This article presents an obituary for Endel Tulving. Tulving's educational and professional careers are summarized. His work in the field of human memory is detailed.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWhen asked to estimate how much their state or nation has contributed to history, people typically provide unreasonably large estimates, claiming that their group has contributed much more to history than nongroup members would estimate, demonstrating collective overclaiming. Why does such overclaiming occur? In the current study we examined factors that might predict collective overclaiming. Participants from 12 U.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWorld War II was a cataclysmic event that consumed people from many countries for at least 6 years. We discuss a large-scale study of how people from 11 nations remember the war, including 8 Allied and 3 Axis countries. The study showed dramatic differences in how people of the former Soviet Union and those of the other 10 countries remembered the war.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe COVID-19 pandemic created a unique set of circumstances in which to investigate collective memory and future simulations of events reported during the onset of a potentially historic event. Between early April and late June 2020, we asked over 4,000 individuals from 15 countries across four continents to report on remarkable (a) national and (b) global events that (i) had happened since the first cases of COVID-19 were reported, and (ii) they expected to happen in the future. Whereas themes of infections, lockdown, and politics dominated global and national past events in most countries, themes of economy, a second wave, and lockdown dominated future events.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCollective memory refers to the memories that individuals have as members of the groups to which they belong, whether small (family, school) or large (political party, nation). Membership in some groups can form a strong part of a person's individual identity. Collective memory is history as people remember it; it is not formal history, because the "memories" of a group are often contradicted by historical fact.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNeuropsychologia
February 2022
Levi et al. (2021) critique the concept of everyday amnesia (high confident misses) by arguing that these are simply due to criterion shifts within a signal detection framework. We agree that signal detection figures can be drawn to conceptualize the results, but we argue such efforts merely provide a re-description of the phenomenon without explaining it.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTesting with various formats enhances long-term retention of studied information; however, little is known whether true-false tests produce this benefit despite their frequent use in the classroom. We conducted four experiments to explore the retention benefits of true-false tests. College students read passages and reviewed them by answering true-false questions or by restudying correct information from the passages.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFUnlabelled: Evidence is mixed concerning whether delayed judgments of learning (JOLs) enhance learning and if so, whether their benefit is similar to retrieval practice. One potential explanation for the mixed findings is the truncated search hypothesis, which states that not all delayed JOLs lead to a full-blown covert retrieval attempt. In three paired-associate learning experiments, we examined the effect of delayed JOLs on later recall by comparing them to conditions of restudy, overt retrieval, and various other delayed JOL conditions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPeople tend to overclaim historical influence for their own ingroup, in a phenomenon called ingroup inflation. Although this overclaiming has been empirically demonstrated in the USA and other nations, the cognitive mechanisms underlying it have been largely conjectural. We test one such proposed mechanism: the application of the availability heuristic to a biased collective memory.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRecent research in the eyewitness identification literature has investigated whether simultaneous or sequential lineups yield better discriminability. In standard eyewitness identification experiments, subjects view a mock-crime video and then are tested only once, requiring large samples for adequate power. However, there is no reason why theories of simultaneous versus sequential lineup performance cannot be tested using more traditional recognition memory tasks.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEndel Tulving has provided unparalleled contributions to the study of human memory. We consider here his contributions to the study of recognition memory and celebrate his first article on recognition, a nearly forgotten but (we argue) essential paper from 1968. We next consider his distinction between remembering and knowing, its relation to confidence, and the implications of high levels of false remembering in the DRM paradigm for using phenomenal experiences as measures of memory.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe assessed the knowledge of 1,338 people from 11 countries (8 former Allied and 3 former Axis) about World War II. When asked what percentage their country contributed to the war effort, across Allied countries, estimates totaled 309%, and Axis nations' estimates came to 140%. People in 4 nations claimed more than 50% responsibility for their country (Germany, Russia, United Kingdom, and United States).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMemory may play a critical role in the ability to imagine events in the future. While most work on this relation has concerned episodic memory and simulated episodic events in the future, the current study examines how collective memories relate to imagination for the collective future. Two thousand American participants provided events for (1) America's origins, (2) normative events that all Americans should remember, and (3) events in America's future.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCogn Res Princ Implic
June 2019
A significant problem in eyewitness identification occurs when witnesses view a suspect in one venue such as a mugshot and then later in a lineup where the suspect is the only previously viewed person. Prior research has documented that the witness may select the suspect from the lineup due either to misplaced familiarity from seeing the mugshot or to their prior commitment from identifying the suspect from the mugshot. Two experiments attempted to minimize these biases by using repeated identical lineups, such that both targets and fillers were repeated, to determine if such a procedure could be useful.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCollective memories are memories or historical knowledge shared by individual group members, which shape their collective identity. Ingroup inflation, which has previously also been referred to as national narcissism or state narcissism, is the finding that group members judge their own group to have been significantly more historically influential than do people from outside the group. We examined the role of moral motivations in this biased remembering.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCogn Res Princ Implic
November 2018
Police departments often use verbal confidence measures (highly confident, somewhat confident) with a small number of values, whereas psychologists measuring the confidence-accuracy relationship typically use numeric scales with a large range of values (20-point or 100-point scales). We compared verbal and verbal + numeric confidence scales for two different lineups, using either two or four levels of confidence. We found strong confidence-accuracy relationships that were unaffected by the nature of the scale at the highest level of confidence.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPresents an obituary for Elizabeth Deutsch Capaldi Phillips (1945-2017). Always known as Betty, she was an important contributor to the scientific literature and a force in higher education. Beginning as an assistant professor at Purdue University in 1969, Betty rose through the ranks and served as head of the Department of Psychological Sciences (1983-1988) and assistant dean of the Graduate School (1982-1986).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCollective narcissism-a phenomenon in which individuals show excessively high regard for their own group-is ubiquitous in studies of small groups. We examined how Americans from the 50 U.S.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe discuss the findings from our 2006 article in Psychological Science on the testing effect and describe how the project arose. The testing effect (or retrieval-practice effect) was first reported in the experimental literature about a century before our article was published, and the effect had been replicated (and sometimes discovered anew) many times over the years. Our experiments used prose materials (unlike most prior research) and produced a more powerful effect than prior research even though we used a conservative control condition for comparison.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCogn Res Princ Implic
December 2017
Researchers use a wide range of confidence scales when measuring the relationship between confidence and accuracy in reports from memory, with the highest number usually representing the greatest confidence (e.g., 4-point, 20-point, and 100-point scales).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Exp Psychol Appl
September 2018
Retrieval practice boosts retention relative to other study strategies like restudying, a finding known as the testing effect. In 3 experiments, the authors investigated testing in social contexts. Subjects participated in pairs and engaged in restudy and retrieval practice of vocabulary pairs.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFame in psychology, as in all arenas, is a local phenomenon. Psychologists (and probably academics in all fields) often first become well known for studying a subfield of an area (say, the study of attention in cognitive psychology, or even certain tasks used to study attention). Later, the researcher may become famous within cognitive psychology.
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