WEEK 7
WEEK 7
WEEK 7
WEEK 8
WEEK 8
WEEK 8
SPOTLIGHTS
LABS
100
What are 3 characteristics that help us source monitor?
1. Amount of detail
2. Supportive memories
3. Reasoning/Realism
100
What are 2 types of recognition tests, give an example of each
Yes/no test - participants are shown an item and have to say yes or no depending on whether they recognise it
Forced choice - participants are shown 2 items simultaneously and have to decide which they recognise
100
What are the 2 procedures for instructions to forget? Explain each
1. Item method directed forgetting - particpants view an object then immediately told to remember or forget it. Later memory for to-be-remembered items is greater.
2. List method directed forgetting - instruction to forget is given after half of the items have been presented. People instructed to remember first half perform better on test for first half, whereas people instructed to forget after the first half who believe in their ability to forget have better memory for second half
100
Define the Misinformation Effect.
The distorting effect on eyewitness memory of misleading information presented after a crime or other event.
100
One implication of false memories is that we change our behaviour around them. Provide an example of this.
Having a false memory about becoming sick after eating eggs, then avoiding eating eggs.
100
Does the valence of a memory influence the misinformation effect?
No, there was no difference between neutral, positive, or negative events. This shows us that all memories are susceptible to misinformation, regardless of the emotions tied to them.
100
What did KC tell us about the link between past and future memory?
She reported a 'blank' when asked to think about future which suggested that inability to recall past impairs ability to think about the future.
100
How does between-subjects design change the way we interpret confidence intervals?
If there is overlap it doesn't indicate the results are not significant unless the overlap is more than half the interval
200
How did real vs imagined events differ on the 5 key characteristics of the MCQ?
Real events were rated higher in visual details, spatial info, temporal info, complexity, and feelings
200
what are 2 limitations to using mistaken identifications as a measure of recognition memory?
1. Because a participant might have 85% correct identifications and 10% misidentifications and score higher than a participant with 5% misidentification who only has 40% correct identifications
2. Does not consider a participants tendency to guess instead of having a sincere belief. Need to be able to distinguish memory from decision making
200
What are 2 possible explanations for the item-method?
1. Selective rehearsal hypothesis - more effort/attention for remembering limits amount of attention given to 'forget' items which helps you forget them
2. Encoding suppression processes - active forgetting process found with greater activation of frontal and hippocampus to support inhibitory control of encoding
200
Lindsay et al. found what when studying proactive interference and memory distortions?
Participants witnessed a robbery of a museum. The group that watched a video of a palace burglary the day before made more errors compared to the group that watched an unrelated video the previous day. Suggests that the information we encounter before an event can also distort our memories for that event.
200
Can emotional arousal, level of detail, or confidence be used to determine what memories are true or false?
No, some people had false memories that they were abducted by aliens. They were very confident, provided rich detail, and were emotionally aroused during recall.
200
Why might someone accept more misinformation when it is delivered by a confederate compared to when it is written down?
Possibly conformity, less time to source monitor, or you trust the information more because they are face-to-face. However, this is not always the case - it also depends on the credibility of the source.
200
What is the constructive episodic simulation hypothesis?
Our memory system allows us to reconstruct/recombine past memories to imagine future
200
What were the results of the study on how photos influence proportion of correct rejections of new article sentences?
Subjects who see the after photos were more likely to mistakenly say they read the lure sentences than subjects who saw the control photo
300
According to the study using the MCQ, what was the difference between older vs recent events when compared to imagined?
Older/childhood events had less distinctive characteristics than recent. Older only differed on 3/39 characteristics because they fade overtime
300
What is signal detection theory as a model of recognition?
It proposes that recognition tests should use the same outcomes as auditory detection tests. Memory traces have various strength values with dictate how familiar they feel. Familiarity is normally distributed and individualised. The old items will feel more familiar because you have recently been exposed to them. Any overlap will have higher likelihood of errors.
300
Your teacher gives you positive and negative feedback on your performance but you can only remember the positive feedback. What is this phenomenon called?
