Characteristics of proper names and temporal memory of social news events

Long-term memory of social news events was investigated by means of a questionnaire methodology with a large sample of participants. In Experiment 1, a total of 501 university students were asked to give proper names (i.e., persons and places) that related to a certain news event, and to estimate the date of the event. The accuracy of proper names (especially person names) was superior to that of estimated date (i.e., year). In addition, telescoping effects were found in the events that occurred more than 3 years ago, but time expansion effects emerged in the events that occurred less than 2 years ago. In Experiment 2, in which 182 students participated, the accuracy of proper names and the date estimates tended to be high on the events that participants judged to be given frequent exposure by the mass media. Based on these results, we discuss long-term memory and temporal schemata regarding social news events.     

Metacognitive errors contribute to the difficulty in remembering proper names

While prior research has shown that proper names are more challenging to learn and remember than other types of information (e.g., occupations), little research has explored the role of metacognitive factors in proper name learning. Thus in four experiments participants learned, made predictions, and were tested on their memory for common nouns (i.e., occupations) and proper nouns (i.e., names). Results showed that memory predictions were consistently overconfident for names, whereas the discrepancy between predictions and performance was smaller for occupations. With experience, participants were able to modify predictions and, critically, Experiment 4 showed that improvements in the accuracy of memory predictions led participants to allocate more study time to names and thus improved memory for names. Such data suggest that theories of proper name learning should make provisions for deficits in metacognitive awareness.     

Memory for time: How people date events

The effect of different formats on the accuracy of dating news and the distribution of personal events was examined in four conditions. In the first, participants had to date events in the absolute time format (e.g., "July 2004"), and in the second, they had to date events in the relative time format (e.g., "3 weeks ago"). In the other conditions, they were asked to choose between the two formats. We found a small backward telescoping effect for recent news events and a large forward telescoping effect for remote events. Events dated in the absolute time format were more accurate than those dated in the relative time format. Furthermore, participants preferred to date news events with the relative time format and personal events with the absolute time format, as well as preferring to date remote events in the relative time format and recent events in the absolute time format.     

Placing events in time: The role of autobiographical recollection

Episodic experience is argued to be rich in temporal information, but it remains unclear whether temporal information is directly coded in the event memory or is reconstructed at retrieval. The two experiments reported here emphasise the role of reconstructive processes of autobiographical context in establishing the date of memories. Younger and older participants were presented with famous public events, although only the latter had actually lived through them. Participants were asked to make forced-choice judgements about the date of the event and other event-related facts. Overall, while the older group showed better fact knowledge of the events, this did not translate into better dating performance. This older group showed similar dating performance across events with high and low factual knowledge. In contrast, the younger group's dating accuracy was determined by their level of knowledge. This suggests that older individuals who have direct episodic experience of an event may perform the task in a qualitatively different manner, eschewing semantic facts in favour of other sources of information. Crucially, this process does not appear to enhance performance. A second experiment addressed the issue of whether older participants date events based on general qualities of the event memory (e.g., vividness), the availability of other event-related semantic facts, or autobiographical context. It was found that the ability to place an event in autobiographical context is related to dating accuracy, but not to other aspects of memory.     

Robust memory of where from way back when: evidence from behaviour and visual attention

Retention of events typically exhibits a sharp initial decrease followed by levelling off of forgetting. In an apparent exception to this general rule, college students have robust memory for their own locations in obscured versions of photographs of their entering classes taken during orientation-related activities, whether tested 2 months or 42 months after the event. Experiment 1 of the present research was a test for conceptual replication of this finding in photographs depicting more than twice the number of students (and thus potential distracters). There was no difference in memory accuracy for personal spatial location across retention intervals of 6–30 months. Experiment 2 featured 40-h and 2-month retention intervals, thereby providing a more fine-grained test of the forgetting function. The findings replicated Experiment 1. In Experiment 3, eye-tracking measures of visual attention revealed that participants rapidly fixated their own spatial locations within the photographs, even in the absence of explicit awareness. In all three experiments, memory for temporal features of the orientation activities (e.g., day and time the photograph was taken) followed the typical forgetting function. The findings suggest differential preservation of episodic memory for where relative to other aspects of events and experiences, such as when.     

