Colin Macleod
University of Waterloo, Psychology, Faculty Member
Pictures typically are better remembered than words—the picture superiority effect. An obvious yet understudied application of picture superiority is to advertising. We compared memorability of names of professional sports teams presented... more
Pictures typically are better remembered than words—the picture superiority effect. An obvious yet understudied application of picture superiority is to advertising. We compared memorability of names of professional sports teams presented in three encoding conditions: team names only, team logos without names, and team logos with integrated names. Results of Experiment 1A provided the first evidence of an intact picture superiority effect for graphic symbols representing abstract concepts. This effect was, however, influenced by familiarity with the to-be-remembered stimuli. Experiment 1B highlighted the role of expertise in memory for logos: When tested on team names, the magnitude of the benefit for the logos-only group depended on whether participants knew what the logos represented. These experiments emphasize familiarity as an undervalued factor influencing memory for pictures. We suggest that logos, when featured in advertisements, should be accompanied by text labels to maxim...
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Memory is reliably enhanced for information read aloud compared with information read silently—this is known as the production effect. Theoretical accounts of this effect have been largely verbal in nature with very little exception, yet... more
Memory is reliably enhanced for information read aloud compared with information read silently—this is known as the production effect. Theoretical accounts of this effect have been largely verbal in nature with very little exception, yet its robustness (and that of related phenomena) suggests that it is worth integrating into existing computational approaches to memory. A leading account of the production effect proposes that production leads to encoding of additional features at study and that these features are available at test to assist retrieval, conferring the observed memory benefit. We implement a version of this account into the Retrieving Effectively from Memory (REM) computational framework and examine its ability to capture key phenomena associated with the production effect. We compare and contrast the current implementation in REM with a pre-existing implementation of this effect in MINERVA2, in addition to discussing alternative conceptualizations and future work.
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When people can successfully recall a studied word, they should be able to recognize it as having been studied. In cued recall paradigms, however, participants sometimes correctly recall words in the presence of strong semantic cues but... more
When people can successfully recall a studied word, they should be able to recognize it as having been studied. In cued recall paradigms, however, participants sometimes correctly recall words in the presence of strong semantic cues but then fail to recognize those words as actually having been studied. Although the conditions necessary to produce this unusual effect are known, the underlying neural correlates have not been investigated. Across two experiments, involving both behavioral and electrophysiological methods (EEG), we investigated the cognitive and neural processes that underlie recognition failures. Experiments 1A and 1B showed that, in cued recall paradigms, presuming that recalled items can be recognized is a flawed assumption: Recognition failures occur in the presence of cues, regardless of whether those failures are measured. Experiment 2 showed that successfully recalled words that are recognized are driven by recollection at recall and by a combination of recollec...
Research Interests: Psychology, Cognitive Psychology, Biology, Medicine, Cued recall, and 2 moreFree recall and Recall(Free recall and Recall)
(Free recall and Recall)
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Retrieving information can result in the forgetting of related information, a phenomenon referred to as retrieval-induced forgetting (RIF). To date, the dominant explanation of RIF has been an inhibition account, which emphasizes... more
Retrieving information can result in the forgetting of related information, a phenomenon referred to as retrieval-induced forgetting (RIF). To date, the dominant explanation of RIF has been an inhibition account, which emphasizes long-term suppression of interfering memories. As one alternative, some have advocated for a strength-based interference account, which emphasizes the role of strengthening associations. More recently, we have proposed a context account, which emphasizes the role of context change and context reinstatement. In this article, we outline these three accounts of RIF and demonstrate that there is substantial evidence that uniquely supports our context account.
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MacLeod and Hodder (1998) demonstrated that presenting two different incongruent color words in the same color on a single Stroop trial resulted in no more interference than did presenting the same incongruent color word twice, and... more
MacLeod and Hodder (1998) demonstrated that presenting two different incongruent color words in the same color on a single Stroop trial resulted in no more interference than did presenting the same incongruent color word twice, and concluded that the first word captured attention, blocking out the second. They also showed that, within a trial, neither stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) between the two items nor the presence/absence of a visible gap between the two items had any effect. We replicated all of their empirical findings. Then by extending their design and factorially combining three types of items--incongruent words, congruent words, and control nonwords--within a trial, we demonstrated that both items within a trial do influence processing, with the contribution of the second greater than that of the first. These results are incompatible with a capture account and suggest instead continued monitoring of the word dimension while attempting to identify and produce the name of...
