Older, not younger, children learn more false facts from stories

Early school-aged children listened to stories that contained correct and incorrect facts. All ages answered more questions correctly after having heard the correct fact in the story. Only the older children, however, produced story errors on a later general knowledge test. Source errors did not drive the increased suggestibility in older children, as they were better at remembering source than were the younger children. Instead, different processes are involved in learning correct and incorrect facts from fictional sources. All ages benefited from hearing correct answers because they activated a pre-existing semantic network. Older children, however, were better able to form memories of the misinformation and thus showed greater suggestibility on the general knowledge test.     

Age differences in suggestibility to contradictions of demonstrated knowledge: the influence of prior knowledge

People maintain intact general knowledge into very old age and use it to support remembering. Interestingly, when older and younger adults encounter errors that contradict general knowledge, older adults suffer fewer memorial consequences: Older adults use fewer recently-encountered errors as answers for later knowledge questions. Why do older adults show this reduced suggestibility, and what role does their intact knowledge play? In three experiments, I examined suggestibility following exposure to errors in fictional stories that contradict general knowledge. Older adults consistently demonstrated more prior knowledge than younger adults but also gained access to even more across time. Additionally, they did not show a reduction in new learning from the stories, indicating lesser involvement of episodic memory failures. Critically, when knowledge was stably accessible, older adults relied more heavily on that knowledge compared to younger adults, resulting in reduced suggestibility. Implications for the broader role of knowledge in aging are discussed.     

Using story contexts to bias children’s true and false memories

The effects of embedding standard Deese/Roediger-McDermott (DRM) lists into stories whose context biased interpretation either toward or away from the overall themes of the DRM lists on both true and false recognition were investigated with 7- and 11-year-olds. These biased story contexts were compared with the same children’s susceptibility to false memory illusions using the standard DRM list presentation paradigm. The results showed the usual age effects for true and false memories in the standard DRM list paradigm, where 11-year-olds exhibited higher rates of both true and false recognition compared with the 7-year-olds. Importantly, when DRM lists were embedded in stories, these age effects disappeared for true recognition. For false recognition, although developmental differences were attenuated, older children were still more susceptible to false memory illusions than younger children. These findings are discussed in terms of current theories of children’s false memories as well as the role of themes and elaboration in children’s memory development.     

Ironic effects of drawing attention to story errors

Readers learn errors embedded in fictional stories and use them to answer later general knowledge questions (Marsh, Meade, & Roediger, 2003). Suggestibility is robust and occurs even when story errors contradict well-known facts. The current study evaluated whether suggestibility is linked to participants' inability to judge story content as correct versus incorrect. Specifically, participants read stories containing correct and misleading information about the world; some information was familiar (making error discovery possible), while some was more obscure. To improve participants' monitoring ability, we highlighted (in red font) a subset of story phrases requiring evaluation; readers no longer needed to find factual information. Rather, they simply needed to evaluate its correctness. Readers were more likely to answer questions with story errors if they were highlighted in red font, even if they contradicted well-known facts. Although highlighting to-be-evaluated information freed cognitive resources for monitoring, an ironic effect occurred: Drawing attention to specific errors increased rather than decreased later suggestibility. Failure to monitor for errors, not failure to identify the information requiring evaluation, leads to suggestibility.     

Ironic effects of drawing attention to story errors

Readers learn errors embedded in fictional stories and use them to answer later general knowledge questions (Marsh, Meade, & Roediger, 2003). Suggestibility is robust and occurs even when story errors contradict well-known facts. The current study evaluated whether suggestibility is linked to participants' inability to judge story content as correct versus incorrect. Specifically, participants read stories containing correct and misleading information about the world; some information was familiar (making error discovery possible), while some was more obscure. To improve participants' monitoring ability, we highlighted (in red font) a subset of story phrases requiring evaluation; readers no longer needed to find factual information. Rather, they simply needed to evaluate its correctness. Readers were more likely to answer questions with story errors if they were highlighted in red font, even if they contradicted well-known facts. Although highlighting to-be-evaluated information freed cognitive resources for monitoring, an ironic effect occurred: Drawing attention to specific errors increased rather than decreased later suggestibility. Failure to monitor for errors, not failure to identify the information requiring evaluation, leads to suggestibility.     

