A strict response criterion yields a mirror effect in the novelty paradigm.
According to the novelty/encoding hypothesis (NEH; Tulving & Kroll, 1995), efficacy of encoding information into long-term memory depends on the movelty of the information. Recognition accuracy is higher for novel than for previously familiarized material. This novelty effect is not a mirror effect: the superiority of novel over familiar items is not found in the hit rates but only in the false-alarm rates. The main result in the present replication study was that novel hit rates were higher than familiar ones when the most confident responses were examined separately, and thus a mirror effect could be demonstrated for these data, for both the low- and the high-frequency words. Similarly, the word-frequency effect on hits was stronger when a stricter response criterion was applied. It was concluded that the novelty effect and the word-frequency effect are more similar to one another than has hitherto been thought.
Aberg
Carola S
CS
Department of Psychology, Stockholm University, Sweden. cag@psychology.su.se
Nilsson
Lars-Göran
LG
D000328:Adult; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D011582:Psychological Theory; D011584:Psychology / Q000379:methods*; D011930:Reaction Time; D021641:Recognition, Psychology; D014825:Vocabulary