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Lexical Decision Task for Studying Written Word Recognition in Adults with and without Dementia or Mild Cognitive Impairment
Published on: June 25, 2019
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Integrating word-form representations with global similarity computation in recognition memory.
1University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia. adamosth@gmail.com.
Psychonomic Bulletin & Review
|November 16, 2023
Summary
This study integrates word perception with memory models, finding that both visual word form and meaning influence recognition errors. Orthographic and semantic factors are equally important in long-term memory retrieval.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Psychology
- Computational Neuroscience
- Psycholinguistics
Background:
- Recognition memory retrieval often relies on global similarity computations.
- Previous models overlooked perceptual word representations, despite observed false recognition for perceptually similar words.
Purpose of the Study:
- To integrate orthographic representations from reading literature into global similarity models of recognition memory.
- To investigate the relative contributions of orthographic and semantic information in memory retrieval and false recognition.
Main Methods:
- Employed absolute (slot codes, overlap) and relative (bigrams) letter position models.
- Utilized the linear ballistic accumulator (LBA) model to link representations with response data and reaction times (RTs).
- Incorporated word2vec semantic representations to compare with orthographic models.
Main Results:
- Relative position models better explained recognition data across three of four datasets.
- Parameter estimates indicated initial letters significantly influence word processing.
- Orthographic and semantic representations were found to be nearly equally important for inter-item similarity and false recognition.
Conclusions:
- Orthographic similarity plays a crucial role in recognition memory, challenging theories prioritizing semantic representations.
- While accounting for false alarm variability, the model requires further development to capture hit rate variability, suggesting a need for extended representations.
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