Developmental invariance in deep distortions.

Recently, a distinction has been drawn between conventional false memories, which misrepresent specific facts, and deep distortions, which misrepresent relations that connect facts. We report the first study of adult developmental trends in deep distortions, using a paradigm in which people make conjoint recognition judgments about incompatible facts (e.g.

Deep distortions in everyday memory: Fact memory is illogical, too.

A distinction has recently been drawn between surface distortions and deep distortions in false memory, where the former are conventional errors of commission and the latter are illogical relations among multiple memories of items. The deep distortions that have been studied to date are violations of the logical rules that govern incompatibility relations, such as additivity and countable additivity. Because that work is confined to laboratory word-list tasks, it is subject to the ecological validity criticism that memory for everyday facts may not exhibit such phenomena.

From association to gist: Some critical tests.

We report the first evidence that the gist mechanism of fuzzy-trace theory and the associative mechanism of activation monitoring theory operate in parallel, in the recall version of the Deese/Roediger/McDermott illusion. In three experiments, we implemented a new methodology that allows their respective empirical indexes, gist strength (GS) and backward associative strength (BAS), to each be manipulated while the other is held constant. In Experiment 1, increasing GS increased false recall of missing words, but increasing BAS did not.

The big three: Accuracy, organization, and retrieval effects of latent semantic attributes.

Rating norms for semantic attributes (e.g., concreteness, dominance, familiarity, and valence) are widely used in many psychological literatures to study the effects of processing specific types of semantic content.

Memory effects of semantic attributes: A method of controlling attribute contamination.

Rating norms for semantic attributes (e.g., concreteness, familiarity, valence) are widely used to study the content that people process as they encode meaningful material.

How does attribute ambiguity improve memory?

The memory effects of semantic attributes (e.g., concreteness, familiarity, valence) have long been studied by manipulating their average perceived intensities, as quantified in word rating norms.

A fundamental asymmetry in human memory: Old ≠ not-new and new ≠ not-old.

In recognition memory, anything that is objectively new is necessarily not-old, and anything that is objectively old is necessarily not-new. Therefore, judging whether a test item is new is logically equivalent to judging whether it is old, and conversely. Nevertheless, a series of 10 experiments showed that old? and new? judgments did not produce equivalent recognition accuracy.

Fuzzy-trace theory and false memory: Meta-analysis of conjoint recognition.

The conjoint-recognition model (CRM) implements fuzzy-trace theory's opponent process conception of false memory. Within the family of measurement models that separate the memory effects of recollection and familiarity, CRM is the only one that accomplishes this for false as well as true memory. We assembled a corpus of 537 sets of conjoint-recognition data, with estimates of CRM's parameters plus goodness-of-fit statistics being available for all the data sets.

Emotional ambiguity and memory.

The emotional ambiguity hypothesis introduced the principle that uncertainty about items' valence determines how emotional content affects memory and other psychological processes. It was formulated to explain why correlations between the perceived valence and arousal of memory items range from weak to unreliable, but it also makes novel predictions. Although data are consistent with those predictions, the hypothesis does not provide a process model of how valence ambiguity causes the valence-arousal relation to fluctuate.

From association to gist.

We removed a key uncertainty in the Deese/Roediger/McDermott (DRM) illusion. The mean backward associative strength (MBAS) of DRM lists is the best-known predictor of this illusion, but it is confounded with semantic relations between lists and critical distractors. Thus, it is unclear whether associative relations, semantic relations, or both foment the illusion.

Verbatim editing: A general model of recollection rejection.

Recollection rejection is traditionally defined as using verbatim traces of old items' presentations to reject new similar test cues, in old/new recognition (e.g., rejecting that couch is old by retrieving verbatim traces of sofa's presentation).