Self–nonself-segregation and reality monitoring.

Three experiments with 144 female undergraduates tested the hypothesis that field-independent (FI) Ss would be better reality monitors and would be better able to separate the self from the nonself than field-dependent (FD) Ss. It is noted that, according to M. K. Johnson and C. L. Raye (see record 1981-06694-001), reality monitoring is the process of determining whether a memory originated in thought processes (internal) or in perception (external). Ss' field dependence–independence was determined with the Group Embedded Figures Test. In Exp I, FD and FI Ss were asked to discriminate between internal and external sources of memories. FI Ss were more accurate at identifying the origin of their memories and made fewer reality monitoring confusions than FD Ss. When Ss were asked to discriminate between 2 external sources of memories in Exp II or between 2 internal sources of memories in Exp III, FI Ss did not show the source discrimination advantage. Recognition memory also varied across experiments, with FI Ss showing an advantage in some (Exps I and II) but not all (Exp III) cases. Findings are discussed in terms of an overreliance by FD Ss on the sensory, semantic, and contextual detail characteristic of externally derived memories and little awareness by these Ss of their own cognitive operations. (21 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Aging and source monitoring.

This experiment was designed to examine the ability of older and younger adults to remember the source of information. Three types of source monitoring tasks were investigated: discriminating between externally derived and internally generated memories, discriminating between two types of internally generated memories, and discriminating between two types of externally derived memories. Relative to younger adults, older adults had more difficulty discriminating between memories of the same class (external–external and internal–internal), but they did not have more difficulty discriminating between memories of different classes (external–internal). These findings indicate that the age-related difficulty in remembering the source of information should not be characterized as a general deficit. Factors that may account for age deficits in source monitoring are discussed drawing upon the Johnson–Raye (1981) reality monitoring framework. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Phenomenal characteristics of memories for perceived and imagined autobiographical events.

Two studies explored potential bases for reality monitoring (M. K. Johnson and C. L. Raye [see PA, Vol 65:6694]) of naturally occurring autobiographical events. In Study 1, subjects rated phenomenal characteristics of recent and childhood memories. Compared with imagined events, perceived events were given higher ratings on several characteristics, including perceptual information, contextual information, and supporting memories. This was especially true for recent memories. In Study 2, subjects described how they knew autobiographical events had (or had not) happened. For perceived events, subjects were likely to mention perceptual and contextual details of the memory and to refer to other supporting memories. For imagined events, subjects were likely to engage in reasoning based on prior knowledge. The results are consistent with the idea that reality monitoring draws on differences in qualitative characteristics of memories for perceived and imagined events (Johnson & Raye, 1981) and augment findings from more controlled laboratory studies of complex events (A. G. Suengas and M. K. Johnson [see PA, Vol 76:14478]; M. K. Johnson and A. G. Suengas, in press). (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Qualitative effects of rehearsal on memories for perceived and imagined complex events.

Three experiments explored the effects of rehearsal and the passage of time on qualitative characteristics of memories for perceived and imagined complex events. Subjects thought or talked about events, focusing on either the perceptual (e.g., colors, sounds) or apperceptive (e.g., thoughts, feelings) aspects of the events (Experiment 1). Thinking about apperceptive aspects of events decreased the salience of context and sensory characteristics of memories and made memories for perceived and imagined events seem more similar in the subjective amounts of thoughts and feelings included in the memories. When the aspects of events subjects thought about were unspecified, thinking about events primarily affected rated clarity (Experiment 2). The clarity of imagined events was more affected than was the clarity of perceived events by whether the memories had been rated previously (Experiments 1 & 3). Over 24 hrs, clarity and sensory ratings decreased more for imagined than for perceived events (Experiment 3). Implications for reality monitoring (M. K. Johnson and C. L. Raye [see PA, Vol 65:6694]) are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Role of memory strength in reality monitoring decisions: evidence from source attribution biases

