Correcting false memories: Errors must be noticed and replaced.

Memory can be unreliable. For example, after reading The new baby stayed awake all night, people often misremember that the new baby cried all night (Brewer, 1977); similarly, after hearing bed, rest, and tired, people often falsely remember that sleep was on the list (Roediger & McDermott, 1995). In general, such false memories are difficult to correct, persisting despite warnings and additional study opportunities.

Recent study, but not retrieval, of knowledge protects against learning errors.

Surprisingly, people incorporate errors into their knowledge bases even when they have the correct knowledge stored in memory (e.g., Fazio, Barber, Rajaram, Ornstein, & Marsh, 2013).

Prospective memory and aging: evidence for preserved spontaneous retrieval with exact but not related cues.

We examined whether normal aging spares or compromises cue-driven spontaneous retrieval processes that support prospective remembering. In Experiment 1, young and older adults performed prospective-memory tasks that required either strategic monitoring processes for retrieval (nonfocal) or for which participants relied on spontaneous retrieval processes (focal). We found age differences for nonfocal, but not focal, prospective-memory performance.

Prospective memory: effects of divided attention on spontaneous retrieval.

We examined the effects of divided attention on the spontaneous retrieval of a prospective memory intention. Participants performed an ongoing lexical decision task with an embedded prospective memory demand, and also performed a divided-attention task during some segments of lexical decision trials. In all experiments, monitoring was highly discouraged, and we observed no evidence that participants engaged monitoring processes.

Resource depletion does not influence prospective memory in college students.

This paper reports an experiment designed to investigate the potential influence of prior acts of self-control on subsequent prospective memory performance. College undergraduates (n=146) performed either a cognitively depleting initial task (e.g.