Animate items are better remembered than inanimate items, suggesting that human memory systems evolved in a way to prioritize memory for animacy. The proximate mechanisms responsible for the animacy ...effect are not yet known, but several possibilities have been suggested in previous research, including attention capture, mortality salience, and mental arousal (Popp & Serra in
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 42
, 186-201,
2016
). Perceived threat of items could be related to any of these three potential proximate mechanisms. Because the characteristic of animacy is sometimes confounded with the perceived threat of the animate items, and because threatening items are often more likely to capture attention (e.g., Blanchette in
The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 59,
1484–1504,
2006
), a norming study was first conducted to aid in the creation of lists of threatening and non-threatening animate and inanimate items. Two experiments were then conducted to determine if the animacy effect persisted regardless of the threat level of the items. The first experiment demonstrated the typical animacy advantage as well as a memory advantage for threatening items. The second experiment replicated these results across three successive recall tests as well as in both full attention and divided attention conditions. The results are discussed with respect to the potential proximate mechanisms of attention capture, mortality salience, and mental arousal.
Animate items are better remembered than inanimate items, suggesting that human memory has evolved to prioritize information related to survival. The proximate mechanisms for the animacy effect are ...not yet known, but one possibility is that animate items are more likely to capture attention, which then leads to better memory for those items. The first experiment independently manipulated the animacy and perceived threat of studied items and found that both target recognition and false-alarm recognition were higher for animate items compared to inanimate items and for threatening items compared to non-threatening items. The effects were eliminated when d’ scores were calculated. The second experiment used a response signal delay (RSD) manipulation where participants were forced to respond after a short (500 ms) or long (2,000 ms) time delay during the recognition test. Similar to the first experiment, the effects of animacy and threat for target recognition and false-alarm recognition persisted and did not interact with the RSD manipulation. Taken together, the results of the studies suggest that the animacy and threat effects in memory are robust and that attention capture might be at least partly responsible for the animacy effect.
The animacy effect, the finding that animate items are better remembered than inanimate items, provides evidence that human memory prioritizes information that is related to survival. Various ...proximate mechanisms for this memory effect have been proposed, including mortality salience, that humans are more likely to remember information related to death, and animate items (e.g., shark, tiger) are more likely to elicit thoughts of death than inanimate items (e.g., volleyball, towel). Mortality salience was manipulated in Experiment 1. Animate items were recalled more than inanimate items and threatening items were recalled more than nonthreatening items, but there was no significant effect of mortality salience. For Experiment 2, norming data were collected rating the word stimuli from the previous experiment on the characteristics of arousal, valence, likelihood to capture attention, and likelihood to elicit thoughts of death. These ratings along with threat ratings and animacy status of the items were included in a regression analysis with the frequency of recall of the items in Experiment 1. In addition to animacy, likelihood to capture attention and likelihood to elicit thoughts of death were significant predictors of recall, suggesting that these characteristics could be at least partly responsible for the animacy effect.
Two experiments were conducted to explore the animacy advantage in memory, which has shown that words for animate objects are more likely to be remembered than words for inanimate objects. In the ...first experiment, participants processed words for animate and inanimate objects either shallowly (i.e., by indicating whether each word contained an “e”) or deeply (i.e., by rating the pleasantness of the items). In the second experiment, participants rated the relevance of the study items to either a moving scenario or to a grasslands survival scenario. As expected, in the first experiment the deep processing led to higher rates of recall, and in the second experiment the grasslands survival scenario led to higher rates of recall. In both experiments, animate words were recalled at a significantly higher rate than inanimate words regardless of processing condition. The data from these experiments provide more evidence for the animacy advantage in memory, which supports the adaptive memory view.
As research in the behavioural sciences increasingly relies on Amazon's Mechanical Turk (MTurk) for recruiting participants, it is an empirical question whether an intentional memory experiment could ...be conducted online and whether performance of MTurk participants and college students would be comparable. College students and MTurk participants viewed threatening and nonthreatening items that were animate or inanimate and completed a recall test. Recent research indicates that human memory systems evolved to prioritise survival-relevant information, including animacy of items. The results of both studies indicated that participants recalled more animate than inanimate items and recalled more threatening items than nonthreatening items. The results indicate that it is possible to conduct memory experiments online and that results match patterns found in laboratory studies of the animacy effect (Nairne, VanArsdall, Pandeirada, Cogdill, & LeBreton, 2013), but that researchers should include safeguards to ensure the online participants are attending to and following directions.
