Search

In free recall, there is a tendency to generate a word that either follows or precedes the just recalled word in the study list, which is known as the contiguity effect. The main aim of this project is to understand the mechanisms behind the contiguity effect. This effect has been explained by two main accounts in the literature: causal models and non-causal models. Causal models claim that the contiguity effect occurs due to the utilization of the just recalled item as a cue to recall the next item; whereas according to non-causal models, items are not used as cues, but instead the similarity between the mental state during the study and test phases results in the contiguity effect. To differentiate between these two claims, probed recall task can be used. In a probed recall task, participants are presented with word lists and in the test phase, they are given a random word from a random list. First, they are asked "Did you see this word" with a confidence interval. Then, they are asked to write another word from the list they saw this word from. When Kılıç and her colleagues used probed recall task (2013), they observed a contiguity effect, which supports the causal models. However, they could not observe the forward-asymmetry which is usually observed in a contiguity effect. When participants have low performance, asymmetry can vanish (Spillers & Unsworth, 2011). Therefore, I aim to facilitate and optimize the probed recall task to improve the performance to test this claim. In experiment 1, I will try to replicate the original article but with a few changes that result in an increase in performance. Those changes are: increasing item strength, reducing the number of lists, reducing the word number, reducing the time of the distractor task, and only having one block. In experiment 2, in addition to all this, I will strengthen the list context by adding a scene picture between each list. Participants will see 5 word lists and each list will include 15 words in each experiment. Between lists, there will be a distractor task (arithmetic calculations) and a waiting period. Then, in the test phase, there will be 3 words randomly selected from each list and 5 new words (20 words in total). First, there will be a recognition part with a CI and then, they will be asked to recall a word from a list that they have seen this probe word in.

Word frequency and output interference effects are two of the effects which are observed in recognition memory. These two effects are explained differently in item and context noise models. The aim of the current project is to examine the effects together to create a data set for the current recognition memory models.