Mnemic neglect effect
300
Which cognitive and personality traits are related to resisting misinformation?
Cognitive: High WMC and intelligence
Personality: High levels of fear of a bad evaluation, low levels of cooperation and reward dependence.
300
What is fluency?
The feeling of ease or difficulty when completing a mental task. High fluidity = feels easy to do. Mental tasks include any type of cognition e.g., perception, memory, reasoning, recognition
300
Give an example of how credibility influences the misinformation effect.
You witness a car crash where driver A is clearly at fault. You are much less likely to accept misleading information from driver A or their lawyer compared to an innocent bystander. Here, you perform rigorous source monitoring because you don't trust the person or their motives.
300
What is the evidence from neuroimaging, ageing, and modulation to support the link between past and future memory?
Nueroimaging: same brain regions active when thinking about past and future.
Ageing: same pattern of results when comparing younger vs older participants in past and future memory tasks. Older adults provide less detail in both tasks because they have decline in episodic (hc) function
Modulation: episodic specificity induction training enhances details for past memory and in imagination
400
What were the 2 most common explanation when justifying real events?
1. Characteristics (eg. details, complexity, feelings etc)
2. Supportive memories
400
What are the 4 possible outcomes of recognition tests according to signal detection theory
Hit - old as old
Miss - old as new
False alarm - new as yes
Correct rejection - new as no
400
What are the 2 differences related to processing for items in the list-method compared to the item-method?
1. List method likely disrupts retrieval of items whereas item method disrupts encoding. Unlikely that participants use shallow encoding to forget items in the list method because they have no motive to not elaborate on processing until half way into it.
2. Items in list-method are still stored but just outside awareness since they can be revealed in implicit test. E.g., in fame judgement test participants judged the to-be-forgotten names as more famous than controls since they felt familiar but forgot the source
400
Is the misinformation effect greater for core or peripheral details of an event?
Peripheral/unimportant.
400
What are two ways to measure fluidity?
Reaction times or self reports
400
What is the relationship between socially attractive voices and the misinformation effect?
A voice high in social attraction increases the misinformation effect, but only when the voice is perceived as having 'low power'. Comes under credibility.
400
What are 2 non-episodic explanations for older populations providing less episodic details? And what does evidence suggest?
1. Change in narrative style
2. Disinhibition - they can't inhibit irrelevant information (low fc)
- Evidence suggests it is likely both episodic and non-episodic explanations because we saw the same pattern of results when describing a picture but to a lesser extent.
500
What was the most common explanation for justifying imagined events?
Reasoning
500
How does dual process account of recognition memory differ from signal detection
Adds a component of recollection
500
What are 2 hypotheses of the list method?
1. Retrieval inhibition - instruction to forgot inhibits activation of unwanted items
2. Context shift - instruction to forgot changes mental context for second list so when tested in the shifted mental context you can only recall items that were encoded in that context (second half)
500
If someone notices discrepancies between event information and post-event information, what effect will we see?
Accuracy for the original event will be enhanced (better than baseline), as the PEI acts as a cue for the actual event.
500
What are implications of fluency?
People judge fluent statements as more true, likable, frequent, and as having come from an intelligent source. People are likely to invest in stocks when the company name is fluent.
500
List 2 social influences that increase the misinformation effect.
Social interaction (having a person give you information face-to-face) and credibility (having a credible/likeable source give you the information).
500
Explain the relationship between specificity induction and false memory/error likelihood?
More details = higher chance of overlap = higher likelihood of mistakenly combining elements of distinct but related episodes
600
What are cognitive tire tracks and how do they impact peoples ability to discrimination whether they saw shapes shown as a whole vs half
Cognitive tire tracks refer to the mental effort used when imagining something difficult. When participants imagined the horizontal half, this left cognitive tire tracks, so they were better able to discriminate between shapes they imagined whole vs saw whole. Compared to vertical which didn't leave tire tracks so it was harder to discriminate since there was overlap in mental effort used
600
Explain the 2 types of recognition judgements according to dual process accounts
1. Familiarity based recognition - knowing of
2. Recollection- remembering the specific details
600
Give an example of motivated context shifts enhancing forgetting
If you were bullied at school and move schools to one that makes you happy, this changes your mental context which makes spontaneous retrieval less likely and encourages decay
600
What are two explanations for why memory distortions occur after misleading information?
