We investigated the influence of negative emotional pictures on associative memory. A visual object was embedded in the periphery of negative emotional or neutral pictures. Memory was assessed for central item (pictorial) information, peripheral (object) information, and the association between item and peripheral information. On tests of item information, negative emotional pictures were remem...

In a previous study we used event-related potentials to dissociate semantic (associative) and repetition priming when prime words were masked below (40 ms primes) and above (80 and 120 ms primes) levels of awareness (Holcomb et al., 2005). While robust priming effects were present on the N400 component regardless of the prime duration in the repetition priming experiment, in the semantic primin...

There are few demonstrations of basic associative learning phenomena using appetitive procedures in mice. This article describes procedures for obtaining four associative learning phenomena in mice, using an appetitive conditioning procedure in which the reinforcer was delivery of a sucrose pellet, and the conditioned response head entry into the food tray. Experiment 1 demonstrated latent inhi...

Are associative memories forgotten more quickly than item memories, and does the level of original learning differentially influence forgetting rates? In this study, we addressed these questions by having participants learn single words and word pairs once (Experiment 1), three times (Experiment 2), and six times (Experiment 3) in a massed learning (ML) or a distributed learning (DL) mode. Then...

Recollection has long been thought to play a key role in associative recognition tasks. Evidence that associative recollection might be a threshold process has come from analyses of the associative recognition receiver operating characteristic (ROC). Specifically, the ROC is not as curvilinear as a signal detection theory requires. In addition, the Z-ROC is usually curvilinear, as a threshold r...

Retrieving category associates (e.g., FRUIT-ORANGE) may induce forgetting other category members (e.g., FRUIT-BANANA), a phenomenon known as retrieval-induced forgetting (RIF). We designed 2 experiments to examine the role of RIF in the associative memory impairment of schizophrenia (SZ). Subjects studied 36 category-exemplar pairs, generated from 6 categories composed of 6 members each. For ha...

Transposed-letter (TL) nonwords (e.g., jugde) can be easily misperceived as words, a fact that is somewhat inconsistent with the letter-position-coding schemes employed by most current models of visual word recognition. To examine this issue further, we conducted four masked semantic/associative priming experiments, using a lexical decision task. In Experiment 1, the related primes could be wor...

The present study aimed at providing a plausible answer for the controversy whether organizational source or associative source could be encoded in a more automatic manner through incidental learning. In the experiment, subjects were asked to learn organizational and associative sources under incidental or intentional learning conditions. It turned out that only associative source accuracy incr...

The role of the hippocampus in associative learning was investigated in 3 experiments with rats as subjects. Hippocampal rats were impaired in the acquisition of conditioned responding both when food was signaled by the insertion of a lever (Experiment 1) and when the presentation of auditory or visual events served as the conditioned stimuli (Experiment 2). Experiment 2 also evaluated the sugg...