Eyewitness memory: The impact of a negative mood during encoding and/or retrieval upon recall of a non-emotive event

The police often appeal for eyewitnesses to events that were unlikely to have been emotive when observed. An eyewitness, however, may be in a negative mood whilst encoding or retrieving such events as mood can be influenced by a range of personal, social, and environmental factors. For example, bad weather can induce a negative mood. This experiment compared the impact of negative and neutral moods during encoding and/or retrieval upon eyewitness recall of a non-emotive event. A negative mood during encoding had no impact upon the number of correct details recalled (provided participants were in a neutral mood at retrieval) but a negative mood during retrieval impaired the number of correct details recalled (provided participants were in a neutral mood at encoding). A negative mood at both time points enhanced the number of correct details recalled, demonstrating a mood-dependent memory enhancement. The forensic implications of these findings are discussed.     

The self and recollection reconsidered: how a ‘failure to replicate’ failed and why trace strength accounts of recollection are untenable

Hirshman and Lanning ( 1999 ) ‘failed to replicate’ findings reported by Conway and Dewhurst ( 1995 ). There were, however, critical differences in design between the two sets of experiments. For example, Hirshman and Lanning used a within‐subject design and a short retention interval, whereas Conway and Dewhurst used a between‐subjects design and longer retention intervals. We demonstrate in a new series of experiments that the Conway and Dewhurst findings do replicate when the correct design is used and, moreover, we show that the design differences in Hirshman and Lanning's experiments account for their findings. Finally, we develop an account in terms of the self that can explain the complex pattern of findings, a pattern which lies beyound the scope of simple trace strength models of memory. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Sociolinguistic inference and intercultural coorientation.

We present a model that examines the effects of cultural differences on coorientation (the ability of communicators to accurately encode and interpret the referential and relational meanings of messages). Intercultural coorientation is made problematic by the absence of certain shared communication system knowledge, which in same‐culture interactions is used in the dynamic sociolinguistic negotiation of relational rights and obligations. We propose that the process of sociolinguistic negotiation of meanings relies fundamentally on probabilistic inference and have constructed a model based on Bayes' theorem. The model predicts the effects of the communication situation, communicator stereotypes and prejudice, and some other‐culture speaker errors on conclusions the receiver draws about the message. Using the model, we distinguish between the ethnocentric error of interpreting a communication in terms of one's own culture and the error of not seeing the communication as diagnostic. Among our predictions are: (a) the less diagnostic the communication, the more impact cultural stereotypes will have on attributions; (b) although evidence of sociolinguistic incompetence sometimes causes misunderstanding, it sometimes prevents misunderstanding; (c) multiple consistent features make intentions clearer than would a single cue, but multiple features violating co‐occurrence norms often lead to the attribution of incompetence.     

Disjunctivism and the Epistemological Holy Grail

The grounding or motivating intuitions behind internalism and externalism seem to be fundamentally at odds. If there is ever to be a viable or satisfying solution to the problem, it must satisfy the grounding intuitions behind both sides of the debate. Duncan Pritchard claims his theory of epistemological disjunctivism (ED) does just this, arguing that it could be the holy grail we have all been waiting for. However, I believe the holy grail is already out there in the form of the theory that knowledge is a mental state (KMS). In this article, I defend the idea the KMS is far better able to satisfy the internalist and externalist intuitions than ED.     

Illusions of familiarity caused by cohort activation

Subjects took part in an auditory lexical decision task followed by an auditory test of recognition memory for words presented in this task. Subjects categorized their recognition judgments as based on either recollection (“remember” responses) or familiarity (“know” responses). Distractor items in the recognition test included the base words from which the nonwords used in the lexical decision task were derived. Consistent with the findings of Wallace, Stewart, Sherman, and Mellor (1995), more false alarms were made to “late” base words (where the corresponding nonwords were created by changing a phoneme near the end of the word) than to “early” base words (corresponding nonwords were created by changing a phoneme at the beginning of the word). However, this effect was found in “know” responses but not in “remember” responses. The findings are attributed to enhanced fluency with which the base words are processed following their implicit activation at encoding.     

The self and recollective experience

Three experiments investigated the hypothesis that self-reference at encoding increases the probability of recollective experience in recognition memory. In all three experiments separate groups of subjects studied words naming personality traits. One group judged the self-relevance of the traits, the other groups performed orientating tasks low in self-reference. In a recognition test subjects first identified old items and then indicated which of these were accompanied by recollective experience ('remember' responses) and which were recognized on some other basis ('know' responses). No reliable differences in overall recognition performance between self-referent and semantic encoding tasks were observed. However, subjects who encoded trait adjectives with reference to the self produced reliably more remember responses and few know responses than subjects who had encoded the items in the low self-referent tasks. Experiment 1 demonstrated a self-reference effect in recognition accompanied by recollective experience after 1-hour retention interval, while Experiment 2 found this effect to persist over a 24-hour retention interval. Experiment 3 demonstrated that this self-reference effect is obtained under incidental as well as under intentional learning conditions. Taken together these findings demonstrate the importance of self-reference as a factor in determining the likelihood that recognition judgements will be accompanied by recollective experience.     

Investigating the attentional demands of recognition memory: Manipulating depth of encoding at study and level of attention at test

Two experiments investigated the effects of divided attention at test after manipulating levels of processing at study. In Experiment 1 items were studied either intact or as anagrams. In Experiment 2 items were studied with either full or divided attention (DA). In both experiments participants carried out a recognition test with either full or divided attention. Analysis of remember and know responses revealed that DA at test had no effect on remember responses to anagrams or to items studied with full attention. In contrast, Know responses decreased with DA at test, and this occurred for items studied in both deep and shallow encoding conditions. The present study confirms recent findings (Knott & Dewhurst, 2007a) that knowing can rely on more controlled retrieval processes, whereas remembering can rely on more automatic retrieval processes. Differences in the controlled processes associated with recollection and familiarity and remember and know responses are discussed.     

Selective interference with the use of visual images in the symbolic distance paradigm

Eight experiments investigated the effects of visual, spatial, auditory, and executive interference on the symbolic comparison of animal size and ferocity, semantic goodness of words, and numbers. Dynamic visual noise (DVN) and the reading of visually presented stimulus items were shown to selectively interfere with response times on the animal size comparison task, though the slope of the symbolic distance function remained unchanged. Increased change of DVN significantly increased interference, but interference was reduced by equiluminant DVN. Spatial tracking reduced the slope of the symbolic distance function in contrast to an executive task that only increased mean latency and errors for all comparisons. Results suggest that the generation of an image is necessary for size comparison, but neither imagery nor executive function is responsible for the frequently observed distance-time function.     

The effect of divided attention on false memory depends on how memory is tested

In three experiments, we investigated the effects of divided attention on false memory, using the Deese/Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants studied six DRM lists with full attention and six in one of two divided-attention conditions (random number generation or digit monitoring). Both divided-attention conditions increased false recall of related words (Experiment 1) but reduced false recognition (Experiment 2). These results were confirmed in Experiment 3, in which the type of secondary task was manipulated within groups. We argue that the increase in false recall with divided attention reflects a change in participants' response criterion, whereas the decrease in false recognition occurs because the secondary tasks prevent participants from generating associates of the words presented at study.