Empirical Generality of Data from Recognition Memory Receiver-operating Characteristic Functions and Implications for the Global Memory Models

The experiments presented in this article examined the slope of the zeta-ROC (receiver-operating characteristic) function for recognition memory. The slope was examined as a function of strength and the variables study time, list length, word frequency, and category membership. For normal distributions of familiarity, the slope of the zeta-ROC is the ratio of the new-item to old-item standard deviations. R. Ratcliff, C.-F. Sheu, and S. D. Gronlund (1992) found that the slope was constant within standard error as a function of strength of encoding, which is inconsistent with the predictions of the global memory models. The results presented here extend this finding: The slope was constant as a function of strength of encoding, list length, and the number of related items from a category in the study list. Word frequency did affect the slope, but within a frequency class the slope was constant as a function of strength. The implications of these data for the global memory models, the attention likelihood model, and variants of these models are discussed.