The propensity to perceive meaningful coincidences is associated with increased posterior alpha power during retention of information in a modified Sternberg paradigm

There are ample inter-individual differences in the frequency with which people perceive meaningful coincidences. Previous research has identified increased proactive interference, that is a reduced working memory capacity, as one possible mechanism associated with this phenomenon. The present study aimed at extending this finding into the domain of neuroscience, (1) by assessing EEG alpha oscillations during the retention of information, (2) by replicating the behavioral link between meaningful coincidences and proactive interference. In a sample of 52 participants, the behavioral replication was successful. Furthermore, participants who perceived more meaningful coincidences showed higher alpha power increases at parietal-occipital sites, and at the same time, displayed lower alpha power increases at frontal areas, during retention of information. This neurophysiological activation pattern further underlines the assumption that participants who perceive more meaningful coincidences show lower working memory capacities, since increased alpha power at parietal areas reflects a higher load on working memory demands.     

The development of spontaneous trait inferences about the actor and spontaneous trait transferences about the informant: Evidence from children aged 8–13 years

In social‐cognitive research, little attention has been paid to the developmental course of spontaneous trait inferences about the actor (STIs about the actor) and spontaneous trait transferences about the informant (STTs about the informant). Using a false recognition paradigm, Study 1 investigated the developmental course of STIs and Study 2 investigated the developmental course of STTs, comparing 8‐, 9‐, 10‐, 11‐, 12‐ and 13‐year olds. The results of Study 1 showed that 8‐year olds could make STIs about the actor, and the magnitude of STIs increased from ages 8 to 10 years, stabilised at the age of 10, 11, 12 years, and decreased from ages 12 through 13 years. The results of Study 2 showed that 8‐year olds could make STTs about the informant, and the magnitude of STTs did not vary with age. In all age groups, the magnitude of STIs about the actor was greater than that of STTs about the informant.     

Conscious and unconscious discriminations between true and false memories

When subjects give higher confidence or memory ratings to a test word in a recognition test, do they simply raise their criterion without making better discrimination, or do they raise both criterion and true discrimination between the studied words (SW) and the lures? Given that previous studies found subjects’ false alarm responses to lures slower than to SW, and recognition latency inversely correlated with the confidence rating, can the latency difference between the lures and SW be accounted for by confidence or memory ratings? The present results showed that when subjects gave higher confidence or memory ratings, both their bias and sensitivity were raised, indicating that they could consciously distinguish the lures from the SW. However, a latency difference between true and false recognitions persisted after confidence and memory ratings were held constant, suggesting an unconscious source of discrimination between the two types of memory.     

Underestimation of prior remembering and susceptibility to false memories: two sides of the same coin?

In two studies, we explored whether susceptibility to false memories and the underestimation of prior memories (i.e., forgot-it-all-along effect) tap overlapping memory phenomena. Study 1 investigated this issue by administering the Deese/Roediger–McDermott task (DRM) and the forgot-it-all-along (FIA) task to an undergraduate sample (N = 110). It was furthermore explored how performances on these tasks correlate with clinically relevant traits such as fantasy proneness, dissociative experiences, and cognitive efficiency. Results show that FIA and DRM performances are relatively independent from each other, suggesting that these measures empirically apparently refer to separate dimensions. However, they do not seem to define different profiles in terms of dissociation, fantasy proneness, and cognitive efficiency. Study 2 replicated the finding of relative independence between false memory propensity (as measured with the DRM task) and the underestimation of prior memories (as measured with an autobiographical memory dating task) in people with a history of childhood sexual abuse (N = 35).     

Why are there limits on theory of mind use? Evidence from adults' ability to follow instructions from an ignorant speaker

Keysar et al. (Keysar, Barr, Balin, & Brauner, 2000 Keysar, B., Barr, D. J., Balin, J. A. and Brauner, J. S. 2000. Taking perspective in conversation: The role of mutual knowledge in comprehension. Psychological Sciences, 11: 32–38. [Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]; Keysar, Lin, & Barr, 2003 Keysar, B., Lin, S. H. and Barr, D. J. 2003. Limits on theory of mind use in adults. Cognition, 89(1): 25–41. [Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) report that adults frequently failed to use their conceptual competence for theory of mind (ToM) in an online communication game where they needed to take account of a speaker's perspective. The current research reports 3 experiments investigating the cognitive processes contributing to adults' errors. In Experiments 1 and 2 the frequency of adults' failure to use ToM was unaffected by perspective switching. In Experiment 3 adults made more errors when interpreting instructions according to the speaker's perspective than according to an arbitrary rule. We suggest that adults are efficient at switching perspectives, but that actually using what another person knows to interpret what they say is relatively inefficient, giving rise to egocentric errors during communication.     

