Semantically induced memories of love and helping behavior

This study tested the effect of semantically induced thoughts of love on helping behavior. In a natural setting, 253 participants were interviewed and asked to retrieve the memory of a love episode or, in the control condition, a piece of music they loved. They then met another confederate who asked for money. Analysis showed that inducing the idea of love had a significant positive effect on compliance to a request by a male passerby who was asked for help by a female confederate, but not by a female passerby. Theoretical explanations are presented, based on a gender-role expectation hypothesis.     

Subjective states associated with retrieval failures in Parkinson’s disease

Instances in which we cannot retrieve information immediately but know that the information might be retrieved later are subjective states that accompany retrieval failure. These are expressed in feeling-of-knowing (FOK) and Tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) experiences. In Experiment 1, participants with Parkinson’s disease (PD) and older adult controls were given general questions and asked to report when they experienced a TOT state and to give related information about the missing word. The PD group experienced similar levels of TOTs but provided less correct peripheral information related to the target when in a TOT state. In Experiment 2, participants were given a Semantic (general knowledge questions) and an Episodic (word pairs) FOK task. PD patients failed to accurately predict their future memory performance (FOK) in response to both episodic and semantic cues. Results are interpreted in the context of recent frameworks of memory and metacognition.     

How intention to retrieve a memory and expectation that a memory will come to mind influence the retrieval of autobiographical memories

While involuntary memories are retrieved with no intention and are usually unexpected (when one is not waiting for a memory to arise), voluntary memories are intended and expected (when one is searching and waiting for a memory to arise). The present study aimed to investigate the effects of retrieval intentionality (i.e. wanting to retrieve a memory) and monitoring processes (i.e. waiting for a memory to appear) during autobiographical memory retrieval. In addition, we introduced two novel laboratory conditions that have not been used in previous research on voluntary memories: in the first, participants were asked to report anything they could think of in response to each cue word; in the second, they could skip a word if nothing came to mind. These novel manipulations allowed us to differentiate between voluntary memories retrieved in response to experimenter-generated cues (when participants were forced to provide a memory or a thought for each cue) and self-selected cues (when participants were free to not answer a cue if they found it too difficult). We found that highly accessible memories were mostly experienced when retrieval was involuntary and unexpected, while memories with low accessibility were accessed through intentional retrieval and monitoring processes. Response times for memories recalled in the experimenter-generated cue conditions were longer compared to the self-selected cue conditions. This novel finding shows that experimenter-generated recall favours memories with low accessibility; it further supports the idea that, in a substantial number of trials, voluntary memories are directly rather than effortfully retrieved. The idea that the driving force behind differences between involuntary and voluntary memories is not the intention per se is further discussed.     

Performance and process in collective and individual memory: the role of social decision schemes and memory bias in collective memory

To assess performance and processes in collective and individual memory, participants watched two job candidates on video. Beforehand, half the participants were told they would be tested on their memory of the interviews, and the other half were asked to make a decision to hire one of the candidates. Afterwards, participants completed a recognition memory task in either a group or individual condition. Groups had better recognition memory than individuals. Individuals made more false positives than false negatives and groups exaggerated this. Post-hoc analysis found that groups only exaggerated the tendency towards false positives on items that reflected negatively on the job candidate. There was no significant difference between instruction conditions. When reaching consensus on the recognition task, groups tended to choose the correct answer if at least two members had the correct answer. This method of consensus is discussed as a factor in groups' superior memory performance.     

The effects of social memories in autobiographical elaboration on incidental memory

The present study compared the effects of social memories with those of nonsocial memories on incidental memory. The participants were presented target words on two occasions, and each time they were asked to think of a past episode associated with them in the orienting task, followed by an unexpected free‐recall test. The results showed that the targets that were associated with social memories, episodes including any person, were recalled more often than those with nonsocial memories. Also, the spacing effect was observed only for the recall of target words associated with social memories. These results were interpreted as showing that the inclusion of any particular person in an episode makes an episode itself more distinctive as an effective cue in autobiographical elaboration.     

Failures to retrieve specific memories in previously depressed individuals: random errors or content-related?

