title: The d-Prime directive: Assessing costs and benefits in recognition by dissociating mixed-list false alarm rates.
abstract: It can be difficult to judge the effectiveness of encoding techniques in a within-subject design. Consider the production effect-the finding that words read aloud are better remembered than words read silently. In the absence of a baseline, a within-subject production effect in a mixed study list could reflect a benefit of reading aloud, a cost of reading silently, or both. To help interpret within-subject data, memory researchers have compared within-subject and between-subjects designs, with the between-subjects (i.e., pure list) conditions serving as baselines against which the within-subject (i.e., mixed-list) conditions are compared. In the present article, the authors highlight a shortcoming of using this comparison to assess costs and benefits in recognition. Unlike between-subjects experiments where separate false alarm rates are obtained for each condition, the typical within-subject experiment yields a collapsed false alarm rate, which, the authors argue, can potentially bias calculations of memory discrimination (d'). Across 3 experiments that used production as the encoding manipulation, they used a typical mixed-list versus pure-list design (Experiment 1) and then made modifications to this design (Experiments 2 and 3) that yielded separate mixed-list false alarm rates. The results of the latter 2 experiments demonstrated that words that are read aloud in a mixed list have an overall memorial benefit over words that are read aloud in a pure list-both in terms of increased hits and reduced false alarms. The authors frame these results in terms of the distinctiveness heuristic. (PsycINFO Database Record
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Waterloo.
authors.forename: Noah D
authors.identifier: 0000-0002-2718-4220
authors.initials: ND
authors.lastname: Forrin
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Waterloo.
authors.forename: Brianna
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Groot
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Waterloo.
authors.forename: Colin M
authors.initials: CM
authors.lastname: MacLeod
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D001244:Association; D003362:Cost-Benefit Analysis; D004192:Discrimination, Psychological / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007206:Individuality; D008297:Male; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D011597:Psychomotor Performance; D011932:Reading; D021641:Recognition, Psychology / Q000502:physiology*; D013334:Students; D014495:Universities; D014705:Verbal Behavior