Reality monitoring of verbal memories was compared with decisions about pictorial memories in this study. Experiment 1 showed an advantage in memory for imagined over perceived words and a bias to respond "perceived" on false alarms. Experiment 2 showed the opposite pattern: an advantage in memory for perceived pictures and a bias to respond "imagined" on false alarms. Participants attribute false alarms to whichever class of memories has the weakest trace strengths. The relative strength of memories of imagined and perceived objects was manipulated in Experiments 3 and 4, yielding changes in source attribution biases that were predicted by the strength heuristic. All 4 experiments generalize the mirror effect (an inverse relationship between patterns of hits and false alarms commonly found on recognition tests) to reality monitoring decisions. Results suggest that under some conditions differences between the strength of memories for perceived and imagined events, rather than differences in qualitative characteristics, are used to infer memory source.     

Cognitive factors in source monitoring and auditory hallucinations

BACKGROUND: In order to elucidate further the cognitive processes underlying auditory hallucinations, an experiment investigating delayed and immediate source monitoring for positive, negative and neutral verbal material was conducted with schizophrenic patients. METHODS: Patients experiencing auditory hallucinations, patients not experiencing auditory hallucinations and normal subjects participated in a word association task, rating their responses for how much a self-generated thought was their own, how controllable and involuntary it was and their confidence in these ratings. A delayed source monitoring test in which subjects had to recall the source (self or experimenter) of the words from the association task was also administered. RESULTS: Hallucinators showed a greater bias towards external attribution of their thoughts compared with both control groups for immediate attributions of source, but not for delayed attributions. Hallucinators showed a bias towards external attribution of emotional material for immediate source monitoring and all subjects showed a bias towards misattribution of positive material to an external source and negative material to an internal source for the delayed source monitoring task. CONCLUSIONS: These findings appear to be most consistent with theories proposing that hallucinations result from an external attributional bias for internal events. The implications of these results for research and practice are also discussed.     

Attempts to reduce the incidence of false recall with source monitoring.

In 5 experiments, the source-monitoring framework was applied to the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm, which has received so much interest recently. The authors' goal was to demonstrate that under certain conditions, when items in the DRM paradigm were learned from more than 1 origin, the incidence of false memories would decline. This result was obtained with internal–external reality monitoring conditions in free recall (Exps 1 and 3). With more confusable sources that required internal–internal or external–external discriminations, there was no reduction in false recall (Exps 2a and 4). In all experiments, participants were willing to assign an origin to their false memories, even when given an option to claim that they were not sure of its source (Exp 2b). The results are discussed in terms of how source-monitoring principles can sometimes reduce false memories in the DRM paradigm. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Recollections of true and false autobiographical memories.

Two diarists recorded true and false events and thoughts over a period of 5 months. In recognition tests taken 7 months later, they discriminated between true and false diary entries and judged their state of memory awareness as recollective experience, feeling of familiarity, or no distinct state of awareness. Correct recognition rates for true events and thoughts were high. Events were associated with recollective experience and thoughts with feelings of familiarity. Incorrect recognition was higher for thoughts than events. False memories were associated with familiarity or no distinct state of awareness. For correct memories of events only, factors influencing encoding (importance, consequentiality, etc.) interacted with state of memory awareness at retrieval. The quality of phenomenal experience, based on the associations between encoding and retrieval, may be critical in leading a remeberer to accept a memory as true. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The controversy over recovered memories.

Comments on the article by J. L. Alpert et al (see record 2000-13581-002), which presented the report of the American Psychological Association Working Group on Investigation of Memories of Childhood Abuse. The authors discuss 4 issues in this commentary: (a) the assumptions and evidence used to support the case for dissociated and recovered memories (noting that the evidence is weak and the assumptions internally inconsistent as well as contradictory to a mass of experimental evidence about human memory); (b) the process by which dissociated memories are said to be recovered (events that were originally very poorly encoded as fragmentary, kinesthetic memories cannot be recovered with accuracy later); (c) 4 bodies of relevant, but neglected, research on human memory (reminiscence and hypermnesia, effectiveness of retrieval cues, priming in implicit memory tests, and intentional forgetting); and (d) the issue of appropriate research strategies to gain evidence on the thorny issues of long-delayed retrieval of information. Current evidence does not support the conclusion that memories of repeated abuse are dissociated and recovered with accuracy years later. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Memory and reality.

