Coordination Processes of Mental Transformations of Patterns: Practice and Transfer Effects

Regulation and monitoring of successful performance in complex tasks requires decisions regarding which processes to engage in and in what order. Coordination of these activities appears to be a separable aspect of the demands imposed on working memory by cascaded serial processes (Carlson & Lundy, 1992). In the experiments presented here, subjects indicated whether symbolically suggested transformation rules (rotation, reflection) correctly described the difference between two patterns of filledin squares within a 3x3 matrix. Two experiments were carried out with different levels of practice and common transfer tasks. Our aim was to provide evidence for an executive coordinating mechanism on the basis of differential practice and transfer effects. The following results were obtained: (1) Coordination complexity (Mayr & Kliegl, 1993) has a nonadditive effect on transformation time at all levels of practice, suggesting that a substantial deal of time is spent on processes other than executing transformations. (2) Performance on the transfer task indicated that the practised coordination skill was generalised under the conditions of the experiment. Level of practice influenced the transfer pattern, showing more specificity in transfer after extended practice. Taken together, the nonadditive effect as well as the transfer effect suggest that coordination cost reflects separable processing demand. The results constrain the type of interaction between the visual working memory system and the central control component of multicomponent working memory models (Baddeley, 1989).     

Look who's talking! Facial appearance can bias source monitoring

When we see a stranger's face we quickly form impressions of his or her personality, and expectations of how the stranger might behave. Might these intuitive character judgements bias source monitoring? Participants read headlines “reported” by a trustworthy- and an untrustworthy-looking reporter. Subsequently, participants recalled which reporter provided each headline. Source memory for likely-sounding headlines was most accurate when a trustworthy-looking reporter had provided the headlines. Conversely, source memory for unlikely-sounding headlines was most accurate when an untrustworthy-looking reporter had provided the headlines. This bias appeared to be driven by the use of decision criteria during retrieval rather than differences in memory encoding. Nevertheless, the bias was apparently unrelated to variations in subjective confidence. These results show for the first time that intuitive, stereotyped judgements of others' appearance can bias memory attributions analogously to the biases that occur when people receive explicit information to distinguish sources. We suggest possible real-life consequences of these stereotype-driven source-monitoring biases.     

Memory for details with self-referencing

Self-referencing benefits item memory, but little is known about the ways in which referencing the self affects memory for details. Experiment 1 assessed whether the effects of self-referencing operate only at the item, or general, level or whether they also enhance memory for specific visual details of objects. Participants incidentally encoded objects by making judgements in reference to the self, a close other (one's mother), or a familiar other (Bill Clinton). Results indicate that referencing the self or a close other enhances both specific and general memory. Experiments 2 and 3 assessed verbal memory for source in a task that relied on distinguishing between different mental operations (internal sources). The results indicate that self-referencing disproportionately enhances source memory, relative to conditions referencing other people, semantic, or perceptual information. We conclude that self-referencing not only enhances specific memory for both visual and verbal information, but can also disproportionately improve memory for specific internal source details.     

How you lie affects what you remember

We investigated how telling different types of lies may impact memory. Participants studied pictures of objects, and later lied and told the truth about these and new objects once or multiple times by describing them or by denying they had seen them. Forty-eight hours later, participants were tested on their source memory. Results revealed that participants had good memory for having falsely described a never-seen object, but relatively poor memory for having falsely denied seeing a studied object. These results suggest that telling certain types of lies may make a person more likely to forget having lied. In addition, repeated truthful denials of having seen a picture paradoxically increased false memories for having seen it. Thus, telling the truth does not always prevent the possibility of memory distortion.     

Claiming hidden memories as one's own: A review of inadvertent plagiarism

Inadvertent plagiarism, or cryptomnesia, occurs when an individual claims another's idea as his or her own with no recollection of having been exposed to the idea before. Although some variation exists in the explanations of this occurrence, the source monitoring framework has emerged as the most plausible account. The purpose of this paper is to review the core body of research that has been conducted on cryptomnesia over the past two decades, with particular focus on the factors that affect the propensity of this phenomenon and how these influences inform a theoretical explanation of cryptomnesia. This paper also includes some suggestions for how future research might continue to explore the phenomenon of inadvertent plagiarism.     

