Deborah K. Eakin

Misinformation effects in eyewitness memory: the presence and absence of memory impairment as a function of warning and misinformation accessibility.

The authors report 5 experiments investigating how exposure to misleading postevent information affects peoples ability to remember details from a witnessed event. In each experiment the authors tested memory using the modified opposition test, which was designed to isolate retrieval-blocking effects. The findings indicate that retrieval blocking occurs regardless of whether the misleading information is presented before or after the witnessed event. In addition, when people are warned immediately about the presence of misleading information, they can counteract retrieval-blocking effects but only if the misinformation is relatively low in accessibility. The authors discuss the findings in terms of the retrieval-blocking hypothesis and a hypothetical suppression mechanism that can counteract retrieval-blocking effects in some circumstances.

Eyewitnesses are misled by human but not robot interviewers

This paper presents research results from a study to determine whether eyewitness memory was impacted by a human interviewer versus a robot interviewer when presented misleading post-event information. The study was conducted with 101 participants who viewed a slideshow depicting the events of a crime. All of the participants interacted with the humanoid robot, NAO, by playing a trivia game. Participants were then interviewed by either a human or a robot interviewer that presented either control or misleading information about the events depicted in the slideshow. This was followed by another filler interval task of trivia with the robot. Following the interview and robot interactions, participants completed a paperpencil post-event memory test to determine their recall of the events of the slideshow. The results indicated that eyewitnesses were misled by a human interviewer (t(46) = 2.79, p <; 0.01, d = 0.83) but not by a robot interviewer (t(46) = 0.34, p > 0.05). The results of this research could have strong implications for the gathering of sensitive information from an eyewitness about the events of a crime.

Age invariance in semantic and episodic metamemory: Both younger and older adults provide accurate feeling-of-knowing for names of faces

ABSTRACT Age differences in feeling-of-knowing (FOK) accuracy were examined for both episodic memory and semantic memory. Younger and older adults either viewed pictures of famous faces (semantic memory) or associated non-famous faces and names (episodic memory) and were tested on their memory for the name of the presented face. Participants viewed the faces again and made a FOK prediction about future recognition of the name associated with the presented face. Finally, four-alternative forced-choice recognition memory for the name, cued by the face, was tested and confidence judgments (CJs) were collected for each recognition response. Age differences were not obtained in semantic memory or the resolution of semantic FOKs, defined by within-person correlations of FOKs with recognition memory performance. Although age differences were obtained in level of episodic memory, there were no age differences in the resolution of episodic FOKs. FOKs for correctly recognized items correlated reliably with CJs for both types of materials, and did not differ by age group. The results indicate age invariance in monitoring of retrieval processes for name–face associations.

Retroactive interference effects in implicit memory.

One source of evidence for separate explicit and implicit memory systems is that explicit but not implicit memory is impacted by interference (e.g., Graf & Schacter, 1987). The present experiment examined whether retroactive interference (RI) effects could be obtained in implicit memory when a strong test of RI was used. People studied an original list of word pairs (e.g., COTTON-PRIZE) using the typical RI paradigm. During the interpolated phase, participants studied either interference pairs for which the same cue was re-paired with a different target (e.g., COTTON-PRINT) or novel pairs (e.g., HOST-VASE). RI was tested with the modified opposition cued recall test (Eakin, Schreiber, & Sergent-Marshall, 2003). The original-list cue was presented along with the beginning stem of its target (e.g., COTTON-PRI-) and a hint (e.g., not PRINT). RI effects were obtained for explicit and implicit memory. Taken together with prior research finding proactive interference effects in implicit memory, the findings indicate that implicit memory is not immune from retroactive interference.

Immediate Judgments of Learning are Insensitive to Implicit Interference Effects at Retrieval

We conducted three experiments to determine whether metamemory predictions at encoding, immediate judgments of learning (IJOLs) are sensitive to implicit interference effects that will occur at retrieval. Implicit interference was manipulated by varying the association set size of the cue (Experiments 1 and 2) or the target (Experiment 3). The typical finding is that memory is worse for large-set-size cues and targets, but only when the target is studied alone and later prompted with a related cue (extralist). When the pairs are studied together (intralist), recall is the same regardless of set size; set size effects are eliminated. Metamemory predictions at retrieval, such as delayed JOLs (DJOLs) and feeling-of-knowing (FOK) judgments accurately reflect implicit interference effects (e.g., Eakin & Hertzog, 2006. In all three experiments, we found that DJOLs and FOKs accurately predicted set size effects on retrieval but that IJOLs did not. The findings provide further evidence that metamemory predictions are inferred from information other than direct access to the state of the memory trace, as well as indicate that inferences are based on different sources depending on when in the memory process predictions are made.

