Signature Limits in Mindreading Systems

Recent evidence that young children seem to both understand false belief in one sense, but not in another, has led to two‐systems theorizing about mindreading. By analyzing the most detailed two‐systems approach in studying social cognition—the theory of mindreading defended by Ian Apperly and Stephen Butterfill—I argue that that even when dutifully constructed, two‐systems approaches in social cognition struggle to adequately define the mindreading systems in terms of signature processing limits, an issue that becomes most apparent when investigating mindreading in infancy. I end the article by developing several challenges that face any two‐systems account of mindreading.     

False memories in Lewy‐body disease

Recently, de Boysson, Belleville, Phillips et al. (2011) found that patients with Lewy‐body disease (LBD) showed significantly lower rates of false memories than healthy controls, using the Deese–Roediger–McDermott (DRM) experimental procedure. Given that this result could be explained by the practically null rate of true recognition in the LBD group (0.09), we decided to replicate the study by de Boysson et al. (2011), but including a new condition that would maximize the true recognition rate (and analyze its effect on the rate of false memories). Specifically, in a DRM experiment, we manipulated (within subjects) two study and recognition conditions: in the “immediate” condition, both the LBD patients and the control group of healthy older people received a different recognition test after each study list (containing twelve words associated with a non‐presented critical word), while in the “delayed” condition (similar to the one in de Boysson et al., 2011), the participants received the entire series of study lists and then took only one recognition test. The results showed that, in both samples, the “immediate” condition produced higher corrected rates of both true and false recognition than the “delayed” condition, although they were both lower in the LBD patients, which shows that these patients are capable of encoding and recognizing the general similitude underlying information (gist memory) in the right conditions.     

An investigation into the relationship between the reported experience of negative life events,trait stress-sensitivity and false confessions among further education students in Iceland

This study investigates the interplay between the reported experiences of negative life events, reported levels of nerves, fear and tension experienced over the past 30 days, and reported false confessions. Data were obtained from 11,388 students in further education in Iceland, out of which 5439 participants were male and 5837 were female. Single level, random intercept, structural equation models were fitted showing that latent stress-sensitivity, indicated by levels of nerves, tension, fear, and the number of negative life events experienced exerted a significant direct effect on the likelihood of false confessions. Stress-sensitive interviewees (those reporting high levels of nerves, fear, tension and negative events) may be more susceptible to environmental influences, due to heightened physiological responsiveness towards and a negative perception of situations and social encounters, with false confessions being a direct consequence of this. A suggestion from the findings is that the type of false confession (the reason for it) may possibly dependent upon which contextual trigger has influenced the interviewee the most – those within the police interview itself and/or pressures from the wider environment within which they reside.     

Fact learning: How information accuracy,delay, and repeated testing change retention and retrieval experience

Previous classroom studies have shown that the phenomenology of studied facts changes over time. However, pedagogical needs preclude both the study of errors and the separation of the effects that delay and repeated testing have on retention and retrieval experience. We addressed these issues together in an experiment where participants read stories containing correct and misleading information and provided Remember, Just Know, and Familiar judgements on immediate and delayed general knowledge tests. After 2 days, information learned from the stories shifted from Remembered to Just Known, but repeated testing attenuated this shift. Interestingly, similar patterns of retrieval and phenomenology were observed for correct and misleading information with one important difference—the shift over time to Just Knowing was significantly greater for correct than for misleading information. Together, these findings show the roles of information accuracy, delay, and testing in determining both retention and the subjective experience of retrieval.     

Recall-to-reject: The effect of category cues on false recognition

Four experiments examined the effect of category cueing on recall-to-reject, one of the central memory-editing mechanisms thought to prevent the occurrence of false memories. When category names were used as retrieval cues, the typically observed false recognition effect was eliminated for semantically associated distractors (Experiment 1a) and, moreover, a reduction in the absolute level of the false alarm rate was found for phonologically associated distractors (Experiment 2a). In addition to the old/new-recognition data, analyses using multinomial models support the interpretation that category cueing was successful in increasing the probability of recall-to-reject (Experiments 1b and 2b). The results are in line with dual-process theories of recognition memory and provide further evidence for recall-to-reject in single item recognition. They demonstrate its potential to reduce false recognition even when explicit instructions are not given. In addition, the results demonstrate that the paradigm can give rise to side effects that oppose recall-to-reject. A simultaneous familiarity increase can explain why many studies failed to find evidence for recall-to-reject in terms of false alarm rates.     

Both differences in encoding processes and monitoring at retrieval reduce false alarms when distinctive information is studied

ABSTRACT

Recent research has provided evidence for memory modifications when a post-reactivation treatment (e.g., drugs, new learning) interferes with the memory re-stabilisation (reconsolidation) process. This finding contradicts the long-standing consolidation theory and has high practical and theoretical implications. With an object-learning paradigm, it was shown that episodic memory is highly susceptible to interfering material presented after its reactivation [Hupbach, A., Gomez, R., Hardt, O., &; Nadel, L. (2007). Reconsolidation of episodic memories: A subtle reminder triggers integration of new information. Learning &; Memory, 14, 47–53. doi:10.1101/lm.365707]. The reactivation of a learned list (List 1) before a second learned list (List 2) led to intrusion errors from List 2 when trying to recall List 1, but not vice-versa. Their work has been widely cited and their findings have been explained according to reconsolidation theory. For the first time, we systematically explored the role of retrieval context as an alternative explanation for Hupbach’s results. Our results showed that the intrusion effect occurs independently of the retrieval context (Experiment 1). Additionally, even when the intrusion rate probability is increased (i.e., List 1 memory test is performed in the List 2 learning context), the groups that did not reactivate the original list did not commit intrusion errors (Experiment 2). In sum, we found that the intrusion effect critically depends on the presence of reactivation, discarding alternative interpretations of the results.     

Mood-congruent true and false memory: Effects of depression

The Deese/Roediger-McDermott paradigm was used to investigate the effect of depression on true and false recognition. In this experiment true and false recognition was examined across positive, neutral, negative, and depression-relevant lists for individuals with and without a diagnosis of major depressive disorder. Results showed that participants with major depressive disorder falsely recognised significantly more depression-relevant words than non-depressed controls. These findings also parallel recent research using recall instead of recognition and show that there are clear mood congruence effects for depression on false memory performance.     

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.     

The organisation of musical semantic memory: Evidence from false memories for familiar songs

By adapting a well-known paradigm for studying memory for words—the Deese-Roediger-McDermott or DRM paradigm (Deese, 1959, Roediger & McDermott, 1995)—the two experiments reported here explore memory for song titles and song clips. Participants were presented with five song titles (Experiment 1a) or five 30-second song clips (Experiment 1b) for each of nine popular artists (e.g., Robbie Williams). The most popular song identified for each artist in a pilot task was omitted from the sets of titles/clips. Following a distractor task, participants were asked to write down as many of the songs as they could recall. They were also asked to return a week later and complete a second recall task. Participants falsely recalled a significant number of the related but non-presented songs in both experiments and this increased a week later, while correct recall for presented items decreased. The results are discussed in terms of theory for musical memory as well as in the context of providing a novel method for exploring the organisation of musical memory.