| Abstract | The experiments presented in this article examined the slope of the z-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 z-ROC is the ratio of the new-item to old-item standard deviations. R. Ratcliff, C.-F. Sheu, and S. D. Gronlund (see record 1992-41823-001) 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. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
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