Placing events in time: the role of autobiographical recollection

Episodic experience is argued to be rich in temporal information, but it remains unclear whether temporal information is directly coded in the event memory or is reconstructed at retrieval. The two experiments reported here emphasise the role of reconstructive processes of autobiographical context in establishing the date of memories. Younger and older participants were presented with famous public events, although only the latter had actually lived through them. Participants were asked to make forced-choice judgements about the date of the event and other event-related facts. Overall, while the older group showed better fact knowledge of the events, this did not translate into better dating performance. This older group showed similar dating performance across events with high and low factual knowledge. In contrast, the younger group's dating accuracy was determined by their level of knowledge. This suggests that older individuals who have direct episodic experience of an event may perform the task in a qualitatively different manner, eschewing semantic facts in favour of other sources of information. Crucially, this process does not appear to enhance performance. A second experiment addressed the issue of whether older participants date events based on general qualities of the event memory (e.g., vividness), the availability of other event-related semantic facts, or autobiographical context. It was found that the ability to place an event in autobiographical context is related to dating accuracy, but not to other aspects of memory.     

Reconstructive memory in the dating of personal and public news events

Two experiments investigated memory for the dates of events selected and recorded by subjects in diaries. In Experiment 1, personal events and public news events were compared, with retention time varying from 1 week up to 9 months. It was found that the day of the week was more accurately identified for personal events than for news events, that day-of-the-week (DOW) accuracy did not decrease with increasing retention time, and that memory of the personal context of both event types was more important for DOW accuracy than was memory of the core of the events. These results support our view that memory of the day of the week is mainly reconstructed by reference to a temporal week schema based on personal experiences, and that the relation of news events to the week schema is mediated by memory of personal context. The distribution of DOW errors was modeled as the outcome of a process of guessing constrained by subdivisions of the week schema, without assuming any special temporal memory trace. In Experiment 2, the model was shown to fit independently collected data from a different subject pool and country equally well.     

Self-events and other-events: Temporal dating and event memory

A diary methodology was used to assess factors related to temporal dating and cued recall of real-world events. In one diary, participants kept a record of unique personal autobiographical events. In a second diary, participants recorded unique events from the life of a friend or relation. At the time each event was recorded, participants rated the event’s pleasantness, person typicality, and degree of initial mental involvement in the event. At the end of the academic quarter, participants provided a recall rating, a rehearsal rating, a date estimate, and a report of the strategy used to estimate the date for each event. Results of regression analyses indicated that both self-events and other-events were characterized by superior memory for person-atypical events. Furthermore, there was a positivity bias in recall for self-events, but there was a negativity bias in recall for other-events. Mediational analyses indicated that the self-event positivity bias was due to enhanced mental involvement when the events occurred, whereas the other-event negativity bias was due to subsequent event rehearsal. The date estimation results indicated that self-event dating was more accurate and evinced less telescoping than other-event dating. Furthermore, the accuracy of date estimates was substantially mediated by event memory. However, mediational differences between self-events and other-events did not emerge. The theoretical implications of these results are discussed.     

共患难,更同盟:共同经历相同负性情绪事件促进合作行为

4项实验探讨了共同经历相同负性情绪事件,相比单独经历负性情绪事件,是否以及如何促进了个体间的合作。实验1~3分别采用抽奖任务和瑞文推理测验任务操纵负性情绪事件,采用公共物品博弈任务测量合作行为,结果表明,共同经历相同负性情绪事件,相比单独经历负性情绪事件,促进了个体间的合作行为。实验2通过测量归属需要、社会联结和内群体认同,实验3通过操纵归属需要,来考察共同经历相同负性情绪事件促进合作行为的潜在机制,结果表明,共同经历者之间的合作行为受归属需要的驱动,而社会联结和内群体认同不足以对该现象进行解释。实验4通过操纵个体共同经历“相同”和“不同”的负性情绪事件,进一步厘清了,促进个体间的合作是由于“共同经历相同的负性情绪事件”而非“共同经历负性情绪”造成的。研究结果有利于解释小群体的形成,对群体和社会管理亦具有借鉴意义。     

Effects of divided attention and social categorization on the own-race bias in face recognition

Perceivers remember own-race faces more accurately than other-race faces (i.e., Own-Race Bias). In the current experiments, we manipulated participants' attentional resources and social group membership to explore their influence on own and other-race face recognition memory. In Experiment 1, Chinese participants viewed own-race and Caucasian faces, and between-subjects we manipulated whether participants attention was divided during face encoding. We found that divided attention eliminated the Own-Race Bias in memory due to a reduction of memory accuracy for own-race faces, implicating that attention allocation plays a role in creating the bias. In Experiment 2, Chinese participants completed an ostensible personality test. Some participants were informed that their personality traits were most commonly found in Caucasian (i.e., other-race) individuals, resulting in these participants sharing a group membership with other-race targets. In contrast, other participants were not told anything about the personality test, resulting in the default own-race group membership. The participants encoded the faces for a subsequent recognition memory test either with or without performing a concurrent arithmetic distracting task. Results showed that other-race group membership and reducing attention during encoding independently eliminated the typical Own-Race Bias in face memory. The implications of these findings on perceptual-expertise and social-categorization models are discussed.     