1. Source misattribution: Mistaking PEI for event information, especially when these are similar. (reduced effect when participants were given a test on the source of the information too)
2. Explanatory role hypothesis: PEIS that provide causal information for things they actually witnessed are more likely to be mistaken for event information - 'filling in the gaps'. (The misinformation effect was reduced when participants were given alternative explanations as well)
600
We often use fluency as cues for what?
Frequency, recency, and duration of exposure.
600
Which is more effective for reducing misinformation effects: a pre-warning or a post-warning? Specific or general?
Pre-warning - we scrutinise the information more (known bc we take longer to read it). However, warnings need to be specific.
700
What are the 3 different types of sources and give an example of each
Internal-External: deciding whether you experienced event or dreamed it
Internal-Internal: deciding whether you thought of an idea while you were awake or in a dream
External-External: deciding whether you heard the information from a friend or your mum
700
what is the remember-know procedure?
People are asked to report whether they know (familiarity based) or remember (recollection)
700
In relation to Intentional retrieval suppression, what is the think-no-think paradigm?
It studies retrieval suppression. Participants study cue target pairs and then have to engage in think-no-think to repress target when faced with cue. Found a memory deficit for no-think targets compared to baseline
700
A warning of misinformation only reduced the misinformation effect when the warning is ______.
Specific. E.g., saying "you will be given incorrect information about broken glass being at the crash site" rather than "you will be given misleading information"
700
How can interpretations of fluency differ?
If we are primed that fluency is good (e.g., the easier to understand, the better), fluent items will be judged positively, and the opposite for fluency = negative. We can also differ on determining why something is fluent - e.g., is this fluent because it is a common word, or because there is a famous example of the word (Last name "Bush").
Overall: why is it fluid, and is this fluidity good or bad.
700
What type of study design can be used to separate the effects of a treatment and the effects of the expectations a participant has about the treatment?
Balanced placebo design:
800
Why does information inflation increase source monitoring errors?
Because imagining the event creates more overlap in shared characteristics between imagined vs real which increases likelihood source monitoring errors
800
What are 3 reasons that help us know that familiarity is different to recognition?
1. Recollection is more sensitive to distractors since it requires attention
2. Older adults with prefrontal damage have impaired recollection but not familiarity
3. They rely on seperate parts of the brain - recollection = hippocampus, familiarity = perihinal cortex
800
What is the 'total control effect' 'positive control effect' and negative control effect'.
Total control effect is the difference between 'think' and 'no think conditions'. Negative control effect is the deficit in memory for 'no-think' compared to baseline. Positive control effect is the enhanced memory for 'think' compared to baseline.
800
Based on what we know about the misinformation effect, what are four possible interventions?
1. Collecting testimonies very quickly, immediate recall makes you resistant to misinformation
2. Avoid leading questions
3. Reinforced self-affirmation: increasing witnesses' overall confidence reduces effects
4. Do not repeat PEI
800
Describe the relationship between fluency, representation, and judgment.
Fluency indirectly influences judgments by changing what and how things are represented in our minds.
EXAMPLE: If a fake word is not fluent (i.e., it's hard to read) we will come up with a complex definition for it.
EXAMPLE 2: When "NYC" is written in a fluent font, we will describe the city in a fluent way.
800
What type of study design involves only administering a placebo (no actual treatment) but having a group that expects a treatment and one that expects a placebo?
Half-balanced placebo design
900
How do we know that imagining the events doesn't just lead people to recover lost memory?
Because the more time you had to imagine the action the more likely you were to make source monitoring errors
900
What is positivity bias? What is a study that showed this?
A tendency which increases over the life span to recall more positive memories
Participants given 85 minutes to free recall memories and 50% of the memories were rated pleasent
900
Is intentional retrieval suppression cue independent or cue dependent?
