The nature of memory errors for verbally quantified information

A variety of theoretical proposals claim that memory is not a faithful reproduction of what was encountered but a blend of what was encountered and knowledge from other sources. We showed participants simple pairings of a person's name and a height or weight or a food name and a calorie count at study. Once veridical responses were removed, there was little evidence that the remaining responses were influenced by the specific value of the studied stimulus. These results suggest that the appearance of memory blends for verbally quantified information may be induced by averaging over different knowledge states.