Effects of Simultaneous Stimulus Presentation and Attention Switching on Memory Conjunction Errors
✍ Scribed by Mark Tippens Reinitz; Sharon L. Hannigan
- Publisher
- Elsevier Science
- Year
- 2001
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 279 KB
- Volume
- 44
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0749-596X
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
The experiments tested whether false alarms to conjunction stimuli (i.e., stimuli constructed by combining parts of separately studied items) in a recognition test decrease as the relative distance on the study list between the parent items increases. Experiment 1 subjects studied a series of face pairs; within-pair faces were presented simultaneously, with one just above the other. There was a strong proximity effect for conjunction stimuli on the subsequent recognition test, with the most false alarms occurring for within-pair conjunction faces. In Experiment 2 the faces within each pair were presented sequentially rather than simultaneously. There was no evidence whatsoever for proximity effects. Experiment 3 utilized a single design in which some subjects received sequential presentations and others received simultaneous presentations of within-pair faces, and again it was shown that proximity effects occur only for simultaneously presented faces. Finally, Experiment 4 showed that when withinpair faces were presented one at a time and alternated back and forth strong proximity effects emerged. The results demonstrate that when attention is switched back and forth between faces, those facial features are especially susceptible to miscombination on subsequent memory tests.