How does familiarity with a voice affect trait judgements?

From only a single spoken word, listeners can form a wealth of first impressions of a person’s character traits and personality based on their voice. However, due to the substantial within-person variability in voices, these trait judgements are likely to be highly stimulus-dependent for unfamiliar voices: The same person may sound very trustworthy in one recording but less trustworthy in another. How trait judgements differ when listeners are familiar with a voice is unclear: Are listeners who are familiar with the voices as susceptible to the effects of within-person variability? Does the semantic knowledge listeners have about a familiar person influence their judgements? In the current study, we tested the effect of familiarity on listeners’ trait judgements from variable voices across 3 experiments. Using a between-subjects design, we contrasted trait judgements by listeners who were familiar with a set of voices – either through laboratory-based training or through watching a TV show – with listeners who were unfamiliar with the voices. We predicted that familiarity with the voices would reduce variability in trait judgements for variable voice recordings from the same identity (cf. Mileva, Kramer & Burton, Perception, 48, 471 and 2019, for faces). However, across the 3 studies and two types of measures to assess variability, we found no compelling evidence to suggest that trait impressions were systematically affected by familiarity.     

The cognitive representation of persons and groups and its effect on recall and recognition memory

A conceptualization of the manner in which trait and behavioral information is organized in memory is proposed and applied in predicting both the recall and recognition of information about persons and groups. Three information presentation conditions were considered: (1) Subjects are told to form an impression of a target (person or group) on the basis of the target's behaviors, and are given a trait-based concept of what the target is like before learning about these behaviors. (2) Subjects are told to form an impression of the target, but a general traitbased concept of the target is not induced until after they learn about the target's behaviors. (3) Subjects receive information about the target's behaviors with instructions to remember the information, and only subsequently are told to form an impression and are given more general information about the target's traits. The proposed model accounted for between-condition differences in both the recall and recognition of behaviors that were consistent and inconsistent with a general trait-based concept of the target, and for contingencies of these differences on whether the target was a single person or a group.     

Distortions in immediate memory

A series of five pairs of abstract geometrical figures were presented to each subject. Unknown to the subjects, the members of each pair were identical. The second member was presented 10 seconds after the first member and the subject then judged whether a specified feature of the figure had changed in one of two possible directions. One group of 32 subjects were not told which feature of the figure would be critical until presentation of the second member: a further group of 32 subjects were given this information before presentation of the first member. Subjects in both groups were significantly consistent with one another in some of their judgements, thus indicating that distortions in remembering had occurred. It is argued that memory distortions of this type (for which previous evidence has been unsatisfactory) are of particular interest since, unlike other memory changes, they are difficult to ascribe to the constructive or inferential character of recognition and recall.     

The miscommunication of deception: An adaptive perspective

Undergraduates were videotaped as they told lies and truths about their last job. Later, these undergraduates viewed the videotape and tried to guess which of their fellow subject were lying. Monetary incentives had been offered for successful lying and lie detection. Our subjects showed a “demeanor bias”—some looked honest even when they were lying; others looked dishonest even when they were telling the truth. These differences in apparent honesty were the primary determinant of deception judgments; perceivers' detection skills played a lesser role. Honest-looking subjects were predisposed to perceive others as dishonest. In general, our liars used hand gestures, maintained eye contact, and refrained from smiling. Perceivers misconstrued these behaviors as signs of honesty and could not often detect deceit—unless the lie was being told by a subject who had earlier told the truth. We draw on sociobiological concepts and offer an adaptive perspective on human deceit.     

Can fabricated evidence induce false eyewitness testimony?

False information can influence people's beliefs and memories. But can fabricated evidence induce individuals to accuse another person of doing something they never did? We examined whether exposure to a fabricated video could produce false eyewitness testimony. Subjects completed a gambling task alongside a confederate subject, and later we falsely told subjects that their partner had cheated on the task. Some subjects viewed a digitally manipulated video of their partner cheating; some were told that video evidence of the cheating exists; and others were not told anything about video evidence. Subjects were asked to sign a statement confirming that they witnessed the incident and that their corroboration could be used in disciplinary action against the accused. See‐video subjects were three times more likely to sign the statement than Told‐video and Control subjects. Fabricated evidence may, indeed, produce false eyewitness testimony; we discuss probable cognitive mechanisms. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Event memory: the effects of processing objectives and time delay on memory for action sequences

The memorial representations of events that result from different types of goal-directed cognition are conceptualized on the basis of the general model of information processing proposed by Wyer and Srull (1980, 1984). In a test of this conceptualization, subjects read a passage describing the events that took place at a cocktail party. They were told either (a) to form an impression of the party and the events that occurred, (b) to empathize with the person from whose perspective the passage was written, or (c) to remember the information presented in a way that would allow them to reproduce it. The stimulus passage contained two target events, each consisting of actions that were either described chronologically or in reverse order, and were either presented together or were separated by other unrelated material. After either a short or a long delay, subjects recalled the information they read in the order it came to mind. Finally, subjects were given the individual event actions and told to place them in the order they were presented. The actions comprising target events were generally more likely to be recalled together and in chronological order when subjects had learned about them with either an impression formation or an empathy objective than when they had read about them with the goal of remembering them. However, orderings of these actions were affected by task objectives only after a long delay. The effect of task objectives on the order of recalling the events themselves showed a quite different pattern; for example, subjects with an empathy objective were most likely to recall the last target event presented before the first one after a long delay, whereas subjects with an impression objective were least likely to do so. The proposed model provided a reasonable account of these and other effects of task objectives on memory for events and the actions comprising them.     

