Can false memories spontaneously recover?

Can false memories that were suppressed at one time spontaneously recover at a later time? Fuzzy trace theory and activation-monitoring theory predict that false memories in the Deese, Roediger, and McDermott (DRM) procedure become substantially reduced as list learning progresses because participants employ a memory-editing process. It follows that if the editing process is rendered less effective, false memories should spontaneously recover. We found that after DRM lists were well learned and false recognition to critical words was substantially reduced by multiple study-test trials, those false memories spontaneously recovered when participants were either rushed or delayed on a retest. We attributed the reduction in false recognition over trials to a memory-editing process that suppresses false recognition as participants gradually learn which words were in the lists and which words, though similar, were not. Rushing or delaying the participants on a retest made it more difficult for them to edit their memory, and false memories spontaneously returned.     

If We Produce Discrepancies,Then How? Testing a Computational Process Model of Positive Goal Revision

Within the self‐regulation literature on goals, both discrepancy reduction and discrepancy production are considered important theoretical and practical processes. Yet, discrepancy production has only been examined in a limited number of goal‐striving contexts, and the analytical strategies employed (e.g., difference scores) are difficult to interpret. This study extends discrepancy production research to multiple goal contexts where the goals are in conflict. Computational modeling and an organizational simulation were used to test a control theory explanation of discrepancy production. The occurrence of discrepancy production in the computational model and participants was assessed using hierarchical linear modeling. Comparing the data from the computational model with participants' data indicated a good fit. Implications of the findings and methods are discussed.     

Clinical Expertise in Psychotherapy: How Expert Therapists Use Theory in Generating Case Conceptualizations and Interventions

Case conceptualization is a primary skill that may be the linchpin of clinical practice as it sets the framework for making sense of a patient’s difficulties and guides a path toward change. Providing meaning and structure to often ambiguous and nuanced clinical information, an apt case conceptualization facilitates the therapist’s complex integration of core therapeutic skills to produce expert performance. Rooted in the cognitive sciences literature on expertise, we introduce the concept of metabolizing theory to capture expert therapists’ capacity to use theoretical and clinical knowledge in an intuitive, flexible manner that responds and adapts to the unique and complex context of the treatment.     

Health Care Chaplains and their Role on Institutional Ethics Committees: An Australia Study

This paper presents the results of the largest Australian pastoral study concerning the perceptions of health care chaplains about their involvement on hospital research ethics committees (also known in some contexts as institutional ethics committees). Survey results from over 300 Australian health care chaplains indicated that nearly 90% of chaplains believed there was merit in chaplains serving on hospital research ethics committees, yet only a minority (22.7%) had ever participated on such committees. Data from in-depth interviews is also presented exploring the reasons for the lack of participation and the varying opinions regarding the role, appropriateness, and value of chaplains on ethics committees. Some implications of this study with respect to chaplaincy, hospital research ethics committees, health care institutions, ecclesiastical institutions, and government responsibilities are discussed.     

Psychology and Religion at Rice University: A Brief History

This essay provides a brief history and overview of the psychological, especially psychoanalytic, study of religion at Rice University.     

Gradual growth versus shape invariance in perceptual decision making

A dominant theme in modeling human perceptual judgments is that sensory neural activity is summed or integrated until a critical bound is reached. Such models predict that, in general, the shape of response time distributions change across conditions, although in practice, this shape change may be subtle. An alternative view is that response time distributions are shape invariant across conditions or groups. Shape invariance is predicted by some race models in which the first of several parallel fibers to communicate the signal determines the response. We competitively assess a specific gradual growth model, the one-bound diffusion model, against a natural shape-invariant competitor: shape invariance in an inverse Gaussian distribution. Assessment of subtle shape change versus shape invariance of response time distributions is aided by a Bayesian approach that allows the pooling of information across multiple participants. We find, conditional on reasonable distributional assumptions, subtle shape changes in response time that are highly concordant with a simple diffusion gradual growth model and discordant with shape invariance.     