Although it may be disconcerting to contemplate, true and false memories arise in the same way. Memories are attributions that we make about our mental experiences based on their subjective qualities, our prior knowledge and beliefs, our motives and goals, and the social context. This article describes an approach to studying the nature of these mental experiences and the constructive encoding, revival, and evaluative processes involved (the source monitoring framework). Cognitive behavioral studies using both objective (e.g., recognition, source memory) and subjective (e.g., ratings of memory characteristics) measures and neuroimaging findings are helping to clarify the complex relation between memory and reality. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Desperately seeking memories of the first few years of childhood: The reality of early memories.

How far back into their childhoods can people remember? Previous research suggests that people's earliest memories date back to the ages of 3 or 4 yrs. J. A. Usher and U. Neisser (see record 1993-36251-001) reported that some events, like the birth of a sibling and a planned hospitalization, can be readily remembered if they occurred at age 2 yrs. However, the bits and pieces of such memories that were obtained in their research may not be indicative of genuine episodic memory. An alternative hypothesis is that these apparent memories are the result of educated guesses, general knowledge of what must have been, or external information acquired after the age of 2 yrs. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Aging and qualitative characteristics of memories for perceived and imagined complex events.

Older and younger adults' memory for perceived and imagined events was examined with a procedure in which everyday situations are simulated in the laboratory. Subjects perceived some situations and imagined others. Later, they were asked to rate their memory for various aspects of these situations (e.g., amount of perceptual detail, thoughts and feelings). A recall test followed the ratings. On the rating scale, for both perceived and imagined events, older subjects reported better memory for their thoughts and feelings than did younger subjects. In addition, on the recall test, older subjects produced more thoughts and feelings than did younger subjects, whereas younger subjects produced more perceptual and spatial information. These results suggest that older subjects may not inhibit personal information (e.g., thoughts and feelings), and this information may interfere with memory for other aspects of information, such as perceptual and contextual details (Hasher & Zacks, 1988). (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

When reality monitoring fails: The role of imagination in stereotype maintenance.

Research on reality monitoring (the process by which people distinguish memories of real events from memories of imagined events) suggests that the occurrence of imagined events can inflate the perceived frequency of corresponding real events. Two experiments examined how such failures in reality monitoring can contribute to the maintenance of social stereotypes. When subjects imagined members of occupational groups in the initial experiment, they tended to incorporate stereotyped traits into their imaginations, with specific traits determined by the contexts being imagined. This suggests that imagined events do correspond with stereotype-confirming real events. In the second experiment, subjects read sentences that presented traits (stereotyped and nonstereotyped) in association with occupations with uniform frequency. They also imagined members of each occupation in situations relevant to particular stereotypic traits. In subsequent judgments of presentation frequency, subjects overestimated their exposure to stereotypic occupation–trait combinations, which replicated earlier studies. Subjects further overestimated the presentation frequency of imagined stereotypic combinations, which indicated the failure to distinguish self-generated images from actual presentations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Development of verbatim and gist memory for numbers.

Two theories of developmental and functional relationships between verbatim and gist memories of numbers were compared: (1) the integration hypothesis, which assumes that gist memories are constructive inferences from verbatim memories; and (2) the parallel retrieval hypothesis, which assumes that gist memories are stored in parallel with the encoding of verbatim information. In Exp 1, being able to remember verbatim numbers did not help children remember either the global gist (most or least) or the pairwise gist (more or less) of those numbers, manipulations that improved verbatim memory did not improve gist memory, and the relative accuracy of the 2 types of memory reversed with age. In Exp 2, additional evidence favoring the parallel retrieval model was provided by an instructional manipulation that enhanced preschoolers' gist memories but impaired their verbatim memories. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Inactivation of glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate dehydrogenase by ferrylmyoglobin

This article describes the development and psychometric evaluation of self-report measurement instruments in (nursing) research. The aim of this study is to gain more insight into, and understanding of the use of such instruments. To be more specific, this paper deals with: (1) What is a self-report measurement instrument?; (2) How to develop such an instrument?; (3) What is its psychometric quality in terms of validity and reliability?; (4) How to analyze an instrument statistically?; (5) Which are the pros en cons of a self-report measurement instrument in general?; and (6) Where do we find examples of good measurement instruments? These six questions will be answered with the help of several practical research examples. The article concludes with a few suggestions for literature concerning existing measurement instruments and their psychometric qualities.     