Cue independent - the target is suppressed for novel cue not just trained cue
900
Order these verbs from highest speed estimate to lowest speed estimate in the Loftus and Palmer (1974) study: hit, smashed, bumped, contacted, collided
Smashed, Collided, bumped, hit, contacted
9mph difference between smashed (40.8) and contacted (31.8)
900
How does fluency impact cognitive operations?
Fluency makes us engage our heuristic and automatic system of processing, while disfluency engages our effortful and analytical system (Dual Processes). Example: when instructions were given in a difficult-to-read font, people made fewer errors on the task. EXPT 2: Participants furrowing their brows made the task seem less fluent; performance was better. Showed that it wasn't the time spent reading that improved performance.
900
One study measured how an alcohol placebo can impact the misinformation effect. What did they find?
People who believed they were drinking alcohol were more misled than those who believed they were drinking tonic water (tonic was still misled though). There was no difference in accuracy when no misleading information was given (control). The alcohol participants were more confident than the tonic participants for both the misled and control conditions.
1000
How might a therapist criticise research on imagination inflation? Was this proven?
They would say that source monitoring errors only occur when the imagined event is plausible, meaning that people aren't likely to believe they experienced events that did not likely to happen.
Imagination inflation still occurred for bizarre events (to a lesser extent though) especially with elaborative instructions
1000
Why might we have positivity bias?
As we get older we focus more on maintaining wellbeing and grow more skilled in emotional regulation which helps us to control what we remember
1000
how does coming up with easy vs hard to imagine disease symptoms impact your subjective likelihood of event likelihood
Easy to imagine symptoms increase your subjective likelihood of the contracting the disease
1000
What are two explanations for the pattern seen in Loftus and Palmers 1974 study?
1. Response bias: participants could be 'on the fence' between two speeds, and the more severe words will just bias them to choose the higher speed estimate.
2. Memory reconstruction: The PEI changes how the initial memory is represented
1000
Describe this chart:
The effects fluency has on judgment is mediated by the attribution of the fluency. Example: when asked to judge if this word was in the list they just read, fluent processing of the word might suggest it was recently encountered. But if they recognise that it is fluid because it is simply a very common word, fluidity will not influence their judgment.
Fluency influences the cognitive operations we engage (E.g., fluency encourages the use of our heuristic processing), which can influence how critical we are in our judgments. Example: We may get a seemingly basic/fluent question wrong (incorrect judgment) because we did not engage critical reasoning.
Fluency impacts how things are mentally represented. Example: if we believe fluid things are better, we might judge an easy-to-understand argument as better than a complex one.
1000
Participants who were told they had taken a memory-enhancing drug were more resistant to misinformation. Why might this be, and how do we know?
They are engaging in more effortful source monitoring during the test. The reading speed of the PEI was the same for the drug and non-drug groups, but the drug group had a longer response time on the questions.
1100
What is the pattern of results for keeping or retracting false vs true memories after being challenged?
People were more likely to keep true than false, and more likely to retract false than true. However, nearly 50% of people still kept the false memory event after being presented with contradictory evidence
1100
What is repression? And how is it different from supression?
One of Freuds defence mechanism which helps us to push unwanted memories into our unconscious. Suppression is different because it is intentional and goal directed
1100
In a study of imagination inflation, how did peoples confidence in event happening change for imagined vs non-imagined events
Imagining events increased confident of events previously rated unlikely. But confidence for non-imagined items also increased (maybe due to repetition effects or regression of the mean)
1100
In Loftus and Palmer's study, what did they test two weeks after participants witnessed the crash?
Asked them if they saw broken glass at the scene. "smashed' had a higher proportion of yes responses than "hit".
1100
Why is understanding fluency important in psychological research?
Seemingly meaningless factors such as font, grammar, and linguistic choices in your instructions may actually have significant impacts on how participants perform on a task.
1200
how are retrieval control processes important for reconstruction memory and give an example
Because we have to use them to ensure we are retrieving the relevant information to fill the gaps. E.g., interference resolution to suppress any information that is not involved in the memory you are trying to fill the gaps in
1200
Are repressed memories still available?