ABSTRACT discuss individual differences in working memory and then turn to individual differences that are more related to long-term memory, concluding with a discussion of expertise that ties together many of the ideas working memory... more
ABSTRACT discuss individual differences in working memory and then turn to individual differences that are more related to long-term memory, concluding with a discussion of expertise that ties together many of the ideas working memory [memory span, information processing approaches, working memory capacity] / long-term memory [knowledge and learning, organization of long-term memory, implicit vs explicit remembering, retrieval from long-term memory] / expertise in remembering [mnemonists, imagery] (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
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Research Interests: Psychology, Cognitive Psychology, Cognitive Science, Perception, Selective Attention, and 12 moreCognition, Visual perception, Attention, Medicine, Evidence-Based Practice (Psychology), Visual Search, Vision, Humans, Optimal Distinctiveness Theory, Reaction Time, Distraction, and Performance Improvement
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Research Interests: Marketing, Cognitive Science, Obesity, Eating Disorders, Body dysmorphic disorder, and 15 moreImplicit measures, Humans, Correlation, Intervention, Panic Disorder, Depressive Disorder, Mental Disorder, Association, American Psychiatric Association, Experimental Validation, Behavioral Research, Case Control Studies, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, Alcohol use disorder, and Phobic disorders(Implicit measures, Humans, Correlation, Intervention, Panic Disorder, Depressive Disorder, Mental Disorder, Association, American Psychiatric Association, Experimental Validation, Behavioral Research, Case Control Studies, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, Alcohol use disorder, and Phobic disorders)
(Implicit measures, Humans, Correlation, Intervention, Panic Disorder, Depressive Disorder, Mental Disorder, Association, American Psychiatric Association, Experimental Validation, Behavioral Research, Case Control Studies, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, Alcohol use disorder, and Phobic disorders)
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Drawing a picture of the referent of a word produces considerably better recall and recognition of that word than does a baseline condition, such as repeatedly writing the word, a phenomenon referred to as the drawing effect. Although the... more
Drawing a picture of the referent of a word produces considerably better recall and recognition of that word than does a baseline condition, such as repeatedly writing the word, a phenomenon referred to as the drawing effect. Although the drawing effect has been the focus of much recent research, it is not yet clear what underlies the beneficial effects of drawing to memory. In 3 experiments, we explored the roles of item and order information following drawing versus silent reading and produced 2 important findings. First, the drawing effect in recall was substantially larger when the 2 conditions were intermixed in a single list compared to appearing in separate lists-in other words, drawing produced a design effect. Second, the studied order was better retained for silent reading compared to drawing in pure lists. These findings are consistent with the item-order account: Memory for the order of drawn lists is poorer because the elaborative act of drawing disrupts the encoding of...
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Reconstructing memory for sequences is a complex process, likely involving multiple sources of information. In 3 experiments, we examined the source(s) of information that might underlie the ability to accurately place an event within a... more
Reconstructing memory for sequences is a complex process, likely involving multiple sources of information. In 3 experiments, we examined the source(s) of information that might underlie the ability to accurately place an event within a temporal context. The task was to estimate, after studying each list, the temporal position of a single test word within that list. In the first 2 experiments, we demonstrated that memory for temporal location was better following semantic encoding than silent reading of the list, which in turn was better than orthographic encoding of the list. Although other measures of sequence retention have revealed impaired memory for order with greater item-level encoding, these experiments demonstrated that item-level encoding improved memory for temporal-location. A 3rd experiment extended these findings by measuring interitem associations in addition to item memory, demonstrating that memory for temporal location within a list was more closely related to ite...
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The production effect is the memory advantage of saying words aloud over simply reading them silently. It has been hypothesised that this advantage stems from production featuring distinctive information that stands out at study relative... more
The production effect is the memory advantage of saying words aloud over simply reading them silently. It has been hypothesised that this advantage stems from production featuring distinctive information that stands out at study relative to reading silently. MacLeod (2011) (I said, you said: The production effect gets personal. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 18, 1197-1202. doi: 10.3758/s13423-011-0168-8 ) found superior memory for reading aloud oneself vs. hearing another person read aloud, which suggests that motor information (speaking), self-referential information (i.e., "I said it"), or both contribute to the production effect. In the present experiment, we dissociated the influence on memory of these two components by including a study condition in which participants heard themselves read words aloud (recorded earlier) - a first for production effect research - along with the more typical study conditions of reading aloud, hearing someone else speak, and reading sile...