Does Context Discriminate Recollection from Familiarity in Recognition Memory?

Five experiments were conducted to examine subjects' ability to make contextual judgements about recognized items for which they report recollective experience or only familiarity within the context of the experiment. In the first four experiments, subjects were able to make judgements of the spatiotemporal context of items that were accompanied by recollective experience significantly better than for items they merely found familiar. In only one of the four studies did subjects display above-chance performance on spatiotemporal judgements for merely familiar items. A fifth experiment examined the frequency with which subjects report the presence of different kinds of contextual knowledge during a standard recognition experiment. All aspects of contextual knowledge were reported with higher frequencies for recollected items than for items only found familiar, although no single contextual feature was strongly associated with recollective experience. Thus, the five studies together provide converging evidence for the validity of the 'recollect-know' distinction in recognition memory and supplement studies that have already demonstrated that the two kinds of response are dissociable. The implications of these data for group comparisons of memory-impaired patients, and the role of context in recognition memory are discussed.     

Varieties of Cues to Emotion in Naturally Occurring Situations

People were asked to observe a person with whom they lived, to report when they noticed that person experiencing an emotion, and to report what cues they used to detect the emotion. In Phase 1, observers were told to "list the cues they used"; in Phase 2, they were told to "describe how they could tell" that the target person was experiencing an emotion. Results were similar in both phases. Only 5 of the 182 respondents reported using a single cue whereas 10 reported using at least a dozen cues. Two out of three respondents reported using vocal cues; over a half reported using facial, indirect verbal, and context cues; nearly a half reported using body and activity cues; about a quarter of the respondents reported using physiological, trait, and other cues; and fewer than a tenth reported using direct verbal cues. Roughly the same number of cues and the same distribution of cue categories was found regardless of the emotion being observed, the sex of the person observing, the sex of the person being observed, or the type of relationship between them.     

Not all happy people are lazy or stupid: Evidence of systematic processing in happy moods

Two experiments investigated the effects of mood on the use of global trait information in impression formation tasks. Participants in both experiments formed an impression of a target based on traits and a series of behaviors that were both consistent and inconsistent with the traits. In Experiment 1, participants in happy moods, relative to those in unhappy moods, made impression judgments that reflected the evaluative implications of the trait information to a greater extent than the behaviors, regardless of the order in which they received the information. In Experiment 2, both happy and sad participants engaged in systematic processing, as reflected by the recall data, but only happy participants’ recall of target information was significantly biased by the global trait information they received. These findings are consistent with the affect-as-information model in which affective cues influence the extent to which individuals rely on general knowledge and, importantly, are inconsistent with models that posit that happiness results in reduced motivation or ability to process information carefully.     

Rehearsal strategy as a function of recall expectation

The subjects were divided into three groups with respect to their expectations concerning a recall task given after the final trial of the usual STM distractor procedure. Group 1 were told only that they would have to recall during each trial's recall interval, thus did not expect to have to recall again. Group 2 were told that they would have to recall all the words presented in the experiment at the end of the last trial, in addition to the trial-by-trial recall. Group 3 were told only that they would have to recall after all words had been presented and they sat passively through the presentation trials. In addition to their recall expectations, half of the subjects in each group received a 2-s presentation and half received a 5-s presentation interval. It was found that the length of the presentation interval had an effect on the number of words recalled at the end of all trials, but recall expectancy did not. However, expectancy did determine the rehearsal strategies of subjects and hence the serial positions from which items were recalled.     

These two are different. Yes,they’re the same: Choice blindness for facial identity

We examined the manipulability of face identity judgements by combining a sorting task for unfamiliar faces with a standard test of choice blindness. In Experiment 1, 50 participants completed a sorting task and then justified grouping specific pairs of photos together or apart. On manipulated trials, the presented pairings were different from those the participants had actually produced. Detection rates for these identity manipulations were strikingly low (∼21%). Moreover, participants readily provided justifications for identity decisions that they had not made, typically referring to specific facial features. Experiment 2 was conducted along similar lines and confirmed that lower task difficulty and higher confidence in one’s face identity judgements increase detection rates. We conclude that observers can easily be led to believe that they made identity judgements they did not make. As well as underscoring the fragility of unfamiliar face matching, our findings have implications for identity judgements in legal settings.     

The Role of Temporal and Spatial Information Cues in Locating Missing Persons

Prospective person memory refers to the search for a missing or wanted person. Performance on prospective person memory tasks has been found to be poor in field‐based experiments. Prior research suggests that the size of the search space may influence success on prospective person memory tasks. In the present research, we gave participants randomly assigned temporal and spatial cues about a mock missing person's whereabouts. Participants were offered a monetary reward for accurately reporting seeing the missing person. Participants who were told the missing person would appear in the building, where they were, had higher expectations of encountering the missing person and made more sightings than participants told the missing person would appear on the university campus. Expectations of encounter predicted participants' intent to look for the missing person, which predicted actual looking behavior, which ultimately predicted accurate sightings.Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

AFFIRMATION AND DENIAL IN EVALUATIVE DESCRIPTIONS

Children made a series of evaluative judgements of 20 nonsense words, which they were told to imagine were people's names. Each subject judged half the names in terms of two-category rating scales containing an affirmative (A) response category which was evaluatively positive (E +) and a negative (n) category which was evaluatively negative (E -), e.g. ‘happy-not happy’, the other half were judged in terms of scales where the A category was E -, and the N category E +, e.g. ‘rude - not rude’. The main finding was a highly significant tendency for subjects to give more A than N responses, irrespective of evaluative content: in addition, a tendency for subjects to give more E - than E + responses, irrespective of grammatical form, approached significance.