Children have traditionally been viewed as less reliable witnesses than are adults. More recently, a concept known as developmental reversals, has brought this view into question. Developmental reversals have demonstrated that in certain contexts, children produce fewer false memories than adults. The primary paradigm used to demonstrate…

This paper examines recent evidence from behavioral and neuroscience research with nonhuman animals that suggests the intriguing possibility that they, like their human counterparts, are vulnerable to creating false memories. Once considered a uniquely human memory phenomenon, the creation of false memories in lower animals can be seen especially…

In the present research, we used the misinformation paradigm to investigate the effects of participants' mood during encoding of an event, and the emotional content of the event on false memory. Participants were randomly assigned to one of three mood-induction groups (positive, negative, or neutral) and they all watched a video of an event that…

Unpleasant affect fades faster than pleasant affect, and this phenomenon is referred to as the fading affect bias (FAB). The FAB is moderated and mediated by many variables, including rehearsal and memory specificity, and researchers have emphasized the importance of memory for the FAB, but research has not evaluated the link of the FAB to…

Iconicity refers to a resemblance between word form and meaning. Previous work has shown that iconic words are learned earlier and processed faster. Here, we examined whether iconic words are recognized better on a recognition memory task. We also manipulated the level at which items were encoded--with a focus on either their meaning or their…

A common method used by memory scholars to enhance retention is to make materials more challenging to learn--a benefit termed desirable difficulties. Recently, researchers have investigated the efficacy of Sans Forgetica, a perceptually disfluent/distinctive font which may increase processing effort required at study and enhance memory as a…

Exposure to 'fake news' can result in false memories, with possible consequences for downstream behaviour. Given the sharp rise in online misinformation during the coronavirus pandemic, it is important to understand the factors that influence the development of false memories. The present study measured susceptibility to false memories following…

Semantic richness theory predicts that words with richer, more distinctive semantic representations should facilitate performance in a word recognition memory task. We investigated the contribution of multiple aspects of sensorimotor experience--those relating to the body, communication, food, and objects--to word recognition memory, by analyzing…

Across four studies, we examined the how design decisions influenced the effectiveness of fact-checking articles created by CrossCheck France during the 2017 French election. We measured both memory for the article and belief in the false rumor. We saw no difference in fact check efficacy based on the type of headline (question vs negation) or the…

Much research has found that implicit associations between Black male faces and aggression affect dispositional judgments and decision-making, but there have been few investigations into downstream effects on explicit episodic memory. The current experiment tested whether such implicit associations interact with explicit recognition memory using…

Three experiments were designed to test whether experimentally created ad hoc associative networks evoke false memories. We used the DRM (Deese, Roediger, McDermott) paradigm with lists of ad hoc categories composed of exemplars aggregated toward specific goals (e.g., going for a picnic) that do not share any consistent set of features. Experiment…

The mirror effect is the finding that in recognition tests, a manipulation that increases the hit rate also decreases the false alarm rate. For example, low frequency words have a higher hit rate and a lower false alarm rate than high frequency words. Because the mirror effect is held to be a regularity of memory, it has had a pronounced influence…

In accord with classic schema theory, people are susceptible to forming false memories that align with stored schema representations (Brewer & Treyens, 1981). Furthermore, clinicians schematize mental disorders as causal networks of features (de Kwaadsteniet, Hagmayer, Krol, & Witteman, 2010; Kim & Ahn, 2002). We asked whether one…

People often need to update representations of information upon discovering them to be incorrect, a process that can be interrupted by competing cognitive demands. Because anxiety and stress can impair cognitive performance, we tested whether looming threat can similarly interfere with the process of updating representations of a statement's…

As a theory of skill acquisition, the instance theory of automatization posits that, after a period of training, algorithm-based performance is replaced by retrieval-based performance. This theory has been tested using alphabet-arithmetic verification tasks (e.g., is A + 4 = E?), in which the equations are necessarily solved by counting at the…