Compelling Untruths Lampinen, James Michael; Meier, Christopher R; Arnal, Jack D ...
Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition,
09/2005, Letnik:
31, Številka:
5
Journal Article
Recenzirano
False memories are sometimes accompanied by surprisingly vivid experiential detail that makes them difficult to distinguish from actual memories. Such strikingly real false memories may be produced ...by a process called content borrowing in which details from presented items are errantly borrowed to corroborate the occurrence of the false memory item. In 2 experiments using think-out-loud protocols at both study and test, evidence for content borrowing occurred for more than half of the false remember judgments participants reported. The present study also provides evidence consistent with recollection rejection and distinctiveness playing a role in false-memory editing.
Language can be viewed as a complex set of cues that shape people's mental representations of situations. For example, people think of behavior described using imperfective aspect (i.e., what a ...person was doing) as a dynamic, unfolding sequence of actions, whereas the same behavior described using perfective aspect (i.e., what a person did) is perceived as a completed whole. A recent study found that aspect can also influence how we think about a person's intentions (Hart & Albarracín, 2011). Participants judged actions described in imperfective as being more intentional (d between 0.67 and 0.77) and they imagined these actions in more detail (d = 0.73). The fact that this finding has implications for legal decision making, coupled with the absence of other direct replication attempts, motivated this registered replication report (RRR). Multiple laboratories carried out 12 direct replication studies, including one MTurk study. A meta-analysis of these studies provides a precise estimate of the size of this effect free from publication bias. This RRR did not find that grammatical aspect affects intentionality (d between 0 and −0.24) or imagery (d = −0.08). We discuss possible explanations for the discrepancy between these results and those of the original study.
One approach that has been used to help recover missing children is forensic age progression. In forensic age progression, outdated photographs of missing children are digitally aged to provide an ...estimate of the current appearance of the child. In two experiments participants studied pictures of children at age seven (outdated), pictures of children at age 12 (current), or pictures that were age progressed to age 12 (age progressed). They were then tested with pictures of the children at age 12. Memory for current pictures was superior to both outdated pictures and age progressed pictures. Memory for outdated pictures and age progressed pictures did not significantly differ. The results failed to demonstrate an advantage for age progressed pictures.
Recollection rejection is a memory editing mechanism in which related lures are rejected because of the recollection of the lure’s instantiating target (e.g., "I know it wasn’t pretty because it was ...beautiful"). According to one view, recollection rejection requires an assumption on the part of the participant that both a word and its related lure could not have been studied. We examined this view by manipulating the instructions that were given to participants (Experiment 1) and the nature of the study list (Experiment 2). Estimates of recollection rejection derived from the phantom receive operating characteristic model found evidence for the role of metacognitive assumptions, but only when metacognitive knowledge was manipulated by varying the nature of the study list.
The present experiments focus on whether the post-identification feedback effect can be reduced by providing participants with warnings. Participants viewed a crime on video and identified a suspect ...from a target-absent lineup (Experiment 1) or target-present lineup (Experiment 2). Participants then received positive feedback, negative feedback or no feedback. Half of the participants received a warning saying their feedback was randomly generated by the computer, and the other half received no warning. Robust post-identification feedback effects were observed in both experiments in the no warning condition. These effects were largely eliminated when participants received a warning. In Experiments 3 and 4, we failed to find an ameliorative effect of a forensically realistic warning. These results indicate that warnings can reduce the effect of post-identification feedback in principle, but the application of warnings in practice may be more difficult. PUBLICATION ABSTRACT
Albarracín et al. (2008, Experiment 7) tested whether priming action or inaction goals (vs. no goal) and then satisfying those goals (vs. not satisfying them) would be associated with subsequent ...cognitive responding. They hypothesized and found that priming action or inaction goals that were not satisfied resulted in greater or lesser responding, respectively, compared with not priming goals (N = 98). Sonnleitner and Voracek (2015) attempted to directly replicate Albarracín et al.’s (2008) study with German participants (N = 105). They did not find evidence for the 3 × 2 interaction or the expected main effect of task type. The current study attempted to directly replicate Albarracín et al. (2008), Experiment 7, with a larger sample of participants (N = 1,690) from seven colleges and universities in the United States. We also extended the study design by using a scrambled-sentence task to prime goals instead of the original task of completing word fragments, allowing us to test whether study protocol moderated any effects of interest. We did not detect moderation by protocol in the full 3 × 2 × 2 design (pseudo-r2 = 0.05%). Results for both protocols were largely consistent with Sonnleitner and Voracek’s findings (pseudo-r2s = 0.14% and 0.50%). We consider these results in light of recent findings concerning priming methods and discuss the robustness of action-/inaction-goal priming to the implementation of different protocols in this particular context.
In Experiment 5 of Albarracín et al. (2008), participants primed with words associated with action performed better on a subsequent cognitive task than did participants primed with words associated ...with inaction. A direct replication attempt by Frank, Kim, and Lee (2016) as part of the Reproducibility Project: Psychology (RP:P) failed to find evidence for this effect. In this article, we discuss several potential explanations for these discrepant findings: the source of participants (Amazon’s Mechanical Turk vs. traditional undergraduate-student pool), the setting of participation (online vs. in lab), and the possible moderating role of affect. We tested Albarracín et al.’s original hypothesis in two new samples: For the first sample, we followed the protocol developed by Frank et al. and recruited participants via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (n = 580). For the second sample, we used a revised protocol incorporating feedback from the original authors and recruited participants from eight universities (n = 884). We did not detect moderation by protocol; patterns in the revised protocol resembled those in our implementation of the RP:P protocol, but the estimate of the focal effect size was smaller than that found originally by Albarracín et al. and larger than that found in Frank et al.’s replication attempt. We discuss these findings and possible explanations.
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