Suggestibility From Stories: Can Production Difficulties and Source Monitoring Explain a Developmental Reversal?

Children's memories improve throughout childhood, and this improvement is often accompanied by a reduction in suggestibility. In this context, it is surprising that older children learn and reproduce more factual errors from stories than do younger children (Fazio & Marsh, 2008 Fazio , L. K. , & Marsh , E. J. ( 2008 ). Older, not younger, children learn more false facts from stories . Cognition , 106 , 1081 – 1089 .[Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). The present study examined whether this developmental reversal is limited to production tests, or whether younger children are still less suggestible when the final test (multiple-choice) asks them to recognize the answer. A second goal was to explore the role of source monitoring in children's suggestibility by examining children's awareness of learning within, versus before, the experiment. Five-year-olds and 7-year-olds listened to stories containing correct, neutral, and misleading references and later took either a multiple-choice or short-answer general knowledge test. In addition, they judged whether each answer had appeared in the stories and whether they had known it before the experiment. Critically, a developmental reversal in suggestibility was observed on both tests; younger children were less suggestible even when faced with the story errors at test. Although older children showed superior source discriminability for whether their answers had appeared in the stories, they showed an illusion of prior knowledge, believing they had known their misinformation answers all along. To this effect, older children's increased suggestibility may be due not only to their superior memory capacity for specific story errors, but also to their ability and tendency to integrate story information into their knowledge base.     

Story stimuli for creating false beliefs about the world.

Fiction is not always accurate, and this has consequences for readers. In laboratory studies, the reading of short stories led participants to produce story errors as facts on a later test of general knowledge (Marsh, Meade, & Roediger, 2003). The present article describes these story stimuli in detail, so that interested researchers will be able to use the stimuli and change them as needed for particular research projects. This article provides instructions for using the stories and suggestions for modifying them; it is a manual for one way of creating suggestibility. The full set of stories and reading comprehension questions may be downloaded from www.psychonomic.org/archive/.     

Learning errors from fiction: Difficulties in reducing reliance on fictional stories

Readers rely on fiction as a source of information, even when fiction contradicts relatively well-known facts about the world (Marsh, Meade, and Roediger, 2003). Of interest was whether readers could monitor fiction for errors, in order to reduce suggestibility. In Experiment 1, warnings about errors in fiction did not reduce students' reliance on stories. In Experiment 2, all subjects were warned before reading stories written at 6th- or 12th-grade reading levels. Even though 6th-grade stories freed resources for monitoring, suggestibility was not reduced. In Experiment 3, suggestibility was reduced but not eliminated when subjects pressed a key each time they detected an error during story reading. Readers do not appear to spontaneously monitor fiction for its veracity, but can do so if reminded on a trial-by-trial basis.     

Story stimuli for creating false beliefs about the world

Fiction is not always accurate, and this has consequences for readers. In laboratory studies, the reading of short stories led participants to produce story errors as facts on a later test of general knowledge (Marsh, Meade, & Roediger, 2003). The present article describes these story stimuli in detail, so that interested researchers will be able to use the stimuli and change them as needed for particular research projects. This article provides instructions for using the stories and suggestions for modifying them; it is a manual for one way of creating suggestibility. The full set of stories and reading comprehension questions may be downloaded fromwww.psychonomic.org/archive/.     

Features and feedback: enhancing metamnemonic knowledge at retrieval reduces source-monitoring errors

Three experiments explored the issue of whether enhanced metamnemonic knowledge at retrieval can improve participants' ability to make difficult source discriminations in the context of the eyewitness suggestibility paradigm. The 1st experiment documented differences in phenomenal experience between veridical and false memories. Experiment 2 revealed that drawing participants' attention to these differences by pairing the ratings of the features with instructions about their utility was successful in reducing source misattributions of suggested items to the event. The results of Experiment 3 showed that participants can make online adjustments in the types of evidence used to make source judgments, as participants who received correct feedback during the training portion of the test reduced misattribution errors on the remainder of the test where feedback was not provided. Altogether, these studies suggest that people can discover and benefit from updated knowledge of the types of memorial evidence that discriminate between sources of information in memory.     

