Browsing by Author "Cleary, Anne, advisor"
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Item Open Access Evolution, memory processes, and the survival processing benefit to memory: an examination of the unpredictability hypothesis(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2015) Claxton, Alexander, author; Cleary, Anne, advisor; DeLosh, Ed, committee member; Robinson, Dan, committee memberNairne, Thompson, and Pandeirada (2007) found an advantage in recall for items that were earlier rated for their survival utility in a hypothetical grasslands scenario. This pattern has repeatedly been shown, typically when comparing survival utility ratings given using a grassland scenario to those given using a modern city scenario. This advantage has been attributed to a grassland setting being similar to the critical ancestral environment of early humans. However, recent work has found this effect in situations entirely unrelated to ancestral environments (e.g., outer space), suggesting that the grasslands scenario is not critical to the effect. Moreover, recent anthropological evidence suggests that early humans lived in a time of high climate variability that, in turn, led to a chronically unpredictable environment during the time period most critical to the evolution of modern humans. Thus, rather than having adapted to one specific environment (i.e., grasslands), early humans may have adapted to environmental unpredictability itself. The proposed series of experiments will investigate the hypothesis that uncertainty may be a modifying factor in the survival processing advantage in memory. In the first experiment, participants were given either a randomized or a blocked series of four rating tasks followed by a subsequent test of recall. The second experiment explored the effect of a task relevant background image that also functioned as a means of isolating trials (90% vs 10%) on recall. The third experiment examined the effect of changing biome images (45% vs 45% vs 10%) on recall.Item Open Access Examining the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon with scalar judgments(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2023) Claxton, Alexander B., author; Cleary, Anne, advisor; Davalos, Deanna, committee member; Rhodes, Matthew, committee member; Davies, Patricia, committee memberThe Tip-of-the-Tongue (TOT) state, which is the feeling of being on the verge of retrieving a word that is as of yet unretrieved, occupies a space between a lack of recall and successful recall. Recent work has found that when someone experiences a TOT state they are more likely to attribute fluent characteristics to the sought after item. The present study sought to explore whether this TOT heuristic was driven by attribution of fluency and what, if any, relationship exists between the TOT heuristic and the subjective intensity of a given TOT state. Initial experiments were able to identify the TOT heuristic with both a binary and scalar TOT rating, but did not find any impact of objective fluency on the TOT heuristic. Follow-up experiments expanded on these findings by utilizing both a scalar (1 to 10 intensity rating) and binary (yes or no) TOT rating. A positive relationship between TOT magnitude ratings and the TOT heuristic was identified. This relationship was significant for both ratings of whether an item had been previously presented and font color ratings.Item Open Access Familiarity-detection from different facial feature-types: is the whole greater than the sum of its parts?(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2023) Carlaw, Brooke N., author; Cleary, Anne, advisor; Rhodes, Matthew, committee member; Thomas, Michael, committee member; Blanchard, Nathaniel, committee memberPrior research indicates that perceived familiarity with a cue during cued recall failure can be systematically increased based on the amount of feature overlap between that cue and studied items in memory (Huebert et al., 2022; McNeely-White et al., 2021, Ryals & Cleary, 2012). However, these studies used word or musical stimuli. Faces represent a special class of stimuli, as evidence suggests that unlike other types of stimuli (such as word or musical stimuli), faces may be primarily processed in a holistic fashion. A recent study demonstrated that even when a person's identity was prevented by the presence of a facial occlusion like a surgical mask or sunglasses, familiarity-detection with the occluded face could still occur, suggesting that holistic processing was not a requirement for facial familiarity-detection (Carlaw et al., 2022). However, some researchers have suggested that although faces can be decomposed into component parts when partially occluded, when faces are presented unoccluded in their entirety, the holistic face processing system may then be obligatory (Manley et al., 2019). The present study suggests that this is not the case. Isolating specific feature types at encoding through partial occlusion of faces at study (via a surgical mask or sunglasses), then embedding those familiarized feature sets in otherwise novel whole faces at test, systematically and combinedly increased the perceived familiarity of the otherwise novel whole faces. These results suggest that even whole faces are processed as sets of component parts.Item Open Access Suppression of free associations in the think/no-think paradigm(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2014) Klein, Kimberly, author; Cleary, Anne, advisor; Rhodes, Matt, committee member; Henry, Kim, committee member; Robinson, Dan, committee memberEmpirical support for forgetting due to memory suppression, the act of intentionally pushing material out of one's mind, has been found using the think/no-think (TNT) paradigm. However, there is little consistency in results across experiments using this paradigm, with no known systematic difference that can predict whether a given experiment will be successful or not. Prior published findings and pilot data suggest that one mediating factor may be speed of response, with fast responders demonstrating suppression while slow responders do not. In order to directly investigate this hypothesis, the present with-in subjects experiment manipulated time allowed for subjects to respond in a free-association variation of the standard TNT paradigm. Results did not show any differences based on speed of response, or on other qualitative information provided by participants. It remains unclear whether there is a particular factor that can predict the success of the TNT paradigm.Item Open Access The experience of novelty: another dimension to subjective memory experience?(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2014) Staley, Shelly, author; Cleary, Anne, advisor; Seger, Carol, committee member; Hoke, Kim, committee memberSubjective experiences of memory (e.g., feelings of familiarity) have been a topic of much research. Though novelty might be considered a manifestation of memory (insofar as some form of memory for the past is required in order for novelty recognition or detection to occur), subjective experiences of novelty have largely been ignored in the current memory literature. The present study used a rating scale to measure the subjective feeling of novelty. One goal was to investigate potential mechanisms of feelings of novelty. Another was to determine how feelings of novelty relate to feelings of familiarity; for example, many models assume that novelty is simply the inverse of familiarity. Two experiments reported here examined if this presumed relationship between familiarity and novelty is an accurate assumption. In one experiment, subjects viewed words in a study list and then were tested on cues that potentially shared orthographic features with the study words while duration of cue-prime exposure and cue-match-priming effects were observed. In another, subjects were tested after having repeated the test cues aloud either once or 30 times. Both experiments compared a familiarity rating scale with a novelty rating scale. No effects of duration of exposure (either through priming in Experiments 1 and 2 or repetitions in Experiment 3) were observed, helping to rule out several potential mechanisms of feelings of novelty. Differences in how familiarity ratings and novelty ratings responded to the experimental manipulations were found in both experiments, suggesting that the sense of novelty is not simply the inverse of familiarity.