Failures to retrieve specific memories have been related to general tendencies to commit errors in executive functioning tasks, raising the question of whether they are simply a reflection of randomly occurring lapses in cognitive control or whether their occurrence is in any way related to memory content. This study investigated the relation between failures to retrieve specific autobiographical memories and dysfunctional attitudes in individuals at risk for depression and controls. Sixteen previously depressed and 19 never-depressed participants were assessed for dysfunctional attitudes regarding "need for approval" and "performance evaluation". One week later, they were asked to generate specific memories following dependency- and achievement-related cue words, both under single and dual task conditions. In previously depressed participants, dysfunctional attitudes regarding "need for approval" significantly predicted specificity for dependency-related events under dual task conditions. The findings provide qualified support for a role of content and demonstrate how, in previously depressed individuals, content effects can surface when cognitive control is undermined.     

The Representation of Left-Right Orientation: A Dissociation Between Imagery and Perceptual Recognition

Eight experiments were conducted to determine whether visual mental imagery preserves left-right orientation in conditions where recognition memory apparently does not. Such a dissociation would suggest that information in memory preserves left-right orientation, but the process that matches input to such representations does not respect this distinction. In the experiments reported here, participants were asked to use one of two methods to indicate which way Abraham Lincoln faces on a US penny: Either they selected the correct profile from two sketches, or they formed a mental image and then specified the direction. If participants had just viewed pennies and were asked to visualize a particular one, they performed far better than chance; in contrast, if imagery was discouraged, they performed poorly when recognizing the profiles perceptually. However, unless actively discouraged from doing so, most participants reported spontaneously visualizing pennies prior to perceptual recognition if they had recently seen pennies.     

目标预知对路径整合的影响

本研究采用头盔式虚拟现实与返回起点或路标的路径完成任务, 通过指导语来调控被试对于返回位置的预知, 检验目标预知对人类路径整合的影响。实验结果表明, 对于返回起点这一目标的预知可以使被试有效地忽略由于路标出现或路标数量增加而导致的干扰, 而对于返回路标这一目标的预知程度越高, 可以促使被试做出更准确的反应。这样的结果体现了目标预知作为一种非感知觉因素对于人类路径整合的影响, 也体现了人类路径整合的策略性和灵活性。     

Priming voluntary autobiographical memories: Implications for the organisation of autobiographical memory and voluntary recall processes

The goal of this study was to show that voluntary autobiographical memories could be primed by the prior activation of autobiographical memories. Three experiments demonstrated voluntary memory priming with three different approaches. In Experiment 1 primed participants were asked to recall memories from their elementary school years. In a subsequent memory task primed participants were asked to recall memories from any time period, and they produced significantly more memories from their elementary school years than unprimed participants. In Experiment 2 primed participants were asked to recall what they were doing when they had heard various news events occurring between 1998 and 2005. Subsequently these participants produced significantly more memories from this time period than unprimed participants. In Experiment 3 primed participants were asked to recall memories from their teenage years. Subsequently these participants were able to recall more memories from ages 13–15 than unprimed participants, where both had only 1 second to produce a memory. We argue that the results support the notion that episodic memories can activate one another and that some of them are organised according to lifetime periods. We further argue that the results have implications for the reminiscence bump and voluntary recall of the past.     

The effect of questioning on young children's memory for an event

The effect of adult questioning on young children's memory for an event was examined. Three groups of 4- and 5-year-old children experienced two special events. The questioning group was then asked a set of questions about one of the events on four different occasions over a 7-week period. At the end of the 7 weeks, all children were tested for recall of the two events. The experience of answering questions enhanced the memory performance of the children in the questioning group. However, comparison of the performance of the questioning group with that of two control groups showed that their memory improvement was extremely specific: (a) The questioning group did better only on the specific questions they had been repeatedly asked, (b) There was no general enhancement of recall; they were no better on new questions about the same event, (c) The enhancement was not specific to the experience of retrieving information from long-term memory; the performance of a control group with no long-term memory demands was almost identical to that of the questioning group. The results of this study support the view that adult questioning of young children enhances memory for the specific information about which questions have been asked, but it does not have generalized effects on memory performance or development.     

Retrieval of autobiographical memories: The mechanisms and consequences of truncated search

Five studies examined the extent to which autobiographical memory retrieval is hierarchical, whether a hierarchical search depends on central executive resources, and whether retrieving memories that are “higher” in the hierarchy impairs problem‐solving ability. The first study found that random generation (assessed using a button‐pressing task) was sensitive to changes in memory load (digit span). The second study showed that when participants fail to retrieve a target event, they respond with a memory that is higher up the hierarchy. The third study showed that memory is more generic only when participants use low imageable cues under cognitive load. The final two experiments showed that experimental manipulation of memory specificity affects problem solving (MEPS performance). The data are consistent with Conway and Pleydell‐Pearce's hierarchical retrieval model of autobiographical memory, and suggest that overgeneral memory in nonclinical participants is associated with reduced executive capacity only when retrieval is “top‐down” (generative).     