Age differences in the rejection of false memories: The effects of giving warning instructions and slowing the presentation rate

Two experiments were conducted to examine whether children of different ages differ in their ability to reject associative false memories with the Deese–Roediger–McDermott (DRM) paradigm. Two different types of manipulations that are thought to facilitate false memory rejection in adults—slowing the presentation rate and issuing explicit warnings—were analyzed in younger and older children. The results showed that older children were more able than younger children to reject associative false memories through warnings and by slowing the presentation rate. We conclude that although older children are, in general, more prone to produce false memories with the DRM paradigm, they are also more able to reject them when certain conditions facilitate the editing process.     

Overdistribution in source memory

Semantic false memories are confounded with a second type of error, overdistribution, in which items are attributed to contradictory episodic states. Overdistribution errors have proved to be more common than false memories when the 2 are disentangled. We investigated whether overdistribution is prevalent in another classic false memory paradigm: source monitoring. It is. Conventional false memory responses (source misattributions) were predominantly overdistribution errors, but unlike semantic false memory, overdistribution also accounted for more than half of true memory responses (correct source attributions). Experimental control of overdistribution was achieved via a series of manipulations that affected either recollection of contextual details or item memory (concreteness, frequency, list order, number of presentation contexts, and individual differences in verbatim memory). A theoretical model was used to analyze the data (conjoint process dissociation) that predicts that (a) overdistribution is directly proportional to item memory but inversely proportional to recollection and (b) item memory is not a necessary precondition for recollection of contextual details. The results were consistent with both predictions.     

What's in a name for memory errors? Implications and ethical issues arising from the use of the term "false memory" for errors in memory for details

The term "false memories" has been used to refer to suggestibility experiments in which whole events are apparently confabulated and in media accounts of contested memories of childhood abuse. Since 1992 psychologists have increasingly used the term "false memory" when discussing memory errors for details, such as specific words within lists. Use of the term to refer to errors in details is a shift in language away from other terms used historically (e.g., "memory intrusions"). We empirically examine this shift in language and discuss implications of the new use of the term "false memories." Use of the term presents serious ethical challenges to the data-interpretation process by encouraging over-generalization and misapplication of research findings on word memory to social issues.     

Self-relevance enhances susceptibility to false memory

Eyewitness testimony serves as important evidence in the legal system. Eyewitnesses of a crime can be either the victims themselves—for whom the experience is highly self-referential—or can be bystanders who witness and thus encode the crime in relation to others. There is a gap in past research investigating whether processing information in relation to oneself versus others would later impact people's suggestibility to misleading information. In two experiments (Ns = 68 and 122) with Dutch and Chinese samples, we assessed whether self-reference of a crime event (i.e., victim vs. bystander) affected their susceptibility to false memory creation. Using a misinformation procedure, we photoshopped half of the participants' photographs into a crime slideshow so that they saw themselves as victims of a nonviolent crime, while others watched the slideshow as mock bystander witnesses. In both experiments, participants displayed a self-enhanced suggestibility effect: Participants who viewed themselves as victims created more false memories after receiving misinformation than those who witnessed the same crime as bystanders. These findings suggest that self-reference might constitute a hitherto new risk factor in the formation of false memories when evaluating eyewitness memory reports.     

