William E. Hockley's research while affiliated with Wilfrid Laurier University and other places

... In these tasks, the level of function of STM can be gauged by the number of stimuli set as targets at the beginning of the task (Sternberg, 1966). The continuous recognition task (CRT) is a different testing approach within the SDT category and has become a standard approach for assessing EM (Hockley, 1982(Hockley, , 2022. In a CRT, stimuli are presented in a series, and the participant is instructed to attend to each stimulus and indicate if a stimulus is a repetition of one previously shown in the series. ...

... The direct-access to the test item (cf. Clark & Gronlund, 1996), i.e., the lack of a search or item matching mechanism, and the implementation of episodic memory strength as different resting level activations also place the AROM and the AROM+ in the category of signal-detection based approaches to recognition memory, as compared to dual-process or global-matching models (for an in depth review of recognition memory models see Humphreys et al., 2023). It is this direct access to test items' representations which is meant to enable fast accumulation of evidence for both old and new responses. ...

... Given that the role of context load has long been deemed crucial for elucidating the theoretical underpinnings of the context reinstatement effect in recognition (see Ensor et al., 2022;Isarida et al., 2018;Rutherford, 2004), various studies have been conducted to test the competing predictions of the cuing-with-context and the ICE accounts. However, their interpretation is arguably not settled. ...

... Importantly, EC effects greatly depend on remembering US (e.g., Pleyers et al., 2007;Stahl et al., 2023;Waroquier et al., 2020; but see Balas & Sweklej, 2012;see Sweldens et al., 2014 for a review), and specifically on remembering US valence (Stahl et al., 2009). Memory for CS-US pairings may be seen as an instance of memory for associative information 6 : upon presentation of a CS (the probe, or retrieval cue), participants may retrieve its relation to other stimuli; here, the US (i.e., associative information; e.g., Hockley, 2022; for memory-based approaches of the EC effect, see Gast, 2018;Stahl & Aust, 2018). In the present procedure, the CS may cue the retrieval of various pieces of information regarding the two US: their specific identity, their valence, and whether they were told to be used or discarded to form an impression of the CS. ...

... When such highly controlled stimulus sets are used, some long-standing results are still observed but others are no longer found. For example, Neath et al. (2022) reported frequency effects (better memory of low-compared to highfrequency words) and concreteness effects (better memory for concrete than abstract words) in recognition, and both effects are also observed in serial recall (Neath & Quinlan, 2021;Neath & Surprenant, 2020, respectively). In contrast, whereas Neath et al. reported an effect of contextual diversity in recognition (better memory for words that appear in fewer contexts than words that appear in many different contexts), Guitard et al. (2019) found no effect of contextual diversity on serial recall. ...

... There have been a number of proposals for why free recall may best reveal LSE, including that free recall may better capture shifts in context activation (Wilson & Criss, 2017), while cued-recall or recognition may disrupt priority signals for retrieval by requiring retrieval to occur in a certain order (e.g. Ensor et al., 2020). While the specifics remain debated, the overarching point is that the LSE for non-emotional information seems to arise due to a combination of factors present at encoding and retrieval. ...

... The effect is commonly attributed to continued rehearsal of to-be-remembered, but stopped rehearsal of to-be-forgotten information (Basden & Basden, 1996;Bjork, 1972;Woodward & Bjork, 1971). An issue of current debate is whether stopping rehearsal is an active and effortful process (e.g., Fawcett & Taylor, 2008, 2012Fellner et al., 2020) or whether the forgetting arises more passively (e.g., Scholz & Dutke, 2019;Tan et al., 2020). ...

... This confirms our first hypothesis; the number of intersections and the number of choices therefore seem to be equivalent determinants of task difficulty in our study. This outcome could not be predicted from extant literature since depending on methodological details, the list length may or may not play a role for serial order memory (Dennis and Humphreys, 2001) and for paired associate memory (Ensor et al., 2020). Also depending on methodological details, the use of repeated items (e.g., "left" being used six times on route 18(3) but nine times on route 18(2)) may facilitate, degrade or not affect memory (Kahana and Jacobs, 2000;Cowan and Hardman, 2021). ...

... In contrast to list-method directed forgetting, the dominant account for the item-method is that encoding differences drive the forgetting effect (Basden et al., 1993;Montagliani & Hockley, 2019;Tan et al., 2020). According to this view, items are maintained in working memory until the instructional cue is presented. ...

... If labelling pictures improves their memorability, then labelling stimuli from other sensory domains should likewise yield a mnemonic benefit. Consistent with this, Crutcher and Beer (2011) found better free recall for environmental sounds than their spoken labels (but see Ensor, Bancroft, et al., 2019), and Clark et al. (1974) found better recognition for sounds that could be labelled compared to sounds that could not be labelled. ...