Karen C. Rose’s research while affiliated with Temple University and other places

Four experiments demonstrated that adults can reliably remember frequency of occurrence information about items they have been exposed to under truly incidental memory conditions. Subjects neither knew that the ultimate test task would concern item frequency nor that they had any reason to remember the items. This was accomplished by presenting items under the guise of one of three cover tasks: anagram solving, sentence completion, and picture naming in a Stroop-like task. In addition, one experiment found that subjects who were prewarned for either a nonspecific memory test or a frequency test were no better able to judge frequency than were subjects operating under truly incidental conditions.

Responds to comments by A. M. Isen (see record 1986-13663-001); H. C. Ellis (see record 1986-13654-001); and J. D. Mayer and G. M. Bower (see record 1986-13675-001) on the present authors' (see record 1986-03061-001) findings that (a) depressed college students showed no overall deficit in recall performance and (b) depressed students failed to show selective recall for mood-congruent (negative) events in a story. Issues considered included performance deficits in depression, selectivity effects in memory, the possibility that affective traits rather than mood states were assessed, and potential reactions to the mood questionnaires. Evidence is presented that the Beck Depression Inventory is not a mild mood-induction procedure. (27 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)

In three experiments we explored the relation between normal variation in depressed mood and memory in college students. Subjects read and subsequently recalled stories whose protagonists experienced good, bad, and neutral events. Contrary to predictions arising independently from capacity theory and from schema theory, the recall of depressed and nondepressed subjects did not differ in either overall level or in affective content. The results are not easily handled by a conceptualization of depression, tied to schema theory, which proposes that negative cognitions are important for the initiation and maintenance of depression. The general usefulness of induction procedures in research on the depressive syndrome is discussed.

The reported experiment tested the suggestion that encoding of temporal order is automatic. Specifically, two of Hasher and Zacks’s (1979) automaticity criteria were examined: (1) that the amount and appropriateness of practice received would not affect acquisition of temporal information, and (2) that reliable individual differences would not be found on a test of memory for temporal order. Contrary to expectations, neither of these criteria was confirmed: Retention of temporal order increased with practice at three (or four) successive lists. And, reliable individual differences were indicated by the findings that subjects’ relative performance levels remained stable across lists, and that groups with higher average academic ability outperformed those with lower ability. Similar results were obtained for a flee-recall task (in which case they were expected). Problems of assessing degrees of nonautomaticity are discussed. Our data are seen to be in general conformity with Tzeng’s (e.g., Tzeng & Cotton, 1980) “study-phase” retrieval theory of temporal coding.

Five experiments with 272 undergraduates attempted to demonstrate an effect on item memorability of the amount of effort expended during the encoding process. The encoding task in 2 experiments was the solution of anagrams of varying difficulty. In the 3rd experiment, Ss were required to judge whether a word fit meaningfully into a sentence frame, and the ease of making this decision was manipulated. The final 2 experiments involved picture naming under time pressure; pictures were displayed either with no labels (easy condition) or, as in the picture–word version of the Stroop task, with superimposed interfering labels (hard condition). In none of the experiments did the manipulations of difficulty/effortfulness of encoding influence item retention. Findings question the robustness of the effort phenomenon. (18 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)