"It was not mentioned": Improving responses to unanswerable questions using retrieval instructions.

Previous research shows that posing many questions about an event may lead to asking questions about unwitnessed details and that people sometimes provide substantive and erroneous answers to them. Therefore, two experiments investigated the role of the problem-solving and judgment processes, which are unrelated to memory access, in improving responding to unanswerable questions. Experiment 1 compared the effects of a brief retrieval training with the effects of an instruction to increase the criterion of reporting.

Intention and Monitoring Influence the Content of Memory Reports.

Objectives: While voluntary memories are intended and expected, involuntary memories are retrieved with no intention and are usually unexpected (when one is not waiting for a memory). The present study investigates the effects of retrieval intentionality () and monitoring processes () on the characteristics of autobiographical memories.

Methods: To this end, by applying mixed-method analysis of memory descriptions (i.