Brief report: Effects of informational feedback on aluminum can recycling

The impact of informational feedback on the depositing of aluminum cans in recycling receptacles at a medium-sized university was investigated. Informational signs were placed over 20-recycling receptacles in three academic buildings. Each informational sign was placed at eye level, with the number of aluminum cans deposited for recycling during the previous week displayed in red digits. A 65% increase in the number of aluminum cans deposited in recycling receptacles with the informational signs was observed. Furthermore, removal of the informational signs was observed to reliably decrease the number of aluminum cans deposited. These results are discussed in the context of employing feedback to increase environmental protection behaviors.     

Directed forgetting of faces: the role of response criterion

In two experiments, we examined recognition for faces following item method directed forgetting. During testing, participants reported whether the face was a new face or, if they thought it was a studied face, they identified the instruction paired with the face during study. In both experiments, the proportion of new faces falsely recognized and classified as forget faces exceeded those falsely recognized and classified as remember faces. Despite the use of different response criteria during testing, participants showed greater discrimination accuracy when identifying remember faces than when identifying forget faces. Taken together, these data patterns indicate that participants employed a strength-based criterion when responding. Specifically, participants responding to new faces were more likely to classify those faces as forget faces from study rather than as remember faces from study.     

Emotion, directed forgetting, and source memory

We investigated the role of emotion on item and source memory using the item method of directed forgetting (DF) paradigm. We predicted that emotion would produce source memory impairment because emotion would make it more difficult to distinguish between to-be-remembered (R items) and to-be-forgotten items (F items) by making memory strength of R and F items similar to each other. Participants were presented with negatively arousing, positively arousing, and neutral pictures. After each picture, they received an instruction to remember or forget the picture. At retrieval, participants were asked to recall both R and F items and indicate whether each item was an R or F item. Recall was higher for the negatively arousing than for the positively arousing or neutral pictures. Further, DF occurred for the positively arousing and neutral pictures, whereas DF was not significant for the negatively arousing pictures. More importantly, the negatively arousing pictures, particularly the ones with violent content, showed a higher tendency of producing misattribution errors than the other picture types, supporting the notion that negative emotion may produce source memory impairment, even though it is still not clear whether the impairment occurs at encoding or retrieval.     

Mental simulation and argument

When a quantified premise such as: Everyone loves anyone who loves someone, occurs with a premise such as: Anne loves Beth, it follows immediately that everyone loves Anne. It also follows that Carol loves Diane, where these two individuals are in the domain of discourse. According to the theory of mental models, this inference requires the quantified premise to be used again to update a model of specific individuals. The paper reports four experiments examining such iterative inferences. Experiment 1 confirmed that they are harder than immediate inferences. Experiment 2 extended the finding to negative inferences, i.e., granted that Anne does not love Beth, it follows from the quantified premise that Carol does not love Diane. Experiment 3 established that intermediate steps referring to specific individuals are accepted more readily than intermediate steps referring to quantified variables. Experiment 4 showed that the participants' written justifications corroborated the model theory.     

Segregation accuracy in item‐method directed forgetting across multiple tests

Two experiments examined recall across tests following item‐method directed‐forgetting instructions and the varying of presentation duration of items at study. For both immediate testing (Experiment 1) and delayed testing (Experiment 2), accurate recall of remember instruction items (R‐items) exceeded the accurate recall of forget instruction items (F‐items). However, some F‐items from study were inaccurately recalled as R‐items and R‐items from study as F‐items. Inaccurate recall persisted across tests for both immediate and delayed recall and increased across tests for immediate recall. We view the R‐item advantage in accurate recall as consistent with the account they receive more rehearsal at study than do F‐items. We view inaccurate recall as reflecting the bias to report items retrieved on an immediate test lacking instructional tags as F‐items. On delayed tests, items retrieved lacking instructional tags are first assessed against a criterion point on a memory‐strength continuum and those with strength above the criterion reported as R‐items and those below the criterion as F‐items.     

