Memory

ABSTRACT Schemas allow us to make assumptions about the world based upon previous experiences and aid in memory organisation and retrieval. However, a reliance on schemas may also result in increased false memories to schematically related lures. Prior neuroimaging work has linked schematic processing in memory tasks to activity in prefrontal, visual, and temporal regions. Yet, it is unclear what type of processing in these regions underlies memory errors. The current study examined where schematic lures exhibit greater neural similarity to schematic targets, leading to this memory error, as compared to neural overlap with non-schematic lures, which, like schematic lures, are novel items at retrieval...

False memories during testimony are an enormous challenge for criminal trials. Exposure to post-event misinformation can lead to inadvertent creation of false memories, known as the misinformation effect. We investigated anodal transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) on the left inferior parietal lobe (IPL) during recall testing to enhance accurate recall while addressing the misinformation effect. Participants ( N  = 60) watched a television series depicting a fictional terrorist attack, then received an audio recording with misinformation, consistent information, and control information...

After studying a list of words that are semantically associated to a critical lure, participants are more likely to attribute a falsely recognised critical lure to the context of its strong than weak semantic associates. This is known as the source-strength effect. The current study investigated the roles of automatic and controlled processing in context retrieval in false recognition that is demonstrated by the source-strength effect. The results revealed that the source-strength effect was impervious to forewarning (Experiment 1) and remained intact when attentional resources at encoding were reduced (Experiment 2), suggesting that context retrieval in false recognition is based on automatic processes that are not amenable to conscious control and do not require many attentional resources...

This research experimentally examined the crossed influences between the emotional valence of collective memory and collective future thinking. As remembering the past and imagining the future are shaped by the present, we additionally test whether perceived anomie (i.e., perceiving present society as disintegrated and disregulated) would moderate these influences. Study 1 (N = 228 French participants) manipulated the valence of collective memory (positive vs. negative French past) to test its effect on the valence of collective future thinking...

The recognition of associative memory can be significantly influenced by the use of an encoding strategy known as unitisation, which has been implemented through various manipulations. However, [Shao, H., Opitz, B., Yang, J., & Weng, X. (2016). Recollection reduces unitised familiarity effect. Memory (Hove, England) , 24 (4), 535-547. https://doi.org/10.1080/09658211.2015.1021258] found intriguing distinctions between two common manipulations, the compound task and the imagery task, leading to a dispute...

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Flashbulb memories (FBMs) refer to vivid and long-lasting autobiographical memories for the circumstances in which people learned of a shocking and consequential public event. A cross-national study across eleven countries aimed to investigate FBM formation following the first COVID-19 case news in each country and test the effect of pandemic-related variables on FBM. Participants had detailed memories of the date and others present when they heard the news, and had partially detailed memories of the place, activity, and news source...

The COVID-19 Pandemic is undoubtedly one of the most impactful and ubiquitous public events in recent history. In this study, we focused on how it affected the organisation of autobiographical memory by examining how often individuals referred to the COVID-19 Pandemic while estimating the date of their autobiographical memories. To that end, we collected word-cued memories from the recent past, event dating protocols, COVID-relatedness ratings, and the transitional impact scores from first-year undergraduates...

Experimental studies show that vividness and emotionality of aversive memories decrease after recall with eye movements. We aimed at replicating this finding. Relatedly, consistent with Conway's view that memory retrieval is constructive, we examined changes in the content of the memories. If eye movements render a memory less aversive, it may be avoided less, stimulating recall and increasing the opportunity to infer (contextual) details. Two experiments ( N  = 97 and N  = 250) examined whether eye movements affect the number of central and peripheral memory details and characteristics...

Predictions about memory involve the use of metacognition, and metacognition can rely on various cues. The present study investigated metacognition and recall performance when to-be-remembered words differed in font size and emotional valence, to determine what cues are utilised when making metacognitive judgments. Participants were presented with lists of words varying in font size (small and large) and emotional valence (negative and neutral) and were asked to remember as many words as possible for a later recall test while engaging in item-level metacognitive assessments...

