Did we see someone shake hands with a fire hydrant?: collaborative recall affects false recollections from a campus walk (original) (raw)

Long-lasting positive effects of collaborative remembering on false assents to misleading questions

Acta Psychologica

Previous studies showed that collaborative remembering can reduce false memories through a process of mutual error checking, although conclusions were limited by the nature of the memory tasks (very few errors). The present experiments extend these findings to eyewitness memory by using a paradigm designed to increase the frequency of memory errors. Collaborative and nominal pairs viewed a video-clip illustrating a bank robbery, provided an immediate free recall, were forced to confabulate answers to false-event questions, and, after a short-(1 h: Experiment 1) or a long-term delay (1 week: Experiment 2), were administered a yes/no recognition task in which the misleading statements either matched the questions presented in the confabulation phase (answered questions) or not (control questions). Collaborative pairs recalled fewer correct details in the immediate free recall task, replicating the negative effects of collaborative inhibition. Most importantly, in the final recognition test, collaborative pairs were less likely to provide false assents to misleading statements, regardless of whether they had provided a response to the related false-event questions 1 h or 1 week earlier. Our results suggest that collaboration can increase the eyewitnesses' tendency to check the accuracy of others' responses and reject false memories through discussion.

Do you remember proposing marriage to the Pepsi machine? False recollections from a campus walk

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 2006

During a campus walk, participants were given familiar or bizarre action statements (e.g., "Check the Pepsi machine for change" vs. "Propose marriage to the Pepsi machine") with instructions either to perform the actions or imagine performing the actions (Group 1) or to watch the experimenter perform the actions or imagine the experimenter performing the actions (Group 2). One day later, some actions were repeated, along with new actions, on a second walk. Two weeks later, the participants took a recognition test for actions presented during the first walk, and they specified whether a recognized action was imagined or performed. Imagining themselves or the experimenter performing familiar or bizarre actions just once led to false recollections of performance for both types of actions. This study extends previous research on imagination inflation by demonstrating that these false performance recollections can occur in a natural, real-life setting following just one imagining.

Creating Non-Believed Memories for Recent Autobiographical Events

PLoS ONE, 2012

A recent study showed that many people spontaneously report vivid memories of events that they do not believe to have occurred . In the present experiment we tested for the first time whether, after powerful false memories have been created, debriefing might leave behind nonbelieved memories for the fake events. In Session 1 participants imitated simple actions, and in Session 2 they saw doctored video-recordings containing clips that falsely suggested they had performed additional (fake) actions. As in earlier studies, this procedure created powerful false memories. In Session 3, participants were debriefed and told that specific actions in the video were not truly performed. Beliefs and memories for all critical actions were tested before and after the debriefing. Results showed that debriefing undermined participants' beliefs in fake actions, but left behind residual memory-like content. These results indicate that debriefing can leave behind vivid false memories which are no longer believed, and thus we demonstrate for the first time that the memory of an event can be experimentally dissociated from the belief in the event's occurrence. These results also confirm that belief in and memory for an event can be independently-occurring constructs.

The influences of partner accuracy and partner memory ability on social false memories

Memory & cognition, 2014

In this study, we examined whether increasing the proportion of false information suggested by a confederate would influence the magnitude of socially introduced false memories in the social contagion paradigm Roediger, Meade, & Bergman (Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 8:365-371, 2001). One participant and one confederate collaboratively recalled items from previously studied household scenes. During collaboration, the confederate interjected 0 %, 33 %, 66 %, or 100 % false items. On subsequent individual-recall tests across three experiments, participants were just as likely to incorporate misleading suggestions from a partner who was mostly accurate (33 % incorrect) as they were from a partner who was not at all accurate (100 % incorrect). Even when participants witnessed firsthand that their partner had a very poor memory on a related memory task, they were still as likely to incorporate the confederate's entirely misleading suggestions on subsequent recall and recognition test...

Enactment and Imagination Encoding Create False Memories of Scripted Actions

Psychological Applications and Trends 2022, 2022

The present study aims to extend our knowledge about the false memories from an adaptation of the DRM paradigm (Roediger & McDermott, 1995) in order to generate memory errors for everyday life action lists. In this perspective, the standard DRM task has been adapted, replacing the associated word lists with thematically related action lists. Each action list refers to a temporally connected action routine, i.e. a script. The sentences describing actions automatically involve visual and motor simulation of the scene. Therefore, the issue is to know whether the encoding conditions of enactment and motor imagery compared to verbal encoding (as control) impact false memories. Compared to the numerous studies on imagination effects on false memories, the enactment effect on the production of false memories of thematically related actions has not yet been tested. Therefore, we compared three experimental conditions: (1) a control condition, in which participants were asked to hear all lists attentively; (2) an imagery condition, where participants were instructed to visualize themselves performing each action, presented orally; (3) an enactment condition, participants had to mime each action heard as if they really were performing it. Then, without having been warned beforehand, all participants carried out a recognition test. The results confirmed the creation of false memories for associated action lists (scripted actions) and therefore valid this new version of the DRM task. However, false memories were of the same magnitude under all encoding conditions. These findings ask into question the classical models of memory, which assume that enactment and visual imagery should favour distinctive conceptual processing with the consequence of reducing false recognition. However, the field of embodied cognition might provide an alternative hypothesis that merit to be discussed and explored.

Social contagion of autobiographical memories [Harris, Barnier, Sutton, Khan]

Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition

We modified the social contagion of memory paradigm to track whether details mentioned during social interaction are transmitted to later individual recall for personal, autobiographical memories. Participants recalled four autobiographical events. A week later, participants described these events to a confederate, who described scripted “memories.” They then summarised each other’s recall. When summarising participants’ memories, confederates inserted two specific new details. Finally, participants recalled the events individually. We scored final individual recall for suggested contagion (new details inserted by confederates) and unsuggested contagion (new details consistent with confederates’ scripted memories but not suggested). We found social contagion for autobiographical memories: at final recall, 30% of participants recalled at least one suggested detail. Notably, at final recall, 90% of participants recalled at least one unsuggested detail from confederates’ scripted memories. Thus, social interaction, even if fairly minimal, can result in the transmission of specific details into memory for personal, autobiographical events.