误导信息干扰引发的错误记忆研究

本研究借鉴GSS的测验程序,以学习材料视觉呈现、团体实验的形式,在人工条件下模拟了目击者记忆过程．通过操纵材料呈现时间（20秒、40秒）与测验次数（初测、重测）两个变量,考察了该情境下错误记忆的内在机制及其动态变化特点。并进一步研究该情境下受暗示性与社会期望、自尊、心理控制源以及视觉想象生动性的关系。实验发现,40秒比20秒条件下,真实记忆效果更好,错误记忆效果更少;重测比初测时错误记忆更多。可见,真实记忆量的差异是影响错误记忆的主要因素：错误记忆较为顽固,产生后呈增加趋势。相关分析还发现,受暗示性的各种指标（yiddl、yidd2、yidd3和shift）与社会期望、自尊、心理控制源、视觉想象生动性等因素均无显著相关．与桔试的自由回忆成绩成显著负相关。     

I misremember it well: Why older adults are unreliable eyewitnesses

We used the eyewitness suggestibility paradigm to investigate the hypothesis that cognitive aging is associated with an increase in misrecollections—confidently held but false memories of past events. When younger and older adults were matched on their overall memory for experienced events, both groups showed comparable rates of suggestibility errors in which they claimed to have seen events in a video that had only been suggested in a subsequent questionnaire. However, older adults were—alarmingly—most likely to commit suggestibility errors when they were most confident about the correctness of their response. By contrast, their younger, accuracy-matched counterparts were most likely to commit these errors when they were uncertain about the accuracy of their response. The elderly adults’ propensity to make high-confidence errors fits our misrecollection account.     

Affect influences false memories at encoding: evidence from recognition data

Memory is susceptible to illusions in the form of false memories. Prior research found, however, that sad moods reduce false memories. The current experiment had two goals: (1) to determine whether affect influences retrieval processes, and (2) to determine whether affect influences the strength and the persistence of false memories. Happy or sad moods were induced either before or after learning word lists designed to produce false memories. Control groups did not experience a mood induction. We found that sad moods reduced false memories only when induced before learning. Signal detection analyses confirmed that sad moods induced prior to learning reduced activation of nonpresented critical lures suggesting that they came to mind less often. Affective states, however, did not influence retrieval effects. We conclude that negative affective states promote item-specific processing, which reduces false memories in a similar way as using an explicitly guided cognitive control strategy.     

Treat and trick: A new way to increase false memory

This paper reports a new experimental manipulation that increased false memories 1 month after the manipulation. Mirroring the standard three‐stage misinformation paradigm (original event, misinformation, and test), subjects in the experimental group were first given a colour‐slide presentation of two stories (events), then given an accurate account (instead of misinformation) of the events in narrations, and finally tested for their memory of the original events. One month later, they underwent the standard misinformation paradigm with two new events. The comparison group was given the standard misinformation tasks at both time points. Results showed that the experimental group produced more false memories in the subsequent misinformation paradigm than did the comparison group. We focus on trust and credibility as possible mechanisms underlying this effect. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The eyewitness suggestibility effect and memory for source

We examined the possibility that eyewitness suggestibility reflects failures of the processes by which people normally discriminate between memories derived from different sources. To test this hypothesis, misled and control subjects were tested either with a yes/no recognition test or with a "source monitoring" test designed to orient subjects to attend to information about the sources of their memories. The results demonstrate that suggestibility effects obtained with a recognition test can be eliminated by orienting subjects toward thinking about the sources of their memories while taking the test. Our findings indicate that although misled subjects are capable of identifying the source of their memories of misleading suggestions, they nonetheless sometimes misidentify them as memories derived from the original event. The extent to which such errors reflect genuine memory confusions (produced, for example, by lax judgment criteria) or conscious misattributions (perhaps due to demand characteristics) remains to be specified.     

Reported serial positions of true and illusory memories in the Deese/Roediger/McDermott paradigm

One of the easiest ways to induce illusory memories in the laboratory is to use the Deese–Roediger–McDermott (DRM) word-list paradigm. Researchers have used this paradigm not only to study people's memories of stimuli that were not actually presented, but also to study the phenomenological qualities of these illusions. In four experiments, the current investigation explored a phenomenological quality of illusory memories that has received almost no attention, specifically, temporality. A serial position task was incorporated into the DRM paradigm to examine temporal attributes of participants' true and false memories. Effects of list strength, presentation order, and types of warnings were examined. Results showed consistent serial position responses for true and false memories. However, only responses for illusory memories were affected by manipulations at study. The current findings thus lend support to encoding-based explanations of false recollections.