Qiuli Ma (UMass) will give the next Cognitive Bag Lunch presentation at 12pm in Tobin 521B on Wednesday April 26th at noon (today!). The title and abstract follow. All are welcome!

Title: Testing recognition models with forced-choice testing

Abstract: We conducted two experiments to distinguish the double high-threshold model (2HT) and unequal variance signal detection model (UVSD) of recognition memory. During the experiments, participants studied a list of words. In the test phase, they first responded “old” or “new” to a single word in the recognition test. For a word that was incorrectly recognized, another word with the same response but was correctly recognized was paired with it to make a forced-choice trial. There were “new-new” (n-n) trials and “old-old” (o-o) trials. Participants were asked to pick the word that was actually studied from the two words. Data from the forced-choice testing were able to distinguish the 2HT and UVSD models. Modeling results showed that the UVSD model accounted for the forced-choice data better than 2HT model.