The Deese-Roediger and McDermott (DRM) paradigm and visually guided saccade tasks are both prominent research tools in their own right. This study introduces a novel DRM-Saccade paradigm, merging both methodologies. We used rule-based saccadic eye movements whereby participants were presented with items at test and were asked to make a saccade to the left or right of the item to denote a recognition or non-recognition decision. We measured old/new recognition decisions and saccadic latencies. Experiment 1 used a pro/anti saccade task to a single target...

We report on a survey of 258 psychotherapists from Germany, focusing on their experiences with memory recovery in general, suggestive therapy procedures, evaluations of recovered memories, and memory recovery in training and guidelines. Most therapists (78%) reported instances of memory recovery encompassing negative and positive childhood experiences, but usually in a minority of patients. Also, most therapists (82%) reported to have held assumptions about unremembered trauma. Patients who held these beliefs were reported by 83% of the therapists...

Across five experiments we examined whether restudying a self-selected subset of items impairs memory for the remaining non-restudied items, and enhances memory for the restudied items. This question was inspired by research on the list strength effect , in which re-presentation of only a subset of items from a list impairs recall for items presented only once, and enhances memory for items presented twice. We found that following initial encoding of all items, honouring participants' restudy selections did indeed impair recall for the non-restudied items relative to when no items were restudied...

Prior work has shown Americans have higher levels of memory specificity than East Asians. Neuroimaging studies have not investigated mechanisms that account for cultural differences at retrieval. In this study, we use fMRI to assess whether mnemonic discrimination, distinguishing novel from previously encountered stimuli, accounts for cultural differences in memory. Fifty-five American and 55 Taiwanese young adults completed an object recognition paradigm testing discrimination of old targets, similar lures and novel foils...

Recognition of speech in noise is facilitated when spoken sentences are repeated a few minutes later, but the levels of representation involved in this effect have not been specified. Three experiments tested whether the effect would transfer across modalities and languages. In Experiment 1, participants listened to sets of high- and low-constraint sentences and read other sets in an encoding phase. At test, these sentences and new sentences were presented in noise, and participants attempted to report the final word of each sentence...

In a society where people often communicate through digital technology, it is crucial to investigate whether the transmission mode influences destination memory performance (our capacity to remember to whom we transmitted certain information). In Experiment 1, we asked young adults ( N  = 31) to share of a set of familiar proverbs only by typing and the rest by both typing and saying them aloud. Better destination memory was observed when the information was transmitted by the two means (aloud and typing)...

ABSTRACT Memory is a reconstructive process that is prone to intrusions and distortions. These processes can be amplified by the emergence and propagation of false information in the social environment. While the acceptance of misinformation is well documented in individual memory tasks, the production of false memories in social interaction contexts presents mixed findings. One factor that may contribute to these inconsistencies is the collaboration method used, which may vary in the opportunities they offer for more (free-for-all) or less (turn-taking) discussion...

Memory is notoriously fallible and susceptible to misinformation. Yet little is known about the underlying cognitive and neural mechanisms that render individuals vulnerable to this type of false memory. The current experiments take an individual differences approach to examine whether susceptibility to misinformation reflects stable underlying factors related to memory retrieval. In Study 1, we report for the first time the existence of substantial individual variability in susceptibility to misinformation in the context of repeated memory retrieval, when the misinformation effect is most pronounced...

Involuntary autobiographical memories (IAMs) have been typically studied with paper diaries, kept for a week or longer. However, such studies are unable to capture the true frequency of IAMs, nor the level of detail that would give new insights into the mechanisms of IAMs. To address this gap, a new audio-recording method was developed and tested on the first author who recorded 674 IAMs while driving a car on a 30-40-minute-long habitual route on 20 occasions. Results revealed very high frequency of IAMs (almost 34 per journey) that were reported more often in response to dynamic (one-off) than static cues...

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, face masks became required attire. Face masks obstruct the bottom portion of faces, restricting face processing. The present study examined the influence face masks have on memory predictions and memory performance for new face-name associations. Participants studied face-name pairs presented for 8 s (Experiment 1) or 10 s (Experiment 2). Half of the face-name pairs included a face mask obstructing the nose and mouth of the pictured face, counterbalanced across participants...