Person memory and person judgments based on categorically organized information

Free recall, cued recall, and rating-like judgments — conceived as alternative modes of expressing memorized information — were assessed in a person memory task. The target person had been described with respect to the presence or absence of 48 different interests (e.g., Mozart, sonatas, tennis, boxing) in 12 interest categories (e.g., music, sports). The number of interests (vs non-interests) per category was manipulated as well as the order of the three sub-tasks. The pattern of results can be explained within a categorical coding framework which suggests two functionally independent stages of recall: (a) access to a higher-order memory code on the category level, and (b0 reconstruction of specific items within categories. In particular, judgments of the degree of interest in the abstract categories were only related to selective free recall on the categorical level but not specific level free recall. Cued recall of the degree of interest in specific items was only related to free recall on the specific level. Making the category judgments before the free recall task, rather than afterwards, increased the availability of categories but not specific items. And inconsistent patterns of interests impaired the cued recall of specific patterns within categories but did not affect the categorical level. A strong positivity effect (i.e., more interests recalled than non-interests) was also found, resembling the often noted advantage of positive information in other domains of cognitive psychology.     

Learning words: children disregard some pragmatic information that conflicts with mutual exclusivity

Children tend to infer that when a speaker uses a new label, the label refers to an unlabeled object rather than one they already know the label for. Does this inference reflect a default assumption that words are mutually exclusive? Or does it instead reflect the result of a pragmatic reasoning process about what the speaker intended? In two studies, we distinguish between these possibilities. Preschoolers watched as a speaker pointed toward (Study 1) or looked at (Study 2) a familiar object while requesting the referent for a new word (e.g. ‘Can you give me the blicket?’). In both studies, despite the speaker's unambiguous behavioral cue indicating an intent to refer to a familiar object, children inferred that the novel label referred to an unfamiliar object. These results suggest that children expect words to be mutually exclusive even when a speaker provides some kinds of pragmatic evidence to the contrary.     

Explanations determine the impact of information on financial investment judgments

Previous research has shown that some types of judgments are influenced by the results of an explanation‐seeking comprehension process. The present experiments investigated novice investors' stock price forecasts and investment decisions. Information presented in a narrative story order was hypothesized to promote the construction of a coherent mental representation that would affect how information was interpreted and subsequently used to predict stock price changes. The results showed that outcome information had a distinctively high impact, but only when the information was read in story order. These results imply that presentation order affects the mental representation of evidence relevant to the forecast, and the form of that mental representation moderates the impact of individual pieces of information on the ultimate judgment. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Collaboration in associative recognition memory: using recalled information to defend "new" judgments

S. E. Clark, A. Hori, A. Putnam, and T. J. Martin (2000) showed that collaboration on a recognition memory task produced facilitation in recognition of targets but had inconsistent and sometimes negative effects regarding distractors. They accounted for these results within the framework of a dual-process, recall-plus-familiarity model but showed only weak evidence to support it. The present results of 3 experiments present stronger evidence for Clark et al.'s dual-process view and also show why such evidence is difficult to obtain.     

Knowledge and judgments about events that occurred prior to birth: The measurement of the persistence of information

Data from five laboratories using five different techniques were reanalyzed to measure subjects’ knowledge of events that occurred over the past 70 years. Subjects were about 20 years of age, so the measures included events that extended up to 50 years before birth. The functions relating knowledge about the events to age do not decrease precipitously at birth but gradually drop to above-chance levels. Techniques usually used to study retention within the individual can be used to study the persistence of ideas and fashions within an age cohort in a culture.     

Source-monitoring judgments about anagrams and their solutions: Evidence for the role of cognitive operations information in memory

Generating solutions to anagrams leads to a memory advantage for those solutions, with generated words remembered better than words simply read. However, an additional advantage is not typically found for solutions to difficult anagrams relative to solutions to easy ones, presenting a challenge for the cognitive effort explanation of the generation effect. In the present series of experiments, the effect of manipulating anagram difficulty is explored further by introducing two new source-monitoring judgments. These studies demonstrate that when attention is directed at test to the operations activated during encoding (by way of source-monitoring judgments focused on solving vs. constructing anagrams), a source advantage is observed for difficult anagrams. However, when attention is directed to the anagrams themselves, asking participants to remember the kinds of anagrams generated or solved (based on kind of rule rather than subjective impressions of difficulty), a similar source advantage is not observed. The present studies bring a new perspective to the investigation of difficulty manipulations on memory for problem solving by illustrating the impact of a shift in focus from the effort mediating cognitive operations to specifics about the cognitive operations themselves.     

