Reinstatement of latent inhibition following a reminder treatment in a conditioned taste aversion paradigm.

Reminder treatments have been shown to facilitate the retrieval of a variety of conditioned responses. Whether or not similar results would occur with an experimental paradigm which involves primarily memory for a stimulus, i.e., where no particular response is specified, is unclear. Accordingly, using Sprague-Dawley rats, we employed a latent inhibition paradigm with a long (10 days) retention interval between sucrose (CS) preexposure and sucrose-illness pairing (training). The results demonstrated a loss of latent inhibition following the 10-day retention interval suggesting "forgetting" of the CS preexposure. However, placing a single reminder exposure to the CS within the preexposure-to-training interval reinstated the preexposure effect. Controls indicated that in the absence of the initial preexposure the reminder per se did not produce latent inhibition. Thus, a reminder can reinstate a stimulus attribute (flavor representation) and explicit conditioned responses.     

The recollective qualities of adolescents’ and adults’ narratives about a long-ago tornado

The recollective qualities of autobiographical memory are thought to develop over the course of the first two decades of life. We used a 9-year follow-up test of recall of a devastating tornado and of non-tornado-related events from before and after the storm, to compare the recollective qualities of adolescents’ (n?=?20, ages 11 years, 11 months to 20 years, 8 months) and adults’ (n?=?14) autobiographical memories. At the time of the tornado, half of the adolescents had been younger than age 6. Nine years after the event, all participants provided evidence that they recall the event of the tornado. Adults also had high levels of recall of the non-tornado-related events. Adolescents recalled proportionally fewer non-tornado-related events; adolescents younger than 6 at the time of the events recalled the fewest non-tornado-related events. Relative to adolescents, adults produced longer narratives. With narrative length controlled, there were few differences in the recollective qualities of adolescents’ and adults’ narrative reports, especially in the case of the tornado; the recollective qualities were stronger among adolescents older at the time of the events. Overall, participants in both age groups provided evidence of the qualities of recollection that are characteristic of autobiographical memory.     

Interviewing Witnesses: Forced Confabulation and Confirmatory Feedback Increase False Memories

In two experiments, adults who witnessed a videotaped event subsequently engaged in face-to-face interviews during which they were forced to confabulate information about the events they had seen. The interviewer selectively reinforced some of the participants' confabulated responses by providing confirmatory feedback (e.g., "Yes, _is the correct answer") and provided neutral (uninformative) feedback for the remaining confabulated responses (e.g., "O.K. _"). One week later, participants developed false memories for the events they had earlier confabulated knowingly. However, confirmatory feedback increased false memory for forcibly confabulated events, increased confidence in those false memories, and increased the likelihood that participants would freely report the confabulated events 1 to 2 months later. The results illustrate the powerful role of social-motivational factors in promoting the development of false memories.     

Adaptation and communicative design.

Two theoretical frameworks that examine the nature of adaptability and mutual influence in interaction, interpersonal deception theory and interaction adaptation theory, were used to derive hypotheses concerning patterns of interaction that occur across time in truthful and deceptive conversations. Two studies were conducted in which senders were either truthful or deceptive in their interactions with a partner who increased or decreased involvement during the latter half of the conversation. Results revealed that deceivers felt more anxious and were more concerned about self‐presentation than truthtellers prior to the interaction and displayed less initial involvement than truthtellers. Patterns of interaction were also moderated by deception. Deceivers increased involvement over time but also reciprocated increases or decreases in receiver involvement. However, deceivers were less responsive than truthtellers to changes in receiver behavior. Finally, partner involvement served as feedback to senders regarding their own performance.     

Forced fabrication versus interviewer suggestions: Differences in false memory depend on how memory is assessed

Many studies show that witnesses can develop false memories for suggested misinformation provided by an interviewer. The forced fabrication effect extends this finding by demonstrating that witnesses can also develop false memories for events they were forced to fabricate themselves. In two experiments we compared the incidence of false memory following forced fabrication and interviewer provided suggestion under various conditions (pre‐test warning/no warning; one‐week/two‐week delay) and type of test (source recognition vs. narrative recall). Whereas interviewer suggestions resulted in more false memories than forced fabrications on source recognition tests when participants overtly resisted fabricating and were warned at test, tests of narrative recall showed the opposite pattern even with pre‐test warnings: Fabrications generated following overt resistance led to more false recall than interviewer provided suggestions. This dissociation between suggestive interview type and test type indicates that predictions about the deleterious consequences of interviews are dependent on the way memory is assessed. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The impact of violations on uncertainty and the consequences for attractiveness

This investigation aimed at extending past research on expectation violations by arguing that violations vary both in valance and in their influence on uncertainty and that the combination of valence and uncertainty states conjointly influences judgments of a violator's social attractiveness. In explaining the predicted variance in uncertainty following violations, a distinction is proposed between congruent violations (i.e., behaviors that are more intense instantiations of a previously displayed message) and incongruent violations (i.e., behaviors that are opposite in meaning from previously displayed messages). Five models for explaining violation effects are contrasted. Results (a) confirm that violations differ in their impact on uncertainty, (b) generally support the validity of the proposed distinction between congruent and incongruent violations, and show that the inclusion of uncertainty and valence in models of violation outcomes accounts for greater variance in social attraction than either one separately.     

Talking about Twisters: Relations between Mothers' and Children's Contributions to Conversations about a Devastating Tornado

Mother-child dyads who experienced a devastating tornado talked about the storm and about two affectively more positive or neutral events at each of two time points: 4 months and 10 months after the storm. The conversations were analyzed to determine whether mothers and/or children's contributions differed as a function of event type and whether there were concurrent and/or cross-lagged relations between mothers and children's contributions to the conversations. For both members of the dyads, contributions were similar (and correlated) across event types. Maternal narrative style related to children's levels of participation and to the amount of unique information the children contributed to the conversations, both concurrently and over time; cross-lagged relations were more robust for the tornado relative to the nontornado related events. The implications of the patterns for socialization models of autobiographical memory development are discussed.     

Forgetting of stimulus attributes: methodological implications for assessing associative phenomena.

Differential responding to changes in the stimulus situation, long central to the concept of stimulus control, also provides the implicit conceptual basis for assessing the nature of a variety of associative relationships. However, there is substantial evidence that the perception of stimulus similarity is not a static property. Generalization gradients to contextual as well as discriminative stimuli flatten over time, and this increase in perceived similarity presumably reflects forgetting of the detailed characteristics or attributes of stimuli. Methodologically, the flattening of the gradient imposes an important constraint: The effect of a stimulus shift will be highly sensitive to the length of the delay interval between training and testing. Conceptually, the loss of memory for stimulus attributes also implies that the sources of interference in retention can increase over time.