Neurobiology of reconstructed memory.

The authors present evidence that normal autobiographical memories and "recovered" autobiographical memories of long-forgotten traumatic events are produced by the same mechanisms. The basic process involves the parallel storage of information in a set of independent modules, the selective retrieval and reaggregation of this dispersed information within an appropriate spatiotemporal context, and the organization of this aggregate by a narrative. The result is a seamless blend of retrieved information (that which is recalled) and knowledge (that which is inferred) experienced as an autobiographical memory. The critical difference between normal and recovered memories, by this account, is the impact of trauma on the storage process: The physiological consequences of trauma can include a disabling of the neural module responsible for encoding the appropriate spatiotemporal context. Recovered memory involves retrieval of memory fragments, confabulation (innocent or not) driven by inference, and the fitting of a context to this incomplete aggregate. This too is experienced as an autobiographical memory. The implications of this view for estimating the veridicality of recovered memories are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

On the whats and hows of retrieval in the acquisition of a simple skill.

Two general views on the role of memory in cognitive skills—an instance-based theory and an associative perspective—were compared with respect to their general assumptions about the information involved and the processes that operate on that information. Characteristics of memory information were examined in terms of predictions for transfer to various stimulus forms as a function of 2 types of learning conditions. Characteristics of memory processes were examined using a set of general process models. Results of 4 experiments indicate that (a) neither theoretical perspective was capable of accounting for all the observed transfer effects, indicating needed refinements to informational assumptions, and that (b) 1 class of process assumptions was consistently supported, whereas other classes were consistently contradicted, indicating a general set of process characteristics that can be used in further model development. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Recollection rejection: How children edit their false memories.

A new methodology is presented for studying children's ability to suppress memory reports of false-but-gist-consistent events, one that measures children's use of a specific editing operation (recollection rejection) that suppresses false reports by accessing verbatim traces of true events. Children make memory reports under 2 instructional conditions, verbatim and gist, and the data are analyzed with fuzzy-trace theory's conjoint-recognition model. Application of the new methodology in studies of children's false memory for narrative events revealed that (a) false-memory editing increases dramatically between early and middle childhood, (b) even young children spontaneously edit their false memories, (c) measures of children's false-memory editing react appropriately to experimental manipulations, and (d) developmental reductions in the incidence of false-memory reports are primarily due to developmental improvements in verbatim memory ability (rather than to decreases in the formation of false memories). Implications for child forensic interviewing are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Contextual forgetting: Posthypnotic source amnesia.

Notes that posthypnotic source amnesia (SA) involves recall of information recently learned during hypnosis without recollection of how the information was acquired. SA occurs when, posthypnotically, an S gives the correct answer to a question like, "An amethyst is a blue or purple gemstone: What color does it become when exposed to heat?" The correct answer seems to pop into the S's mind and he or she does not remember just learning it during hypnosis. SA occurred in 4 of 12 deeply hypnotized totally amnesic Ss but not in 15 unhypnotizable simulating Ss tested by a "blind" experimenter. (Ss were selected by use of the Harvard Group Scale of Hypnotic Susceptibility and the Stanford Hypnotic Susceptibility Scale.) SA also occurred with 31% of 29 deeply hypnotized amnesic Ss in a nonblind experiment. Results show that amnesia cannot be attributed to subtle aspects of the experimental procedure nor to a partial failure of posthypnotic amnesia. SA may provide a model to help understand aspects of several normal and pathological contextual memory disruptions including plagiarism, flashbulb memories, clinical amnesia, the development of phobic states, and other related processes in which there is an apparent dissociation between the content of accessible memories and the context in which the episodic events originally occurred. In SA, Ss know, but do not know how or why they know. (26 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)