorial stimuli decreases false recognition, there still were levels of false recognition related to false lures. There differences may be attributed to the theoretical basis that pictorial memory encoding decreases the level of false recognition by suggesting to the individual’s mind to reject new words whether it is related or unrelated because words lack the package of information and features which pictures come with. In regards to using both words and pictures, interestingly, there has been a current study which showed that in older adults, there was false recognition when labels were presented with pictures but not when labels were not presented with pictures (Koustall, Reddy, Jackson, Prince, Cendan and Schacter, 2003). It would be interesting for future work to find out there exist methods of pictorial encoding or other modalities of encoding which can eliminate or minimize to a further degree false recognition. Information derived from such studies would be able to influence the way information is sent or taught to different age groups. One of the limitations of the study was that the data was not classified in regards to gender and age group. As noted by Koustall et al (2003), differences occur when comparing younger and older adults. The assumption taken from this study was that all the participants were young adults. From the aspect of gender and false recognition, although Bauste and Ferrero (2005) have shown that there were no differences in regards to gender and false recognition, it would be interesting to reproduce the study. Another limitation would be the population which was studied, all whom were university students. It is expected that these students have attained a certain degree of knowledge, thus, the levels of false recognition may be lower as influenced by education. Future studies should include a larger and more varied sample. Having confirmed that the usage of pictures will reduce false recognition, the need for continuous theoretical and practical development of human memory is clear. There are still many areas of cognition which overlap with memory and as considerations are given to define them, development will lead to better learning, recognition and memory processes. References Bauste, G & Ferraro, F.R. (2005) Gender differences in false memory production. Current Psychology. Springer New York. Volume 23: 3, 238-244 Brainerd, C. J., Reyna, V. F., & Kneer, R. (1995). False-recognition reversal: When similarity is distinctive. Journal of Memory and Language, 34, 157-185. Curran, T., Schacter, D.L., Norman, K.A & Galluccia, L. (1997). False recognition after a right frontal lobe infarction: memory for general and specific information. Neuropsychologia 35, 1035-1049 Delbecq-Derouesne, J., Beauvois, M.F & Shallice, T. (1990). Preserved recall versus impaired recognition. Brain. 113, 1045-1075 Koustaal, W., Reddy, C., Jackson, E. M., Prince, S., Cendan, D. L., & Schacter, D. L. (2003). 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