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In the color-word contingency learning paradigm, each word appears more often in one color (high contingency) than in the other colors (low contingency). Shortly after beginning the task, color identification responses become faster on... more
In the color-word contingency learning paradigm, each word appears more often in one color (high contingency) than in the other colors (low contingency). Shortly after beginning the task, color identification responses become faster on the high-contingency trials than on the low-contingency trials-the contingency learning effect. Across five groups, we varied the high-contingency proportion in 10% steps, from 80% to 40%. The size of the contingency learning effect was positively related to high-contingency proportion, with the effect disappearing when high contingency was reduced to 40%. At the two highest contingency proportions, the magnitude of the effect increased over trials, the pattern suggesting that there was an increasing cost for the low-contingency trials rather than an increasing benefit for the high-contingency trials. Overall, the results fit a modified version of Schmidt's (2013, Acta Psychologica, 142, 119-126) parallel episodic processing account in which prior...
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Three experiments investigated the learning of simple associations in a color-word contingency task. Participants responded manually to the print colors of 3 words, with each word associated strongly to 1 of the 3 colors and weakly to the... more
Three experiments investigated the learning of simple associations in a color-word contingency task. Participants responded manually to the print colors of 3 words, with each word associated strongly to 1 of the 3 colors and weakly to the other 2 colors. Despite the words being irrelevant, response times to high-contingency stimuli and to low-contingency stimuli quickly diverged. This high-low difference remained quite constant over successive blocks of trials, evidence of stable contingency learning. Inclusion of a baseline condition-an item having no color-word contingency-permitted separation of the contingency learning effect into 2 components: a cost due to low contingency and a benefit due to high contingency. Both cost and benefit were quick to acquire, quick to extinguish, and quick to reacquire. The color-word contingency task provides a simple way to directly study the learning of associations. (PsycINFO Database Record
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In three experiments, we tested a relative-speed-of-processing account of color-word contingency learning, a phenomenon in which color identification responses to high-contingency stimuli (words that appear most often in particular... more
In three experiments, we tested a relative-speed-of-processing account of color-word contingency learning, a phenomenon in which color identification responses to high-contingency stimuli (words that appear most often in particular colors) are faster than those to low-contingency stimuli. Experiment 1 showed equally large contingency-learning effects whether responding was to the colors or to the words, likely due to slow responding to both dimensions because of the unfamiliar mapping required by the key press responses. For Experiment 2, participants switched to vocal responding, in which reading words is considerably faster than naming colors, and we obtained a contingency-learning effect only for color naming, the slower dimension. In Experiment 3, previewing the color information resulted in a reduced contingency-learning effect for color naming, but it enhanced the contingency-learning effect for word reading. These results are all consistent with contingency learning influenci...
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Conway and Gathercole [(1990). Writing and long-term memory: Evidence for a "translation" hypothesis. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 42, 513-527] proposed a translation account to explain why certain types of... more
Conway and Gathercole [(1990). Writing and long-term memory: Evidence for a "translation" hypothesis. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 42, 513-527] proposed a translation account to explain why certain types of encoding produce benefits in memory: Switching modalities from what is presented to what is encoded enhances item distinctiveness. We investigated this hypothesis in a recognition experiment in which the presentation modality of a study list (visual vs. auditory) and the encoding activity (speaking vs. typing vs. passive encoding) were manipulated between-subjects. Manipulating encoding activity between-subjects ruled out any potential influence of the relationally distinct processing that can occur in a within-subject manipulation (in which all previous translation effects have been demonstrated). We found no overall difference in memory for words presented auditorily vs. visually nor for visual vs. auditory encoding, but critically presentation mo...
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Remembering the order of a sequence of events is a fundamental feature of episodic memory. Indeed, a number of formal models represent temporal context as part of the memory system, and memory for order has been researched extensively.... more
Remembering the order of a sequence of events is a fundamental feature of episodic memory. Indeed, a number of formal models represent temporal context as part of the memory system, and memory for order has been researched extensively. Yet, the nature of the code(s) underlying sequence memory is still relatively unknown. Across 4 experiments that manipulated encoding task, we found evidence for 3 dissociable facets of order memory. Experiment 1 introduced a test requiring a judgment of which of 2 alternatives had immediately followed a word during encoding. This measure revealed better retention of interitem associations following relational encoding (silent reading) than relatively item-specific encoding (judging referent size), a pattern consistent with that observed in previous research using order reconstruction tests. In sharp contrast, Experiment 2 demonstrated the reverse pattern: Memory for the studied order of 2 sequentially presented items was actually better following ite...