Subjective experience guides betting decisions beyond accuracy: evidence from a metamemory illusion

The goal of this research was to test whether subjective memory experiences drive accuracy regulation decisions above and beyond objective memory indices. In four experiments (n?=?115) subjective recollection (i.e., reporting “Remember” in the Remember-Know task) was dissociated from memory accuracy by manipulating retrieval during a two-alternative forced-choice recognition task: in the Match condition the distracter was a novel exemplar of the target (e.g., a studied and an unstudied toaster) and in the Non-match condition the distracter was a novel exemplar of another studied but untested item (e.g., a studied toaster and an unstudied birdhouse). Participants were more accurate on Match trials, but reported subjective recollection more frequently on Non-match trials. Critically, participants also bet more often on Non-match trials to the detriment of their score (Experiment 1). This pattern persisted when participants were additionally required to retrieve details about items (Experiment 2) and when confidence assessments were collected (Experiment 3). Finally, participants bet more on Non-match trials even when subjective judgments were not elicited, suggesting that the decision process does not require reporting on subjective experience (Experiment 4). These results indicate that subjective memory experiences guide decision-making independent of objective accuracy and thus are critical to accuracy regulation.     

False memories of fabricated political events

In the largest false memory study to date, 5,269 participants were asked about their memories for three true and one of five fabricated political events. Each fabricated event was accompanied by a photographic image purportedly depicting that event. Approximately half the participants falsely remembered that the false event happened, with 27% remembering that they saw the events happen on the news. Political orientation appeared to influence the formation of false memories, with conservatives more likely to falsely remember seeing Barack Obama shaking hands with the president of Iran, and liberals more likely to remember George W. Bush vacationing with a baseball celebrity during the Hurricane Katrina disaster. A follow-up study supported the explanation that events are more easily implanted in memory when they are congruent with a person's preexisting attitudes and evaluations, in part because attitude-congruent false events promote feelings of recognition and familiarity, which in turn interfere with source attributions.     

Naming very familiar people: When retrieving names is faster than retrieving semantic biographical information

One of the most reliable findings in the literature on person indentification is that semantic categorization of a face occurs more quickly than naming a face. Here we present two experiments in which participants are shown the faces of their colleagues, i.e., personally familiar people, encountered with high frequency. In each experiment, naming was faster than making a semantic classification, despite the fact that the semantic classifications were highly salient to the participants (Experiment 1: highest degree obtained; Experiment 2: nationality). The finding is consistent with models that allow or parallel access from faces to semantic information and to names, and demonstrates the need for the frequency of exposure to names to be taken into account in models of proper name processing e.g. Burke, Mackay, Worthley and Wade (1991) .     

Thinking about memories for everyday and shocking events: Do people use ease-of-retrieval cues in memory judgments?

Extant research shows that people use retrieval ease, a feeling-based cue, to judge how well they remember life periods. Extending this approach, we investigated the role of retrieval ease in memory judgments for single events. In Experiment 1, participants who were asked to recall many memories of an everyday event (New Year's Eve) rated retrieval as more difficult and judged their memory as worse than did participants asked to recall only a few memories. In Experiment 2, this ease-of-retrieval effect was found to interact with the shocking character of the remembered event: There was no effect when the event was highly shocking (i.e., learning about the attacks of September 11, 2001), whereas an effect was found when the event was experienced as less shocking (due either to increased distance to "9/11" or to the nonshocking nature of the event itself). Memory vividness accounted for additional variance in memory judgments, indicating an independent contribution of content-based cues in judgments of event memories.     

Environmental context-dependent eyewitness recognition

The present study helped resolve the apparent conflict between many laboratory list-learning studies, which have not found environmental context-dependent recognition memory, and staged field studies (e.g. Malpass and Devine, 1981), whose results with ‘guided memory’ techniques suggest that eyewitness face recognition should depend upon environmental context reinstatement. It was found in two different experiments that, relative to testing in a new place, returning participants to the environment where a live staged event had occurred improved performance on identification of a confederate's face (i.e., hit rate). Although physical reinstatement improved identification performance in Experiment 1, mental reinstatement instructions to subjects tested in a new environment did not improve identification performance over an uninstructed group. The environmental reinstatement effect did not interact with test delay or confederate. In Experiment 2 it was found that environmental reinstatement improved accuracy (hit rate and foil identification rate) when the correct target was present in the test line-up, and that false identifications were not significantly affected by contextual manipulations when the correct target was absent from the line-up. The results provide an empirical basis for the hypothesis that returning to the scene of an event improves eyewitness face recognition.     