Problems and solutions for a hybrid approach to grounding practical normativity

Source Hybridism about practical reasons is the position that facts that constitute reasons sometimes derive their normative force from external metaphysical grounds, and sometimes from internal. Although historically less popular than either Source Internalism or Source Externalism, hybridism has lately begun to garner more attention. Here, I further the hybridist's cause by defending Source Hybridism from three objections. I argue that we are not warranted in rejecting hybridism for any of the following reasons: that hybridists cannot provide an account of normative weight, that hybridists are committed to implausible results concerning practical deliberation, or that Source Hybridism is objectionably unparsimonious.     

Source reliability and the conjunction fallacy

Information generally comes from less than fully reliable sources. Rationality, it seems, requires that one take source reliability into account when reasoning on the basis of such information. Recently, Bovens and Hartmann (2003) proposed an account of the conjunction fallacy based on this idea. They show that, when statements in conjunction fallacy scenarios are perceived as coming from such sources, probability theory prescribes that the "fallacy" be committed in certain situations. Here, the empirical validity of their model was assessed. The model predicts that statements added to standard conjunction problems will change the incidence of the fallacy. It also predicts that statements from reliable sources should yield an increase in fallacy rates (relative to unreliable sources). Neither the former (Experiment 1) nor the latter prediction (Experiment 3) was confirmed, although Experiment 2 showed that people can derive source reliability estimates from the likelihood of statements in a manner consistent with the tested model. In line with the experimental results, model fits and sensitivity analyses also provided very little evidence in favor of the model. This suggests that Bovens and Hartmann's present model fails to explain fully people's judgements in standard conjunction fallacy tasks.     

The influence of victim intoxication and victim attire on police responses to sexual assault

Limited research exists on the impact of contextual factors such as victim intoxication and victim attire on police processing of a case of sexual assault. The effects of these variables were examined in a simulated sexual assault case. Participants were 125 detectives from the New South Wales Police Department. Officers read controverted witness statements and viewed photographs pertaining to an investigation of a report of date rape. Contrary to findings in earlier studies, complainant intoxication, ‘provocative’ dress, and gender of the officer had no influence on the likelihood of charging the alleged offender. Factors predictive of pressing charges were the perceived credibility of the complainant and culpability of the alleged offender. Credibility and guilt judgements were themselves influenced by the level of rape myth acceptance endorsed by the officers. Rape myth acceptance also exerted a number of other effects on case evaluations. Implications for future studies and education and training programmes for police on sexual assault were discussed. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Hemispheric asymmetries in the activation and monitoring of memory errors

Previous research on the lateralization of memory errors suggests that the right hemisphere's tendency to produce more memory errors than the left hemisphere reflects hemispheric differences in semantic activation. However, all prior research that has examined the lateralization of memory errors has used self-paced recognition judgments. Because activation occurs early in memory retrieval, with more time to make a decision, other memory processes, like strategic monitoring processes, may affect memory errors. By manipulating the time subjects were given to make memory decisions, this study separated the influence of automatic memory processes (activation) from strategic memory processes (monitoring) on the production of false memories. The results indicated that when retrieval was fast, the right hemisphere produced more memory errors than the left hemisphere. However, when retrieval was slow, the left hemisphere's error-proneness increased compared to the fast retrieval condition, while the right hemisphere's error-proneness remained the same. These results suggest that the right hemisphere's errors are largely due to activation, while the left hemisphere's errors are influenced by both activation and monitoring.     

On Polarizing Outranking Relations with Large Performance Differences

We introduce a bipolarly extended veto principle—a positive, as well as negative, large performance differences polarization—which allows us to extend the definition of the classical outranking relation in such a way that the identity between its asymmetric part and its codual relation is preserved. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.