Colleen M. Kelley

Becoming famous without being recognized: Unconscious influences of memory produced by dividing attention

The familiarity of names produced by their prior presentation can be misinterprete d as fame. We used this false fame effect to separately study the effects of divided attention on familiarity versus conscious recollection. In a first experiment, famous and nonfamous names were presented to be read under conditions of full vs. divided attention. Divided attention greatly reduced later recognition memory performance but had no effect on gains in familiarity as measured by fame judgments. In later experiments, we placed recognition memory and familiarity in opposition by presenting only nonfamous names to be read in the first phase. Recognizing a name as earlier read on the later fame test allowed Ss to be certain that it was nonfamous. Divided attention at study or during the fame test reduced list recognition performance but had no effect on familiarity. We conclude that conscious recollection is an attention-demanding act that is separate from assessing familiarity. Folk wisdom suggests that we benefit from experience by consciously remembering those experiences and applying the knowledge gained from them to the current situation. In contrast, research shows that many effects of prior experience on later performance can occur independently of the ability to consciously recollect the experience (see Richardson-Klavehn & Bjork, 1988, for a review). In this article, we provide further evidence that the past can be used to influence present performance without the intervention of conscious recollection. We show that divided attention, in comparison with full attention, can radically reduce a persons ability to recognize an item as previously presented while leaving intact the effects of that prior presentation on judgment. Furthermore, this potential for unconscious influence of the past leads to a role for conscious recollection that is directly counter to that advanced by folk wisdom. Rather than being a prerequisite for producing effects of the past, conscious recollection can be a means of escaping misleading effects of the past. The task that we used required subjects to judge whether a name was famous. In the first phase of each experiment, people read a list of names. Then those old names were mixed with new famous and new nonfamous names in a test of fame

Becoming famous overnight: limits on the ability to avoid unconscious influences of the past

Nonfamous names presented once in an experiment are mistakenly judged as famous 24 hr later. On an immediate test, no such false fame occurs. This phenomenon parallels the sleeper effect found in studies of persuasion. People may escape the unconscious effects of misleading information by recollecting its source, raising the criterion level of familiarity required for judgments of fame, or by changing from familiarity to a more analytic basis for judgment. These strategies place constraints on the likelihood of sleeper effects. We discuss these results as the unconscious use of the past as a tool vs its conscious use as an object of reflection. Conscious recollection of the source of information does not always occur spontaneously when information is used as a tool in judgment. Rather, conscious recollection is a separate act.

The process-dissociation procedure and similarity : Defining and estimating recollection and familiarity in recognition memory

In this article, we have two objectives. One aim is to demonstrate that estimates of the contributions of recollection and familiarity to recognition memory judgments obtained with Jacobys (1991) two-study-list processdissociation (PD) procedure are dramatically affected by the discriminability of the two study lists. Our more grand, theoretical aim is to argue that rather than being viewed as evidence of measurement error in the two-study-list PD procedure, our findings can be interpreted as support for a functionalist approach to recognition memory. The proposed approach combines aspects of dual-process theories (Jacoby & Dallas, 1981; Mandler, 1980) with aspects of global memory models (Gillund & Shiffiin, 1984; Murdock, 1982) and, more generally, with theories in which memory for an event consists of multiple records of the component processes that gave rise to and constituted the experience of that event (e.g., the multiple-entry, modular memory system [MEM] model of Johnson, 1983, 1990, 1992, or the transfer-appropriate processing approach articulated by Roe

Memory, monitoring, and control in the attainment of memory accuracy

Abstract Three experiments assessed people’s ability to strategically regulate memory accuracy in free report. Older adults were substantially less accurate than young adults in free report cued recall. Both older and younger adults made gains in memory accuracy from forced report to free report, but older adults did so at the expense of greater losses in quantity correct. This pattern of gains in accuracy at the cost of losses in quantity was mediated by the level of memory monitoring, and older adults showed less correspondence between their confidence judgments and the accuracy of their responses. When young adults encoded items with full vs. divided attention, the resulting differences in retention set off a cascade of effects including poorer memory monitoring and, ultimately, lower accuracy in free report. We suggest that older adults’ problems with memory monitoring and memory accuracy stem from impairments in their ability to recollect details of events.

