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Biomedical subjects

T O Nelson

Publications and source records attributed to T O Nelson.

29 records · Page 2Linked to original sources
PubMed1986

Effects of alcohol intoxication on metamemory and on retrieval from long-term memory.

In a balanced-placebo design, people expected either an alcohol drink or placebo drink and consumed either alcohol (1 ml/kg) or placebo. Shortly thereafter, each person attempted to recall the answers to general-information questions (e.g., "What is the capital of Chile?"), made confidence judgments about the accuracy of recall, made feeling-of-knowing judgments on all nonrecalled items, and received a recognition test. Unanticipated outcomes included: Alcohol intoxication significantly hindered recall from long-term memory, contrary to previous conclusions that alcohol does not affect retrieval; people's expectancy of alcohol had no significant effect on memory or metamemory performance, contrary to its established effects on other kinds of performance; and alcohol intoxication produced no significant overconfidence in judgments about recall or in feeling-of-knowing judgments, contrary to the overconfidence produced in other kinds of judgments such as an intoxicated person's assessment of his driving ability. This last outcome implies that alcohol intoxication does not produce a general lowering of the threshold for confidence but rather has effects that are situation specific.

Adult↗
PubMed1986

A comparison of three predictors of an individual's memory performance: the individual's feeling of knowing versus the normative feeling of knowing versus base-rate item difficulty.

Distinctions are drawn between different predictors of an individual's memory performance, with emphasis on the notion of privileged access to idiosyncratic knowledge. Research is reported in which undergraduates attempted to recall the answers to general-information questions, then made feeling-of-knowing judgments on nonrecalled items, and subsequently had a criterion test (relearning, perceptual identification, or one of two versions of recognition). For predicting an individual's criterion performance, the individual's own feeling-of-knowing predictions were intermediate between two kinds of normative predictions: The individual's feeling-of-knowing predictions were more accurate than predictions derived from normative feeling-of-knowing ratings but were less accurate than predictions derived from base-rate item difficulty (normative probabilities of correct recall). Subsidiary analyses showed that factors other than unreliability are responsible for the partial inaccuracy of the individual's feeling of knowing. Ramifications are discussed for possible ways to improve the accuracy of an individual's feeling-of-knowing predictions.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1985

Ebbinghaus's contribution to the measurement of retention: savings during relearning.

The focus here is on Ebbinghaus's sole measure of retention: savings during relearning. The article is divided into four sections: (a) the historical perspective surrounding Ebbinghaus's use of savings and relearning (including a fundamental difference between Ebbinghaus's conception of memory and that of his contemporaries such as William James), (b) potential problems with savings as a measure of retention, (c) recent findings based on savings and relearning, and (d) applications of savings and relearning.

Humans↗
PubMed1984

Accuracy of feeling-of-knowing judgments for predicting perceptual identification and relearning.

The feeding of knowing refers to predictions about subsequent memory performance on previously nonrecalled items. The most frequently investigated type of subsequent performance has been recognition. The present research explored predictive accuracy with two new feeling-of-knowing criterion tests (in addition to recognition): relearning and perceptual identification. In two experiments, people attempted to recall the answers to general-information questions such as, "What is the capital of Australia?", then made feeling-of-knowing predictions for all nonrecalled answers, and finally had a criterion test to assess the accuracy of the feeling-of-knowing predictions. Experiment 1 demonstrated that perceptual identification can be employed successfully as a criterion test for the feeling of knowing. This opens a new way for metamemory research via perception. Moreover, the feeling-of-knowing accuracy for predicting perceptual identification was not significantly correlated with the feeling-of-knowing accuracy for predicting recognition, in accord with the idea that these two tests assess memory differently. Experiment 2 demonstrated that relearning performance can also be predicted by feeling-of-knowing judgments. Both experiments showed that there is a positive relationship between the feeling of knowing and the amount of time elapsing before a memory search is terminated during recall. Further analyses showed that this relationship is substantial for nonrecalled items for which the person did not guess an answer (omission errors), but the relationship is null or negative for nonrecalled items that the person guessed incorrectly (commission errors). Several theoretical mechanisms that may underlie the feeling of knowing are proposed.

Humans↗
PubMed1982

Colors in imagery and memory performance.

The present research investigated the effects of imaging in different colors on memory performance. Four groups of subjects were told to form an interactive image in a specific color for each of 30 word pairs. A fifth group was instructed to form an interactive image but received no color instruction, and a sixth group was told to form a non-interactive image and received no color instruction. Analysis showed the five interactive groups differed significantly from the non-interactive group but there were no reliable differences among the different color conditions. These results contradict a prediction derived from Switras' 1977 study of color in imagery.

Color Perception↗
PubMed1980

Immediate memory for spatial location.

Performance characteristics in a spatial-location task were examined nonmetrically. In Experiment 1, subjects reproduced the location of a dot either from immediate memory or while actually looking at the dot. Independent analyses of accuracy and the direction of incorrect reproductions yielded evidence for a fast-acting locational-memory process that may be distinct both from locational-perception processes and from response-bias processes. In Experiment 2, three different borders were used to vary the distance between the dot location and the border. Locational-memory accuracy increased as this distance decreased. Incorrect reproductions tended to occur toward rather than away from the border, and the robustness of this effect decreased for dot locations nearer to the border. Due to our nonmetric approach, the above conclusions are generalizable to all psychological conceptions whose spatial distances are monotonically related to the external spatial distances investigated here. A weighted-distortion theory of memory for spatial location is proposed to account for these and other findings.

Distance Perception↗