The future is now: the impact of present fluency in judgments about the future

Recent research has emphasised the role of episodic memory in both remembering past events and in envisaging future events. On the other hand, it has been repeatedly shown that judgments about past events are affected by the fluency with which retrieval cues are processed. In this paper we investigate whether perceptual fluency also plays a role in judgments about future events. For this purpose we conducted four experiments. The first experiment replicated recent findings showing that stimuli that are processed fluently tend to be wrongly recognised as having been encountered in the past outside the laboratory walls [Brown, A. S., & Marsh, E. J. (2009). Creating illusions of past encounter through brief exposure. Psychological Science, 20, 534–538. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2009.02337.x]. Two follow-up experiments using Brown and Marsh’s [(2009). Creating illusions of past encounter through brief exposure. Psychological Science, 20, 534–538. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2009.02337] task tested the influence of perceptual fluency on future judgments. The fourth and last experiment was designed to rule out a potential confounding factor in the two previous experiments. Across experiments, we found that people rely on fluency when making judgments about events that are yet to come. These results suggest that fluency is an equally valid cue for past and future judgments.     

Implicit person theories influence memory judgments: the circumstances under which metacognitive knowledge is used

This work focuses on the influence of implicit theories on recognition judgments. We argue that to understand how a recognition task is solved, it is necessary to study inferential processes because individuals might use their metamnestic knowledge (‘I would have known that!’) as a basis for replacing missing recollective experiences with inferential processes (Strack & Bless, 1994 ). In the present study, individuals' preexisting implicit personality theory (Dweck, 1996 ) was measured and was identified as a moderating variable for the use of metamnestic knowledge. After participants had studied word lists their metamnestic knowledge concerning these lists was manipulated. The results of a subsequent recognition task revealed that individuals used these metacognitively based inferences only when they assumed personal stability (‘entity theory’). Participants who believed in personal variability (‘incremental theory’) did not draw similar inferences when recollective experiences were missing. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The ease-of-processing heuristic and the stability bias: dissociating memory, memory beliefs, and memory judgments

Judgments about memory are essential in promoting knowledge; they help identify trustworthy memories and predict what information will be retained in the future. In the three experiments reported here, we investigated the mechanisms underlying predictions about memory. In Experiments 1 and 2, single words were presented once or multiple times, in large or small type. There was a double dissociation between actual memory and predicted memory: Type size affected predicted but not actual memory, and future study opportunities affected actual memory but scarcely affected predicted memory. The results of Experiment 3 suggest that beliefs and judgments are largely independent, and neither consistently resembles actual memory. Participants' underestimation of future learning-a stability bias-stemmed from an overreliance on their current memory state in making predictions about future memory states. The overreliance on type size highlights the fundamental importance of the ease-of-processing heuristic: Information that is easy to process is judged to have been learned well.     

Selective exposure to information: the impact of information limits

In research on selective exposure to information, people have been found to predominantly seek information supporting rather than conflicting with their opinion. In most of these studies, participants were allowed to search for as many pieces of information as they liked. However, in many situations, the amount of information that people can search for is restricted. We report four experiments addressing this issue. Experiment 1 suggests that objective limits regarding the maximum number of pieces of information the participants could search for increases the preference for selecting supporting over conflicting information. In Experiment 2, just giving participants a cue about information scarcity induces the same effect, even in the absence of any objective restrictions. Finally, Experiment 3 and 4 clarify the underlying psychological process by showing that information limits increase selective exposure to information because information search is guided by the expected information quality, which is basically biased towards supporting information, and information limits act to reinforce this tendency. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The impact of affective information on the professional judgments of more experienced and less experienced auditors

This study examines whether the presence of realistic, yet irrelevant, affective information differentially influences the professional judgments of more experienced and less experienced auditors. In this study, auditors with different experience levels were either provided or not provided with information designed to elicit a negative interpersonal emotional reaction towards a manufacturing client when making an inventory obsolescence risk judgment. The results indicate that the inventory obsolescence risk assessments of less experienced auditors were significantly higher when they were provided with negative affective information on a client than when no such information was provided. No such differences were found for the more experienced auditors. This study suggests that professional experience is one factor that influences individuals' assessments of the informational value of affective reactions. This has implications for developing effective training programs to increase professionals' awareness of the influence that emotional reactions can have on their judgment. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

"Saying one thing and doing another": examining the impact of event order on hypocrisy judgments of others

This study investigated whether the temporal order of people's expressed statements and their behaviors affected others' judgments of hypocrisy, and why. It was proposed that hypocrisy would be greater when a statement establishing a personal standard preceded a behavior violating that standard as opposed to the reverse order. This order effect occurred in three studies, generalizing across two topic areas (healthy living and safe sex) and for both normative and non-normative statements (pro/anti-safe sex). Mediation analyses indicated that the reverse order mitigated against hypocrisy because the target's inconsistency was attributed to dispositional change. The discussion addresses additional variables likely to affect hypocrisy and the relationship of this research to hypocrisy paradigms in dissonance.     

