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.