Using robots to interview children about bullying: Lessons learned from an exploratory study

This article describes the results of a study that compares disclosure occurrences of bullying from children (ages 8 to 12) to either a human or a social robot. Results from an orally administered questionnaire to 60 children, split evenly between human and robotic interviewers, revealed that few significant differences in reporting were encountered between interviewer types. Overall 9 of 60 (15%) of participants reported being bullied in the past month. Participants were significantly more likely to report that fellow students were teased about their looks to the robot interviewer in comparison to the human interviewer. In addition to the examination of these results, a discussion of lessons learned for future studies of this nature are provided.

ListChecker Pro 1.2: a program designed to facilitate creating word lists using the University of South Florida word association norms.

Various areas of research (e.g., memory, metamemory, visual word recognition, associative priming) rely on the careful construction of reliable word lists. ListChecker Pro 1.2 is a computer program that accesses the University of South Florida word association norms (Nelson, McEvoy, & Schreiber, 1998, 2004) to report characteristics of words (e.g., frequency, concreteness), as well as direct and indirect associative relationships (e.g., shared associates, mediators). The present article presents the input requirements, menu options, and output obtained by ListChecker Pro 1.2. In addition, a randomly selected list of words from the associative versus semantic priming literature was submitted to ListChecker Pro 1.2 to demonstrate how seemingly unrelated words can be associated. The zipped file containing the program and database can be downloaded from www .eakinmemorylab.psychology.msstate.edu.

He can read your mind: Perceptions of a character-guessing robot

After playing a five to seven minute character guessing game with a Nao robot, children answered questions about their perceptions of the robots abilities. Responses from interactions with 30 children, ages eight to twelve, showed that when the robot made an attempt at guessing the participants character, rather than being stumped and unable to guess, the robot was more likely to be perceived as being able to understand the participants feelings and able to provide advice. Regardless of their game experience, boys were more likely than girls to feel they could have discussions with the robot about things they could not talk to other people about. This article provides details associated with the implementation of a game used to guess a character the children selected; a twelve question verbally-administered survey that examined their perceptions of the robot; quantitative and qualitative results from the study; and a discussion of the implications, limitations, and future directions of this research.

Moving toward an intelligent interactive social engagement framework for information gathering

The objective of this research is to investigate the use of robots as intermediaries to gather sensitive information from children. The research is multidisciplinary in nature. The goals will be accomplished through the development of an integrated robotic framework that includes a novel architecture and an interactive user interface to gather information using methodologies recommended for forensic interviews with children. The Interactive Social Engagement Architecture (ISEA) is designed to integrate behavior-based robotics, human behavior models, cognitive architectures, and expert user input to increase social engagement between a human and system (e.g., robot, avatar, etc.). ISEA provides for the autonomous generation of robot behaviors for self-preservation and to convey social intelligence. The framework is designed to be modular and adaptable to different applications and domains; however for this project, the focus is on social engagement for information gathering. The interactive user interface provides interviewers with the ability to use a robot as an intermediary for gathering this information. The interface and framework have been iteratively improved through observations from user studies conducted to date with 186 children ages 8–12. This project compares the effectiveness of robot versus human interviewers to gather sensitive information from children using situations in which this would commonly occur — cases of child eyewitness memory and child reports of bullying. This research has the potential to transform how sensitive information is gathered as it relates to criminal investigations and proceedings.

An investigation of training, schemas, and false recall of diagnostic features for mental disorders.

This study examined whether schemas formed during training (graduate coursework, clinical supervision, etc.) are responsible for the tendency of clinicians to experience higher rates of false recall for clinical case details when compared with novices. Participants in this study were recruited from a general psychology class to limit preexisting knowledge of psychological disorders. Half of the participants were trained to recognize features of generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) with the purpose of forming a schema for that disorder, whereas the other half were not. Participants’ memories for diagnostic and nondiagnostic details within a hypothetical case vignette were tested using a free recall prompt followed by a yes–no recognition test. Trained participants falsely recognized the diagnostic detail “restlessness” and falsely recalled the diagnostic detail “uncontrollable worry” at a significantly higher rate than controls, suggesting that the training successfully formed a schema for GAD symptoms. Graduate training programs should consider incorporating training about false memories in students’ coursework as one mechanism for mitigating these errors.