Need for Cognition (NFC) was explored in the misinformation effect paradigm where participants view an event and receive post-event information that contains false information. The misinformation ...often leads to decreased memory accuracy and incorporation of the misinformation into the original event memory. The present study sought to determine whether high-NFC individuals would be more likely to detect discrepancies between the original event and the misinformation, making them less susceptible to the influence of misinformation. This was hypothesised because high-NFC individuals should be more likely to engage in effortful processing that could be used to carefully monitor the source of misinformation and detect discrepancies in order to avoid false memories. Further, when presented with misinformation, high-NFC individuals had more accurate memories and accepted less misinformation than low-NFC individuals. The results suggest that high-NFC individuals are less susceptible to misinformation suggesting they might be more likely to engage in discrepancy detection.
In the memory conjunction paradigm, the number of times that constituents of conjunction lures were studied and the method of presentation were varied. In two experiments, participants were presented ...with eight parent items that could be recombined at test to form a conjunction lure. The constituents that were shared between the parent items and the conjunction lures were either presented in the same words (e.g., blackmail and jailbird presented four times each for the conjunction lure blackbird) or in different words (e.g., the targets footstool, footlocker, foothill, footbridge, baseball, softball, basketball, and golfball for the conjunction lure football). In both experiments, rates of false recognition were higher in the Different condition as opposed to the Same condition. These results provide evidence that participants in the Same condition were able to utilise a recall-to-reject strategy by remembering the repeatedly presented parent word. In the Different condition, participants were not able to utilise that strategy and instead relied on the familiarity of the repeatedly presented constituents which led to higher rates of false recognition.
Research on false memories, which has increased drastically in the past decade, has mainly focused on the cognitive influences that lead to the creation of false memories, such as the theoretical ...causes of decreased memory strength and source confusion. Although there is certainly a cognitive component to false memories, in this article, I argue that false memories are more likely to be created with the use of persuasion strategies. Within a variety of false memory paradigms, including the misinformation effect, the imagination inflation paradigm, and false confession research, persuasion strategies help create and strengthen false memories. My conclusion is that false memories often occur without the presence of persuasion strategies, but that they are more frequent and compelling with the presence of persuasion strategies. I discuss this conclusion in relation to the source monitoring framework. I also discuss the applied implications of this research (e.g., a detective in a crime investigation "suggesting" details or an interrogator trying to elicit a confession). Copyright The American Psychological Association.
The relationship between working memory capacity (WMC) and false memories in the memory conjunction paradigm was explored. Previous research using other paradigms has shown that individuals high in ...WMC are not as likely to experience false memories as low-WMC individuals, the explanation being that high-WMC individuals are better able to engage in source monitoring. In the memory conjunction paradigm participants are presented at study with parent words (e.g., eyeglasses, whiplash). At test, in addition to being presented with targets and foils, participants are presented with lures that are composed of previously studied features (e.g., eyelash). It was found that high-WMC individuals had lower levels of false recognition than low-WMC individuals. Furthermore, recall-to-reject responses were analysed (e.g., "I know I didn't see eyelash because I remember seeing eyeglasses") and it was found that high-WMC individuals were more likely to utilise this memory editing strategy, providing direct evidence that one reason that high-WMC individuals are not as prone to false memories is because they are better able to engage in source monitoring.
Need for Cognition and false recall Leding, Juliana K.
Personality and individual differences,
07/2011, Letnik:
51, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Two experiments investigated whether Need for Cognition (NFC) affected false recall in the Deese–Roediger–McDermott (DRM) paradigm. In the first experiment, participants were presented with DRM lists ...and given one attempt to recall the items. In the second experiment, participants were presented with DRM lists under full or divided attention and were given three consecutive recall tests. In Experiment 2, high-NFC individuals exhibited increased false recall across successive recall attempts in both the full and divided attention conditions whereas low-NFC individuals did not. Furthermore, high-NFC individuals in the full attention condition exhibited increased levels of true recall across successive tests. These results show that the individual differences in the ways in which individuals process information can affect true and false recall in the DRM task.
PDF
