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Context effects on reproduced magnitudes from short-term and long-term memory
Douglas H Wedell1, William M Hayes2, Jongwan Kim3
1Department of Psychology, University of South Carolina, 1512 Pendleton Street, Columbia, SC, 29208, USA. wedell@mailbox.sc.edu.
Attention, Perception & Psychophysics
|January 4, 2020
Summary
Context significantly impacts memory recall of perceptual magnitudes. Both short-term and long-term memory tasks showed context effects, influencing square size reproduction based on distribution, anchors, and prior stimuli.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Psychology
- Perceptual Science
- Memory Studies
Background:
- Perceptual magnitude reproduction is known to be influenced by context.
- Understanding these contextual dependencies is crucial for memory research.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate how various contextual factors influence the reproduction of perceptual stimuli from short-term and long-term memory.
- To examine the roles of distributional mean, stimulus ranks, anchor values, and recent trial history.
Main Methods:
- Two experiments were conducted involving reproduction tasks of square sizes.
- Experiment 1 focused on short-term memory reproduction, analyzing effects of distributional contrast and assimilation.
- Experiment 2 compared short-term memory with a long-term memory task using label cues.
Main Results:
- Short-term memory reproduction showed assimilation effects influenced by running mean, anchors, and prior stimuli.
- Long-term memory reproduction exhibited contrast effects, with larger sizes reproduced from positively skewed distributions.
- Modified category adjustment and range-frequency models explained the observed biases.
Conclusions:
- Contextual factors critically affect perceptual magnitude estimation and reproduction.
- Memory retrieval processes mediate the impact of context in both short-term and long-term memory.
- Existing models can be adapted to incorporate these context-dependent memory effects.
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