Memory error in recognizing a pre-change object

People often fail to detect a change between two visual scenes and retrieval failure has been suggested as a reason. We investigated the possibility that retrieval blocking underlies this failure by examining the error pattern in recognizing the pre-change object. The results of Experiment 1 showed that participants were biased toward selecting the lure that was similar to the post-change object when they failed to recognize the pre-change object. This bias was also observed in Experiment 2 when there was sufficient time to encode and consolidate the pre-change object and the bias was as strong as correct recognition in Experiment 3 when participants divided attention during encoding and comparison. The bias in memory error remained significant even when participants had the option to select an “I don’t remember” response in Experiment 4. In Experiment 5, the bias was observed after participants successfully detected a change at an invalidly cued location and after they failed to detect a change at a validly cued location. These findings suggest that blocking can lead to retrieval failure in change detection when participants are aware of a change yet unable to retrieve verbatim traces and also when participants are unaware of a change and use the post-change object to retrieve the identity of the previous object at the same location.     

市场信息整合的创造性思维机制初探

采用个别测试和集体测试相结合的方法, 辅以个别访谈等技术, 运用自编的实验测试材料, 通过两个实验探索市场信息的量、关键启发信息的突出性等对商业投资问题的思维决策结果的影响, 初步探讨了市场信息整合的创造性思维过程和机制。实验结果发现, 提供给被试的市场信息越多, 信息整合的问题空间越大, 其整合过程难度越大; 在问题空间进行搜索时, 被试需要抓住关键启发信息形成一个初始意向, 明确进一步搜索的思维方向; 初始意向形成后, 被试须筛选必要信息、排除冗余信息, 并进一步整合有用信息, 使初始意向更加精致化, 最终形成一个“可盈利的完善的投资方案”。     

Moving and memorizing: Motor planning modulates the recency effect in serial and free recall

Motor planning has generally been studied in situations where participants carry out physical actions without a particular purpose. Yet in everyday life physical actions are usually carried out for higher-order goals. We asked whether two previously discovered motor planning phenomena - the end-state comfort effect and motor hysteresis - would hold up if the actions were carried out in the service of higher-order goals. The higher-order goal we chose to study was memorization. By focusing on memorization, we asked not only how and whether motor planning is affected by the need to memorize, but also how memory performance might depend on the cognitive demands of motor planning. We asked university-student participants to retrieve cups from a column of drawers and memorize as many letters as possible from the inside of the cups. The drawers were opened either in a random order (Experiment 1) or in a regular order (Experiments 2 and 3). The end-state comfort effect and motor hysteresis were replicated in these conditions, indicating that the effects hold up when physical actions are carried out for the sake of a higher-order goal. Surprisingly, one of the most reliable effects in memory research was eliminated, namely, the tendency of recent items to be recalled better than earlier items - the recency effect. This outcome was not an artifact of memory being uniformly poor, because the tendency of initial items to be recalled better than later items - the primacy effect - was obtained. Elimination of the recency effect was not due to the requirement that participants recall items in their correct order, for the recency effect was also eliminated when the items could be recalled in any order (Experiment 3). These and other aspects of the results support recent claims for tighter links between perceptual-motor control and intellectual (symbolic) processing than have been assumed in the past.     

Crashing memories and reality monitoring: distinguishing between perceptions,imaginations and ‘false memories’

Research has shown that the memory characteristics questionnaire (MCQ) can be used to discriminate between ‘memories’ of perceived events and ‘memories’ of imagined events. The present study extended this research by examining the utility of the MCQ in distinguishing impossible memories (i.e., reports of an event a person could not have witnessed). Congruent with previous research, a considerable number of participants in both the pilot study (45%) and the main study (44%) were willing to report that they had seen a non‐existent film of the car crash in which Diana, Princess of Wales was killed. The MCQ ratings of three groups of participants were therefore compared: (1) those who indicated that they had seen the non‐existent film, (2) those who were asked to imagine having seen the film, and (3) a control group who were asked to rate their memory of when they first heard the news of the crash. The MCQ did not serve to distinguish impossible memories, but there were reliable differences on one of the MCQ subscales between those who imagined the film and controls. Furthermore, participants who reported that they had seen the film gave higher scores on the Self Monitoring scale. Implications are discussed. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Ease of retrieval effects in social judgment: the role of unrequested cognitions