Yes 'return of the repressed'
1200
What are 3 possible explanations for imagination inflation in childhood events?
1. Imagining event increases likelihood of source attribution errors since there are less different characteristics since childhood memories are distant
2. Reinterpretation hypotheses: item expands to accomodate event
3. Hypermnesia: recall ability increases over successive attempts
1200
What is the name of the procedure where family members are used to plant false memories?
Familial-informant false narrative procedure
1200
Briefly describe four Loftus studies related to the misinformation effect.
Loftus, Miller & Burns: Video of a car hitting a pedestrian. Misinformation about stop/yield signs.
Loftus & Palmer: "Smashed" = higher speed estimate and presence of glass
Loftus & Zanni: Did you see the/a broken headlight? "The" = more yes responses.
Loftus: how fast was the car going past the barn? There was no barn, but 17% recalled one.
1300
What is the study involving a story about 'Carol Harris' and what did it show?
Participants were told a story about a problem child called Carol Harris then a week later half the participants were told the story was actually about Helen Keller (a famous blind/deaf person). Those told the story was about Helen Keller were more likely to claim they recognised sentences such as "she was dumb, deaf, and blind".
This shows how we use reconstructive inferences when trying to retrieve
1300
How is intentional forgetting different from motivated forgetting?
Motivated forgetting includes forgetting which is unconscious
1300
what is the relationship between ability imagine future and psychiatric disorders?
Deficit in imagining future for schizophrenics and suicidal people - and older adults
1300
What percentage of people falsely recalled an event where they were left alone in a mall for a long time?
25% - some even added novel details to the false memory
1300
Accurate PEI can improve the accuracy of the original memory. Why should we still avoid giving PEI in the court systems?
1) Your testimony is meant to be your memory, 2) In the real world, we can't always tell what PEI is accurate.
1400
What is recognition memory?
Our ability to determine whether we have previously encountered the stimuli in that context
1400
What is Psychogenic Amnesia?
A subset of motivated forgetting which includes forgetting not due to neurological damage/dysfunction. It is for cases where you forget chunks of life or events that you should remember.
1400
What evidence supports the constructive episodic hypothesis?
More detailed and vivid imagination of future events which involve familiar context and recent events
1400
What 'impossible' event did people falsely recall after watching an ad, and added their own sensory details?
Meeting Bugs Bunny at Disneyland - further study found that this false memory primed people to rate Bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse as closely related even though they aren't
1400
What mechanisms of the misinformation effect are discussed in the Week 8 online content?
Demand characteristics: responding with what you believe the researcher wants/not wanting to correct them
The details didn't make it into memory, therefore, the PEI is filling in gaps rather than changing your existing memory.
If it isn't the two above, we aren't entirely sure. Maybe PEI is overwriting the original memory, or maybe they coexist, but the PEI is more accessible.
1500
In recognition tests what are new/nonstudied items termed?
Lures, distractors, or foils
1500
What are the 3 factors that predict motivated forgetting?
1. Instructions to forget
2. Motivated context shifts or environmental changes
3. Intentional retrieval suppression
1500
1. Is false recognition correlated with divergent or convergent creative thinking? why
2. Is false recall correlated with divergent or convergent creative thinking? why
3. Is true recognition and recall correlated with divergent or convergent creative thinking? why
1. Both - both rely on common semantic associations
2. Divergent - divergent thinking sensitive to episodic processing (ability to combine novel events) and rely on pattern completion from inappropriate cue
3. Convergent - source monitoring underlies both
1500
According to Loftus' paper on make-believe memories, what are 3 patterns of difference we see between true and false memories?
1) People are more confident in true memories, 2) False memories are less coherent in recall, 3) P300 difference
1500
What are some cognitive factors that influence the misinformation effect?
Delay: longer delay = larger effect/reduced accuracy
Repetition of misinformation: increases the effect, likely due to familiarity. Can be 3 different people repeating it or 1 person repeating it 3x
Repetition of original event: rehearsal makes you resistant to misinformation, unless you are rehearsing right before the PEI