A short-term perceptual priming account of spacing effects in explicit cued-memory tasks for unfamiliar stimuli

Memory for repeated items improves when presentations are spaced during study. This effect is found in explicit memory tasks using different types of material, different experimental paradigms, and in different subject populations. Two experiments are described where the spacing effect was assessed...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inEuropean journal of cognitive psychology Vol. 16; no. 3; pp. 387 - 402
Main Authors Mammarella, Nicola, Avons, S. E., Russo, Riccardo
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Psychology Press Ltd 01.05.2004
Subjects
Attention
Encoding
Memory
Nonsense Words
Perception
Priming
Printed Materials
Semantic Processing
Word Recognition
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Summary:Memory for repeated items improves when presentations are spaced during study. This effect is found in explicit memory tasks using different types of material, different experimental paradigms, and in different subject populations. Two experiments are described where the spacing effect was assessed on a yes/no recognition memory task using words and nonwords as targets. The main results showed that changing the font between repeated occurrences of targets at study did not affect the spacing effect for words, even under shallow encoding conditions, but effectively removed the spacing effect with nonwords. In both experiments, the font manipulation was made between subjects, ruling out explanations in terms of differential attention to particular font conditions. These results provide further support for short-term perceptual priming accounts of the spacing effect: Semantically-based repetition priming affects memory for words; perceptual priming mechanisms affect memory for nonwords.
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ISSN:0954-1446
1464-0635
DOI:10.1080/09541440340000042