Four experiments examined subjective experience during retrieval in the DRM false memory paradigm [Deese, J. (1959). "On the prediction of occurrence of particular verbal intrusions in immediate recall." "Journal of Experimental Psychology," 58, 17-22; Roediger, H. L., & McDermott, K. B. (1995). "Creating false memories: Remembering words not…

Many studies into learners' ideas in science have reported that aspects of learners' thinking can be represented in terms of entities described in such terms as alternative conceptions or conceptual frameworks, which are considered to describe relatively stable aspects of conceptual knowledge that are represented in the learner's memory and…

People will often look to empty, uninformative locations in the world when trying to recall spoken information. This spatial indexing behaviour occurs when the information had previously been associated with those locations. It remains unclear, however, whether this behaviour is an example of a simple association across perceptual and cognitive…

Performance on tests of source memory is typically based on recollection of contextual information associated with an item. However, recent neuroimaging results have suggested that the perirhinal cortex, a region thought to support familiarity-based item recognition, may support source attributions if source information is encoded as a feature of…

Aim: The Gudjonsson Suggestibility Scale (GSS) assesses suggestibility by asking respondents to recall a short story, followed by exposure to leading questions and pressure to change their responses. Suggestibility, as assessed by the GSS, appears to be elevated in people with intellectual disabilities (ID). This has been shown to reflect to some…

Adults can represent approximate numbers of items independently of language. This approximate number system can discriminate and compare entities as varied as dots, sounds, or actions. But can multiple different types of entities be enumerated in parallel and stored as independent numerosities? Subjects who were prevented from verbally counting…

The study examines the relation of death experience to death attitudes and to autobiographical memory use. Participants (N = 52) completed standard death attitude measures and wrote narratives about a death-related autobiographical memory and (for comparison) a memory of a low point. Self-ratings of the memory narratives were used to assess their…

The formation and recall of memories are fundamental aspects of life and help preserve the complex collection of experiences that provide us with a sense of identity and autonomy. Scientists have recently started to investigate pharmacological agents that inhibit or "dampen" the strength of memory formation and recall. The development of…

This study examined the effect of distributed questioning on learning and retention in a college lecture course. A total of 48 question pairs were presented over four exams. The 16 question pairs associated with each of the three blocks of the course appeared on the block exams, and all 48 appeared on the final exam. The two questions in each pair…

This study examined the relationship between language experience and false memory produced by the DRM paradigm. The word lists used in Stadler, et al. (Memory & Cognition, 27, 494-500, 1999) were first translated into Chinese. False recall and false recognition for critical non-presented targets were then tested on a group of Chinese users.…

Retrieval monitoring enhances episodic memory accuracy. For instance, false recognition is reduced when participants base their decisions on more distinctive recollections, a retrieval monitoring process called the distinctiveness heuristic. The experiments reported here tested the hypothesis that autobiographical elaboration during study (i.e.,…

How does the brain carry out working memory storage, categorization, and voluntary performance of event sequences? The LIST PARSE neural model proposes an answer that unifies the explanation of cognitive, neurophysiological, and anatomical data. It quantitatively simulates human cognitive data about immediate serial recall and free recall, and…

The mnemonic model of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) proposed by D. C. Rubin, D. Berntsen, and M. K. Bohni presents some provocative and potentially insightful ideas about this mental disorder. D. C. Rubin et al. suggested that PTSD is caused and maintained through a "pathogenic memory" (D. C. Rubin et al., 2008, p. 985) of a negative event…

Eyewitness memory is known to be fallible. We describe 3 experiments that aim to establish baseline performance for recognition of unfamiliar faces. In Experiment 1, viewers were shown live actors or photos (targets), and then immediately presented with arrays of 10 faces (test items). Asked whether the target was present among the test items, and…

Infusions of CREB antisense into the amygdala prior to training impair memory for aversive tasks, suggesting that the antisense may interfere with CRE-mediated gene transcription and protein synthesis important for the formation of new memories within the amygdala. However, the amygdala also appears to modulate memory formation in distributed…