True and false memory for colour names versus actual colours: Support for the visual distinctiveness heuristic in memory for colour information

In a colour variation of the Deese–Roediger–McDermott (DRM) false memory paradigm, participants studied lists of words critically related to a nonstudied colour name (e.g., “blood, cherry, scarlet, rouge … ”); they later showed false memory for the critical colour name (e.g., “red”). Two additional experiments suggest that participants generate colour imagery in response to such colour-related DRM lists. First, participants claim to experience colour imagery more often following colour-related than standard non-colour-related DRM lists; they also rate their colour imagery as more vivid following colour-related lists. Second, participants exhibit facilitative priming for critical colours in a dot selection task that follows words in the colour-related DRM list, suggesting that colour-related DRM lists prime participants for the actual critical colours themselves. Despite these findings, false memory for critical colour names does not extend to the actual colours themselves (font colours). Rather than leading to source confusion about which colours were self-generated and which were studied, presenting the study lists in varied font colours actually worked to reduce false memory overall. Results are interpreted within the framework of the visual distinctiveness hypothesis.     

Similarity on the rebound: Inhibition of similarity assessment leads to an ironic postsuppressional rebound

A widely held but rarely tested assumption among cognitive scientists is that different cognitive tasks may rely upon a single basic cognitive process. Using an established methodology to examine the suppression and subsequent rebound of mental operations, the present research indicates that suppressing use of similarity in one domain results in the subsequent rebound of similarity assessment in a different domain, suggesting that both domains rely on the same underlying cognitive process. In two studies, we demonstrate that leading people to suppress natural similarity assessment in one task produces increased reliance on similarity in subsequent, different, and apparently unrelated tasks. In Experiment 1, participants led to suppress similarity in a concentration task subsequently made more errors in a false-memory paradigm than did control participants. In Experiment 2, participants suppressing similarity in a categorization task made more false-memory errors and perceived more similarity between word pairs than participants who did not suppress. The findings suggest that the cognitive process of similarity assessment may be a domain-general process, such that it is widespread across a number of different mental tasks.     

False recall in the Deese–Roediger–McDermott paradigm: The roles of gist and associative strength

Theories of false memories, particularly in the Deese–Roediger–McDermott (DRM) paradigm, focus on word association strength and gist. Backward associative strength (BAS) is a strong predictor of false recall in this paradigm. However, other than being defined as a measure of association between studied list words and falsely recalled nonpresented critical words, there is little understanding of this variable. In Experiment 1, we used a knowledge-type taxonomy to classify the semantic relations in DRM stimuli. These knowledge types predicted false-recall probability, as well as BAS itself, with the most important being situation features, synonyms, and taxonomic relations. In three subsequent experiments, we demonstrated that lists composed solely of situation features can elicit a gist and produce false memories, particularly when monitoring processes are made more difficult. Our results identify the semantic factors that underlie BAS and suggest how considering semantic relations leads to a better understanding of gist formation.     

What is “theory of mind”? Concepts,cognitive processes and individual differences

Research on “theory of mind” has traditionally focused on a narrow participant group (preschool children) using a narrow range of experimental tasks (most notably, false-belief tasks). Recent work has greatly expanded the age range of human participants tested to include human infants, older children, and adults, has devised new tasks, and has adopted methods from cognitive psychology and neuroscience. However, theoretical work has not kept pace with these changes, with the result that studies using one kind of method or participant group often inherit assumptions about the nature of theory of mind from other research, with little regard for whether these assumptions are appropriate. I argue that three distinct approaches to thinking about theory of mind are already implicit in research practice, and that future work, whether with infants, children, or adults, will benefit from articulating these approaches more clearly and following their different implications for what theory of mind is and how it should be studied.     

Variation in individuals' semantic networks for common knowledge is associated with false memory

Three experiments assessed the relationships between false memories of words and their degree of connectedness within individual semantic networks. In the first two experiments, participants studied associated word lists (e.g., hot, winter, ice), completed a recognition test that included related nonstudied words (e.g., cold, snow), and then rated the semantic relatedness of all word pairs including studied and nonstudied words. In the third experiment, the task order was reversed; participants completed pairwise ratings and then, two weeks later, completed the false memory task. The relatedness ratings were analysed using the Pathfinder scaling algorithm. In all experiments, items that an individual falsely recognized had higher semantic Pathfinder node densities than those items correctly rejected.