ReviewPsychonomic bulletin & review2023
Measuring memory is harder than you think: How to avoid problematic measurement practices in memory research.
Review in Psychonomic bulletin & review, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 32 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
32 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Salient experiences enhance mundane memories through graded prioritization.Science advances · 2025Pooled it
- Age and Proactive Interference in Visual Working Memory: Reassessing the Recent-Probes Task.Brain sciences · 2026Article
- Developing a psychological test battery to measure cognition in daily life.Behavior research methods · 2026Article
- Content-Independent Pointers Mediate Working Memory Storage for Both Visual and Verbal Stimuli.Journal of cognitive neuroscience · 2026Article
- Article
- The field situation heuristics effect in online emergencies: the formation mechanism and differences of audience cognitive bias.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Targeting memory of embedded positive verbal content indirectly modulates negative visual memory.iScience · 2025Article
- Default mode network connectivity predicts individual differences in long-term forgetting: Evidence for storage degradation, not retrieval failure.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- Involuntary and voluntary memory retrieval relies on distinct neural representations and oscillatory processes.PLoS biology · 2025Article
- Object fine-grained discrimination as a sensitive cognitive marker of transentorhinal integrity.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Reinforcement learning increasingly relates to memory specificity from childhood to adulthood.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Evidence for indirect strengthening through reactivation of contextually bound memories.Communications psychology · 2025Article
- Zooming in on what counts as core and auxiliary: A case study on recognition models of visual working memory.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2025Review
- Ready to ROC? A tutorial on simulation-based power analyses for null hypothesis significance, minimum-effect, and equivalence testing for ROC curve analyses.Behavior research methods · 2025Article
- Low-priority items are held in visual working memory: Evidence from flexible allocation in a two-alternative forced-choice (2AFC) paradigm.Journal of vision · 2025Article
- Effect of levels-of-processing on rates of forgetting.Memory & cognition · 2025Article
- Naturalistic investigation of cannabis strains varying in THC and CBD ratios and verbal recognition memory.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- Effects of left ventrolateral prefrontal stimulation on forming and maintaining deep and shallow episodic traces.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2024Article
- The upside of cumulative conceptual interference on exemplar-level mnemonic discrimination.Memory & cognition · 2024Article
- Anchor objects drive realism while diagnostic objects drive categorization in GAN generated scenes.Communications psychology · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
We argue that critical areas of memory research rely on problematic measurement practices and provide concrete suggestions to improve the situation. In particular, we highlight the prevalence of memory studies that use tasks (like the "old/new" task: "have you seen this item before? yes/no") where quantifying performance is deeply dependent on counterfactual reasoning that depends on the (unknowable) distribution of underlying memory signals. As a result of this difficulty, different literatures in memory research (e.g., visual working memory, eyewitness identification, picture memory, etc.) have settled on a variety of fundamentally different metrics to get performance measures from such tasks (e.g., A', corrected hit rate, percent correct, d', diagnosticity ratios, K values, etc.), even though these metrics make different, contradictory assumptions about the distribution of latent memory signals, and even though all of their assumptions are frequently incorrect. We suggest that in order for the psychology and neuroscience of memory to become a more cumulative, theory-driven science, more attention must be given to measurement issues. We make a concrete suggestion: The default memory task for those simply interested in performance should change from old/new ("did you see this item'?") to two-alternative forced-choice ("which of these two items did you see?"). In situations where old/new variants are preferred (e.g., eyewitness identification; theoretical investigations of the nature of memory signals), receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis should be performed rather than a binary old/new task.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.