Ambiguity aversion: the explanatory power of indeterminate probabilities

Daniel Ellsberg presented in Ellsberg (The Quarterly Journal of Economics 75:643–669, 1961) various examples questioning the thesis that decision making under uncertainty can be reduced to decision making under risk. These examples constitute one of the main challenges to the received view on the foundations of decision theory offered by Leonard Savage in Savage (1972). Craig Fox and Amos Tversky have, nevertheless, offered an indirect defense of Savage. They provided in Fox and Tversky (1995) an explanation of Ellsberg’s two-color problem in terms of a psychological effect: ambiguity aversion. The ‘comparative ignorance’ hypothesis articulates how this effect works and explains why it is important to an understanding of the typical pattern of responses associated with Ellsberg’s two-color problem. In the first part of this article we challenge Fox and Tversky’s explanation. We present first an experiment that extends Ellsberg’s two-color problem where certain predictions of the comparative ignorance hypothesis are not confirmed. In addition the hypothesis seems unable to explain how the subjects resolve trade-offs between security and expected pay-off when vagueness is present. Ellsberg offered an explanation of the typical behavior elicited by his examples in terms of these trade-offs and in section three we offer a model of Ellsberg’s trade-offs. The model takes seriously the role of imprecise probabilities in explaining Ellsberg’s phenomenon. The so-called three-color problem was also considered in Fox and Tversky (1995). We argue that Fox and Tversky’s analysis of this case breaks a symmetry with their analysis of the two-color problem. We propose a unified treatment of both problems and we present a experiment that confirms our hypothesis.     

Is expanding retrieval a superior method for learning text materials?

Expanding retrieval practice refers to the idea that gradually increasing the spacing interval between repeated tests ought to promote optimal long-term retention. Belief in the superiority of this technique is widespread, but empirical support is scarce. In addition, virtually all research on expanding retrieval has examined the learning of word pairs in paired-associate tasks. We report two experiments in which we examined the learning of text materials with expanding and equally spaced retrieval practice schedules. Subjects studied brief texts and recalled them in an initial learning phase. We manipulated the spacing of the repeated recall tests and examined final recall 1 week later. Overall we found that (1) repeated testing enhanced retention more than did taking a single test, (2) testing with feedback (restudying the passages) produced better retention than testing without feedback, but most importantly (3) there were no differences between expanding and equally spaced schedules of retrieval practice. Repeated retrieval enhanced long-term retention, but how the repeated tests were spaced did not matter.     

Concept Grounding and Knowledge of Set Theory

C. S. Jenkins has recently proposed an account of arithmetical knowledge designed to be realist, empiricist, and apriorist: realist in that what’s the case in arithmetic doesn’t rely on us being any particular way; empiricist in that arithmetic knowledge crucially depends on the senses; and apriorist in that it accommodates the time-honored judgment that there is something special about arithmetical knowledge, something we have historically labeled with ‘a priori’. I’m here concerned with the prospects for extending Jenkins’s account beyond arithmetic—in particular, to set theory. After setting out the central elements of Jenkins’s account and entertaining challenges to extending it to set theory, I conclude that a satisfactory such extension is unlikely.     

Pictorial encoding effects and memory confusions in the Deese–Roediger–McDermott paradigm: Evidence for the activation of spontaneous imagery

The purpose of the experiments reported in this paper was to examine the possible role of spontaneous imagery and list-specific cues on pictorial encoding effects induced by the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) task. After viewing pictures and words referring to thematically related materials, by way of a picture/word source-judgement task, participants were asked to remember the way in which these materials were presented. Participants reported “seeing” pictures of items that were presented as words, an effect predicted by the imaginal activation hypothesis in its suggestion that incidental images experienced during encoding will later be mistaken as memories for pictures. Whether participants made the same picture misattributions on related lures (or non-presented related items) depended on the way in which the lures’ respective thematic lists were experienced during encoding (Experiments 1 and 2), pointing to the effects of list-specific cues in picture/word judgements. These findings have intriguing implications for interpretations of picture-encoding effects induced by the DRM task. The findings also speak to the use of DRM false-memory rates when marshalling evidence against the use of imagery in applied settings.