Knowing in advance: the impact of prior event information on memory and event knowledge

We examined the influence of newly acquired information on children's memory and general representation of a personally experienced event. Thirty-five children between the ages of 5 and 7 years participated in the novel event (Visiting the Pirate). The day before participating, children were: (1) provided with new information specific to the up-coming event; (2) engaged in a discussion generally related to the event topic based on existing knowledge; or (3) discussed an unrelated topic. Advance information specific to the event led to better recall and, in particular, to better integration of the experience into a general event representation both soon after the event and at a follow-up interview 4 months later, whereas general discussion of the topic without the event specific information neither enhanced memory reports nor facilitated the integration of event information. Providing information in advance can have significant effects on memory and knowledge acquisition although many variables, including those relating to the specific content of the information, will affect this relation.     

Judgments relative to patterns: how temporal sequence patterns affect judgments and memory

Six experiments studied relative frequency judgment and recall of sequentially presented items drawn from 2 distinct categories (i.e., city and animal). The experiments show that judged frequencies of categories of sequentially encountered stimuli are affected by certain properties of the sequence configuration. We found (a) a first-run effect whereby people overestimated the frequency of a given category when that category was the first repeated category to occur in the sequence and (b) a dissociation between judgments and recall; respondents may judge 1 event more likely than the other and yet recall more instances of the latter. Specifically, the distribution of recalled items does not correspond to the frequency estimates for the event categories, indicating that participants do not make frequency judgments by sampling their memory for individual items as implied by other accounts such as the availability heuristic (Tversky & Kahneman, 1973) and the availability process model (Hastie & Park, 1986). We interpret these findings as reflecting the operation of a judgment heuristic sensitive to sequential patterns and offer an account for the relationship between memory and judged frequencies of sequentially encountered stimuli.     

Timing matters! The neural signature of intuitive judgments differs according to the way information is presented

One can conceive of intuition as the preliminary perception of coherence. Since this requires holistic perception, it is hypothesized that underlying processing strategies are dependent on the possibility to obtain all relevant information at once. The present study used magnetoencephalography (MEG) to investigate neural mechanisms underlying intuitive coherence perception when semantic concepts are presented all together (simultaneously) or one after the other (sequentially). With simultaneous presentation, absolute activation increases in the left OFC when participants recognize coherence. With sequential presentation activation increases in the right OFC when participants conclude that there is no common associate between the words presented. Behavioral performance was similar in the two experiments. These results demonstrate that the way information is revealed over time changes the processing of intuitive coherence perception. We propose that such changes must be taken into account to disentangle the neural and behavioral mechanisms underlying different accounts of intuition and related phenomena.     

Context attributes in memory are bound to item information,but not to one another

In four experiments, we compared binding between item and context information with binding between different types of context information. Participants studied line drawings of common objects that appeared in both different colors and different locations. We explored the effects of reinstating one type of information on recognition memory for another type, and we also tested the participants’ ability to discriminate intact from rearranged pairings of two types of information. Results showed that different contextual dimensions (i.e., color and location) were bound to item information (i.e., object information), but not to each other.     

Event memory: temporal-order judgments of personal life experiences

Three experiments with undergraduate subjects investigated the mental representations that people form when they recall and chronologically order their personal experiences. Subjects in each study first recalled five events that occurred to them in two general periods of their life (e.g., high school and college). Later, they saw pairs of these events and judged the order in which they occurred. It typically took less time to compare events that occurred in different time periods than events that occurred in the same period. However, response times depended on the serial positions of the compared events in each time period, and the distance between them, in ways that varied over the three experiments. These effects were interpreted in terms of a model of event memory and judgment proposed by Wyer, Shoben, Fuhrman, and Bodenhausen (1985). Specifically, subjects appear to organize the events they are asked to recall into categories defined by the periods of life in which they occurred and assign temporal codes to these categories. However, they do not perform a more detailed temporal coding of the events they recall unless a coherent temporal representation of these events is difficult to construct. A direct comparison between judgments of personal experiences and judgments of others' experiences suggested that people may make more detailed temporal coding of others' experiences than they do of their own.     

Recalling more childhood events leads to judgments of poorer memory: Implications for the recovered/false memory debate

Dissociative disorders that are believed to develop from childhood sexual abuse are often considered to include amnesia for childhood events, particularly the events that involve the abuse itself. One unresolved issue is the extent to which memory recovery attempts can contribute to claims of having amnestic symptoms. Experiments with undergraduate subjects reveal that requiring more reports of childhood events will increase judgments of having poorer memory of one’s childhood. The results are consistent with the use of heuristics when one is reasoning under conditions of uncertainty, as experienced difficulty in remembering more experiences is attributed to the incompleteness of childhood memory. The findings challenge the validity of reports of childhood amnesia that follow memory recovery attempts.