Hypermnesia: A further examination of age differences between young and older adults

Previous studies that examined age differences in hypermnesia reported inconsistent results. The present experiment investigated whether the different study materials in these studies were responsible for the inconsistency. In particular, the present experiment examined whether the use of a video, as opposed to words and pictures, would eliminate previously reported age differences in hypermnesia. Fifteen college students and 15 older adults viewed a 3‐minute video clip followed by two free‐recall tests. The results indicated that older adults, as a whole, did not show hypermnesia. However, when older adults were divided into low and high memory groups based on test 1 performance, the high memory group showed hypermnesia whereas the low memory group did not show hypermnesia. The older adults in the low memory group were significantly older than the older adults in the high memory group – indicating that hypermnesia is inversely related to age in older adults. Reminiscence did not show an age‐related difference in either the low or high memory group whereas inter‐test forgetting did show an age difference in the low memory group. As expected, older adults showed greater inter‐test forgetting than young adults in the low memory group. Findings from the present experiment suggest that video produces a pattern of results that is similar to the patterns obtained when words and pictures are used as study material. Thus, it appears that the nature of study material is not the source of inconsistency across the previous studies.     

The role of intentional forgetting in employee selection

The authors examined the effects of forbidden information on the employee-selection process. They presented the participants with 4 applicants for the position of cashier-stockperson. One of the applicants (the Target Applicant) provided a mixture of forbidden and job-relevant information; the remaining applicants gave no forbidden information. Some of the participants were told before they reviewed the applicants what types of information were to be considered as forbidden, and they were instructed to disregard any such information in the applications. The remaining participants were not aware of the presence of the forbidden information, nor were they instructed to disregard such information. The participants who were instructed to disregard the forbidden information rated the Target Applicant more favorably than did those who were not aware of its presence. Moreover, those in the disregard condition recalled less of the forbidden information and more of the job-relevant information about the Target Applicant than did those in the no-instruction condition. These data patterns support laboratory-based studies on intentional forgetting.     

Emotional Salience and the Isolation Effect

When a homogeneous list contains a few items that are different from the rest of the items in the list, these isolated items show enhanced recall compared to the same items in a list where these items are not isolated. This phenomenon, known as the isolation effect, has been explained on the basis of isolated items eliciting salience. In this experiment, negative pictures and neutral pictures were isolated at the early and late part of the list. The salience explanation would predict that participants would pay more attention to these isolated items resulting in higher judgments of learning (JOL) ratings compared to the same items in the control list. Negative pictures showed the isolation effect for both early and late isolation; however, for early isolation, JOL was similar between the isolated and non-isolated pictures indicating that the emotional isolation effect does not require emotional salience.     

Abstracts From the Northern Lights Psychology Conference. University of North Dakota October 2001

The authors examined the effects of forbidden information on the employee-selection process. They presented the participants with 4 applicants for the position of cashier-stockperson. One of the applicants (the Target Applicant) provided a mixture of forbidden and job-relevant information; the remaining applicants gave no forbidden information. Some of the participants were told before they reviewed the applicants what types of information were to be considered as forbidden, and they were instructed to disregard any such information in the applications. The remaining participants were not aware of the presence of the forbidden information, nor were they instructed to disregard such information. The participants who were instructed to disregard the forbidden information rated the Target Applicant more favorably than did those who were not aware of its presence. Moreover, those in the disregard condition recalled less of the forbidden information and more of the job-relevant information about the Target Applicant than did those in the no-instruction condition. These data patterns support laboratory-based studies on intentional forgetting.     

The Antecedents of Retrieval Inhibition

The subjects were given one of three types of retrieval tests—free-recall, part-list cued-recall, or part-set cued-recall—in a modified directed-remembering study. A directed-remembering effect occurred for free-recall but not for cued-recall, and a blocking effect occurred with “remember” words but not with “forget” words. These results suggested that the same retrieval cues that initiate blocking may alter the impact of the directed-remembering effect.