Scale effects in memory for the timeof events

This study addressed the question of how people remember the time of past events. Stimuli were 10 news events that had occurred from 6 months to 20 years before the study. In contrast to previous studies of memory for time, subjects were asked to provide estimates of the stimulus events on multiple time scales, including year, month, day of the month, day of the week, and hour. If judgments are based on direct information about the age of the memory, accuracy should decrease monotonically as one moves to finer scales. Alternatively, if subjects reconstruct the time from fragmentary information associated with the event, one would expect that estimates on finer time scales would often exceed grosser scales in accuracy. Results for accuracy, confidence, and number of recall cues supported the latter position. In addition, subjects reported a variety of types of recall cues, the most common being memory for personal experiences or events that were contiguous with the news event.     

Flashbulb memories in social groups: a comparative test-retest study of the memory of French President Mitterrand's death in a French and a Belgian group

Flashbulb memories are vivid and long-lasting memories for the reception context of an important public event (Brown & Kulik, 1977). They are assumed to be triggered by emotional factors (i.e., intensity of emotional feeling, appraisal of the original event) and by social factors (i.e., social sharing of the news, following media debate about the event). The present study investigated the memory for the death of the former President of France F. Mitterrand in two social groups, i.e., French and Belgian people. This study tests whether the flashbulb memory attributes, the memory for the original event, and the impact of the emotional and social determinants of flashbulb memory differed across groups. The results indicated that the flashbulb memory for Mitterrand's death is affected by group provenance, as French people showed higher levels of recall for the flashbulb memory attributes and their determinants than Belgian people. Time impaired recollections in both groups, so that flashbulb memories appear prone to decay and share the same destiny as ordinary memories. The theoretical construct of concern--as the most basic antecedent of emotional experiences and its related appraisal (Frijda, 1994)--is discussed in order to explain the differences in memory of the two social groups.     

Increasing mentally retarded adolescents' verbalizations about current events

The effects of antecedent and consequent events on the verbal behavior of three institutionalized mentally retarded adolescents were examined. Verbal statements, related to current national and international events, were recorded after exposures to television news programs. The study examined the accuracy of verbalizations as a function of: (1) exposures to television news presentations in massed (i.e., viewing the entire news program before an opportunity to describe it) versus distributed from (i.e., viewing each news item separately with each followed by an opportunity to describe it), and (2) contingent tokens and social praise for correct verbal responses (i.e., statements corresponding to news items presented). Both the temporal distribution of news presentations and the reinforcement procedures improved the accuracy of verbal statements emitted by the subjects.     

Flashbulb memories in social groups: A comparative test–retest study of the memory of French President Mitterrand's death in a French and a Belgian group

Flashbulb memories are vivid and long-lasting memories for the reception context of an important public event (Brown & Kulik, 1977). They are assumed to be triggered by emotional factors (i.e., intensity of emotional feeling, appraisal of the original event) and by social factors (i.e., social sharing of the news, following media debate about the event). The present study investigated the memory for the death of the former President of France F. Mitterrand in two social groups, i.e., French and Belgian people. This study tests whether the flashbulb memory attributes, the memory for the original event, and the impact of the emotional and social determinants of flashbulb memory differed across groups. The results indicated that the flashbulb memory for Mitterrand's death is affected by group provenance, as French people showed higher levels of recall for the flashbulb memory attributes and their determinants than Belgian people. Time impaired recollections in both groups, so that flashbulb memories appear prone to decay and share the same destiny as ordinary memories. The theoretical construct of concern - as the most basic antecedent of emotional experiences and its related appraisal (Frijda, 1994) - is discussed in order to explain the differences in memory of the two social groups.     

The impact of hedged testimony on judgments of credibility

We tested whether people are attuned to critical memory factors, such as age at the timing of encoding and hedge words when judging the credibility of testimony. In two experiments, participants read a 19‐year‐old's testimony regarding a sexual assault. We manipulated whether participants learned that the assault occurred 4 years ago (when the claimant was 15 years old) or 15 years ago (when the claimant was 4 years old) and whether the claimant used hedge words in her testimony. In Experiment 2, we included a cross‐examination. Without the cross‐examination, participants rated the testimony as more credible when the assault had occurred 15 years ago. However, with the inclusion of a cross‐examination, participants rated the testimony more reliable when the event occurred 4 years ago and the claimant did not use hedge words. We discuss the implications our results have, particularly for historical cases, where memory is a key factor.