The influence of retrieval processes in verbal overshadowing

Recent studies of eyewitness memory have observed deleterious effects of producing a verbal description on later identification accuracy of a previously viewed face, an effect termedverbal overshadowing (Schooler & Engstler-Schooler, 1990). The present research investigated whether the phenomenon of verbal overshadowing may be constrained by variation in participants’ initial retrieval processes, such that verbalization of a previously viewed stimulus could produce either positive or negative influences on subsequent attempts at recollection. To assess the validity of this hypothesis, we manipulated participants’ response criterion during the verbal description task. As predicted, variation in response criterion significantly influenced not only the quality of the description generated but also accuracy on a subsequent identification task. This retrieval-based effect was found to persist despite either a postdescription delay (Experiment 1) or source-monitoring instructions at the time of the identification task (Experiment 2). We conclude that retrieval-based processes exert a powerful influence over the accuracy of verbalization and subsequent identification of a target face.

Subjective reports and process dissociation: Fluency, knowing, and feeling

We review research on the fluency heuristic as a basis for the subjective experience of familiarity. Then, we explore the links between the construct of fluency and the automatic versus consciously controlled memory processes that are estimated using the process dissociation procedure, and the phenomenological experiences studied using ‘‘Remember’’ and ‘‘Know’’ judgements. Although the fluency that underlies familiarity may map onto the automatic memory process that is estimated by the process dissociation procedure, both fluency and automatic memory processes arise in a particular context and their expression depends on the joint constraints created by the cues and the task. ” 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

Making sense and nonsense of experience: Attributions in memory and judgment

Publisher Summary This chapter review research on whether ease of perceptual processing serves as a basis for familiarity in recognition memory and on criticisms of the role of perceptual fluency in recognition. It assess the generality of the notion of a fluency heuristic by exploring whether there are other enhancements of processing due to repetition that are both specific and substantial enough to serve as the basis for a fluency heuristic, namely conceptual fluency and retrieval fluency. If memory is indeed an attribution regarding effects of past experience on current experience, then the relative diagnosticity of those cues as indicators of past experience is critical for memory accuracy. This chapter discusses the relation between the basis for memory judgments and memory monitoring. There is ambiguity in the source of variations in current processing, such that effects of past experience can be misattributed to current conditions, affecting judgments of everything from perceptual judgments of brightness and duration to judgments of the complexity of a text.

Sources of individual differences in working memory: Contributions of strategy to capacity

Some research on attentional control in working memory has emphasized theoretical capacity differences. However, strategic behavior, which has been relatively unexplored, can also influence attentional control and its relationship to cognitive performance. In two experiments, we examined the relationship between attentional control (measured with operation span) and interference in a part-list cuing paradigm. Paradoxically, the results indicated that superior attentional control was related to increased interference. This relationship reflected the participants’ use of more complex encoding strategies, rather than superior interference control at retrieval, and was eliminated following brief encoding strategy training. The results suggest that complex span measures sometimes predict individual differences in task strategies related to interference control and that these strategies may be amenable to training. The implications for working memory research and the roles of strategies in basic memory and attention paradigms are briefly discussed.

Remembering to Forget The Amnesic Effect of Daydreaming

Daydreaming mentally transports people to another place or time. Many daydreams are similar in content to the thoughts that people generate when they intentionally try to forget. Thus, thoughts like those generated during daydreaming can cause forgetting of previously encoded events. We conducted two experiments to test the hypothesis that daydreams that are more different from the current moment (e.g., in distance, time, or circumstance) will result in more forgetting than daydreams that are less different from the current moment, because they result in a greater contextual shift. Daydreaming was simulated in the laboratory via instructions to engage in a diversionary thought. Participants learned a list of words, were asked to think about autobiographical memories, and then learned a second list of words. They tended to forget more words from the first list when they thought about their parents’ home than when they thought about their current home (Experiment 1). They also tended to forget more when they thought about an international vacation than when they thought about a domestic vacation (Experiment 2). These results support a context-change account of the amnesic effects of daydreaming.

Direct versus indirect tests of memory for source: judgments of modality.

We studied the relation between performance on direct versus indirect tests of memory for modality. Subjects read or heard words in a mixed list and then were tested by visual perceptual identification (the indirect test) and direct report of items as read, heard, or new. There was a dependent relation between perceptual identification performance and modality judgments, in accord with the hypothesis that subjects base their judgments of modality on relative perceptual fluency. In Experiment 2, we attempted to change the degree of dependence by providing subjects with an alternative basis for modality judgments. Subjects given a mnemonic to encode modality exhibited less dependence between perceptual identification performance and modality judgments than did subjects who encoded modality incidentally. The relation between direct and indirect tests of memory for source characteristics depends on the basis used for each.