Interference effects in memory and sentence processing

描述(由申请人提供)：反应时间的测量混淆了物品强度的影响和获取该物品的速度。速度精度权衡(SAT)程序可用于消除这些因素的歧义，方法是提供对检索过程中积累的信息的响应精度的完整表征。目前的提议将支持对这一方法的应用进行培训，以研究实验前语义相似性对从短期记忆中提取和在句子加工中的影响。前人的研究表明，记忆项目之间的相似性会对目标项目的提取产生干扰；然而，这些影响的时间进程在短时记忆领域的研究很少，在句子加工中则完全没有。有两个实验试图用允许跨域比较的材料来解决这些问题，这样就可以独立评估影响，但也要着眼于了解这两个过程背后的共同机制。这将为评估基于线索的检索机制在多大程度上导致句子加工领域的句法分析失败，以及那里观察到的干扰是否与STM中的干扰效应更广泛地类似而提供证据。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Measures of reaction time confound effects of item strength with the speed of accessing that item. The speed accuracy tradeoff (SAT) procedure can be used to disambiguate these factors by providing a full characterization of response accuracy as information accrues during retrieval. The current proposal would support training in the application of this method to study the effects of pre-experimental semantic similarity on retrieval from short term memory (STM) and in sentence processing. Previous work suggests that similarity among to-be-remembered items creates interference for retrieval of target items; however the time course of these effects has been sparsely studied in the STM domain and not at all in sentence processing. Two experiments attempt to address these issues with materials that permit comparison across domains, so that the effects can be assessed independently but also with an eye to understanding common mechanisms underlying both processes. This will provide evidence for evaluating claims regarding the extent to which cue-based retrieval mechanisms are responsible for parsing failure in the domain of sentence processing, and whether the interference observed there resembles interference effects in STM more broadly.