The present research explores a new mechanism for ease of retrieval effects in social judgment. It is suggested that in the most common ease of retrieval paradigm, when it is difficult for people to generate or retrieve the specific type of cognition requested (e.g., positive thoughts about an issue or memories of assertive behavior), they are more likely to spontaneously generate or retrieve unrequested cognitions (e.g., negative thoughts about the issue or memories of unassertive behavior), and the presence of these unrequested cognitions can affect social judgment. In 4 experiments, participants were asked to generate a high (difficult) or low (easy) number of cognitions in a given direction. Across experiments, when participants were asked to generate a high number of cognitions, they also had more unrequested cognitions, and these unrequested cognitions played a mediating role in the ease of retrieval effect on judgment. In the 3rd and 4th experiments, this mechanism was found to be independent of previously identified mediators.     

Improving metacognitive accuracy: How failing to retrieve practice items reduces overconfidence

People often exhibit inaccurate metacognitive monitoring. For example, overconfidence occurs when people judge that they will remember more information on a future test then they actually do. The present experiments examined whether a small number of retrieval practice opportunities would improve participants’ metacognitive accuracy by reducing overconfidence. Participants studied Lithuanian–English paired associates and predicted their performance on an upcoming memory test. Then they attempted to retrieve one or more practice items (or none in the control condition) and made a second prediction. Experiment 1 showed that failing to retrieve a single practice item lead to improved subsequent performance predictions – participants became less overconfident. Experiment 2 directly manipulated retrieval failure and showed that again failure to retrieve a single practice item significantly improved subsequent predictions, relative to when participants successfully retrieved the practice item. Finally, Experiment 3 showed that additional retrieval practice opportunities reduced overconfidence and improved prediction accuracy.     

Eliciting false memories on implicit and explicit memory tests after incidental learning

Abstract: In a false memory experiment, lists of semantic associates (e.g., newspaper, letter, book, etc.) were presented to three groups of participants to induce false memories for critical nonpresented (CN) words (e.g., read) in an incidental learning task. The control group simply estimated the frequency rate in everyday Japanese discourse of each word on a list. The imagery instruction group received an additional instruction to imagine a thematically related converging word from the target words on a list. Participants in the imagery plus writing group received the same instructions as those in the imagery instruction group, but were also required to write down the word they imagined for each list. The results from the implicit and explicit memory tests given after the incidental learning episode showed that the level of priming for CN words was equivalent to that for actually presented target words for all three groups on the implicit test, whereas explicit memory results showed that participants explicitly recognized more target words than CN words. The implications for implicit associative response and fuzzy‐trace theories of false memory, as well as implicit priming, are discussed.     

Attention on our mind: The role of spatial attention in visual working memory

The current study shows that spatial visual attention is used to retrieve information from visual working memory. Participants had to keep four colored circles in visual working memory. While keeping this information in memory we asked whether one of the colors was present in the array. While retrieving this information, on some trials a probe dot was presented. When this probe dot was presented at the location of the color that had to be retrieved, participants responded faster than when it was presented at another location. Our findings further elaborate the role of visual attention in working memory: not only is attention the mechanism by which information is stored into working memory, it is also the mechanism by which information is retrieved from visual working memory.     

Remembering and telling self-consistent and self-discrepant memories

It has been argued that memories that are inconsistent with one's self would differ from those that are consistent with the self. The present study addresses retrieval, phenomenology, rehearsal and narrative characteristics of autobiographical memories that are consistent versus discrepant with one's self. One hundred participants were asked to recall one self-consistent and one self-discrepant memory as well as an episode of telling these memories to others. They also filled out the Autobiographical Memory Questionnaire and the Centrality of Event Scale for each memory. Results showed no difference between self-consistent and self-discrepant memories in retrieval time, specificity or phenomenology. However, self-discrepant memory narratives contained more meaning-making statements and less autonomy than self-consistent memories. Compared to self-consistent memories, self-discrepant memories were told to fewer people, and listener responses were more negative when they were told. Results are discussed in relation to the functions these memories serve.