Mary Ann Foley

Phenomenal characteristics of memories for perceived and imagined autobiographical events.

Two studies explored potential bases for reality monitoring (Johnson & Raye, 1981) of naturally occurring autobiographical events. In Study 1, subjects rated phenomenal characteristics of recent and childhood memories. Compared with imagined events, perceived events were given higher ratings on several characteristics, including perceptual information, contextual information, and supporting memories. This was especially true for recent memories. In Study 2, subjects described how they knew autobiographical events had (or had not) happened. For perceived events, subjects were likely to mention perceptual and contextual details of the memory and to refer to other supporting memories. For imagined events, subjects were likely to engage in reasoning based on prior knowledge. The results are consistent with the idea that reality monitoring draws on differences in qualitative characteristics of memories for perceived and imagined events (Johnson & Raye, 1981) and augment findings from more controlled laboratory studies of complex events (Johnson & Suengas, in press; Suengas & Johnson, 1988).

Cognitive Operations and Decision Bias in Reality Monitoring

In each of the three experiments, a reality monitoring task required subjects to discriminate between words they generated and words presented by an experimenter. Each of the experiments included a manipulation designed to affect the amount of external control over what the subject generated, with the expectation that the more a response is determined by external cues, the less the memory will include information about cognitive operations that took place when the memory was established. In general, increasing cognitive operations increased accuracy of reality monitoring. In addition, when subjects falsely recognized new items as old, they were much more likely to attribute the items to external sources than to internal sources. These findings were discussed primarily in terms of the role that cognitive operations preserved in memory may play in identifying the origin of information in memory. A comparison of memory for the occurrence of experimenterpresented and subject-generated items, regardless of correct identification of origin, extended the generation effect found by Slamecka and Graf in 1978 to information only covertly generated by the subject (Experiment 1), and to retention intervals as long as 10 days (Experiment 2). The results of Experiment 3 suggested that the generation effect may not necessarily appear in situations in which what is generated is essentially a meaningful response to what is perceived.

Age-related Changes in Confusion between Memories for Thoughts and Memories for Speech.

The present experiments compared peoples abilities to make decisions about the origin of their memories. Experiment 1 demonstrated that 6-year-olds were as good as 17-year-olds in discriminating memories originating from what they said earlier (self-generations) from memories of what another person said earlier (external presentations). However, in both experiments 1 and 2, 6-year-olds were not as good at discriminating what they had said earlier from what they had only thought. The possibility that younger children simply have more difficulty distinguishing between memories originating from the same class, internal or external, was ruled out because 6-year-olds performed as well as 9-year-olds when differentiating between memories from 2 external sources (experiment 2). Nor could their difficulty be attributed to a general problem in distinguishing memories for their thoughts from any other class of memories because they were at no disadvantage in discriminating their earlier thoughts (words they imagined themselves saying) from words someone else said (experiment 2). Our findings suggest that some distinctions, self versus other, emerge as cues in memory sooner than other distinctions, thoughts versus actions.

The consequences for memory of imagining in another person's voice.

Subjects listened to and imagined words and then attempted to discriminate words they had heard from words they had imagined. Discrimination was better when subjects imagined themselves saying the words (Experiments 1 and 2) than when subjects imagined the words in the speaker’s voice. Subjects also had more difficulty discriminating imagined from perceived words when they imagined in the speaker’s voice than when they imagined words in a voice other than their own or the speaker’s (Experiment 1). The results are consistent with the idea that reality monitoring is affected by the degree of similarity in sensory characteristics of memories derived from perception and from imagination (Johnson & Raye, 1981).

Developmental comparisons of explicit versus implicit imagery and reality monitoring

Reality Monitoring refers to the decision processes involved in discriminating perceptual memories from those which are self-generated. The present studies compare the effects of spontaneous, implicit imagery generation and controlled, explicit imagery generation on the reality monitoring decisions of children and adults. Subjects (6 year olds, 9 year olds, and adults) were shown pictures and words, and they were asked each objects function or they were asked to create an image of each object. When later deciding whether each object was presented as a picture or a word, subjects were more likely to claim a word was presented as a picture than the converse, especially in the Function condition (Experiment 1). This confusion effect was evident for simple and complex perceptual materials and extended across three age groups (Experiments 1 and 2). The results indicate that the absence of developmental differences in reality monitoring previously reported is not due simply to the type of imagery involved, and that the representational processes of children and adults are more alike than is commonly believed.

Stimulus range, number of categories, and the “virtual” exponent

Three different stimulus modalities (line length, number, and sound pressure) were judged by magnitude scaling techniques and by 7-, 15-, 31-, and 75-point category scales. All of the 40 subjects were given the same number stimuli, but two different sound-pressure ranges were presented (each to 20 subjects) and four different line-length ranges were presented (each to 10 subjects). Analyses of lack of fit for various simple functions were performed to determine bestfitting functions. The simple power function was often found to be an adequate fit to the data for all the response modalities used, although all of the response modalities were sensitive to changes in stimulus range. For simple power functions, the category-scale exponent was a function of both the range of stimuli and the number of categories provided. Category scales did not always produce exponents smaller than those obtained with magnitude estimation, which calls into question the concept of a virtual exponent for category scales.

Discriminating between Memories: Evidence for Children's Spontaneous Elaborations.

Children are more confused than adults about memories for what they said and what they imagined saying. The present studies examine the extent to which this confusion is related to the person subjects imagine. In Experiment 1, subjects (7, 10, and adult) said words and imagined someone (themselves, a parent, or a friend) saying other words. They were then asked to distinguish words they said from words they imagined. Performance varied with age as well as with the person subjects imagined. Further, performance was better for words subjects imagined than for words they said. Metamemory responses indicated subjects of all ages remembered elaborative processing activated spontaneously during imagination when discriminating between memories. When the nature of subjects encodings was constrained (i.e., subjects said and imagined someone saying words as part of a sentence completion task. Experiment 2), performance declined for all age groups. Experiments 3 and 4 suggest that elaborations reported in response to our metamemory questions occurred during imagination and were not solely prompted by our metamemory questions.

Appropriating the Actions of Another: Implications for Children's Memory and Learning.

Perspectives on reality monitoring and sociocultural learning were integrated in four studies of childrens memory of contributions to the outcomes of collaborative exchanges. Children made collages with an adult, and were later surprised with a reality-monitoring task in which they were asked to remember who placed particular pieces on the collage. In three of the four studies, 4-year-olds were more likely to claim they contributed pieces that the adult actually contributed rather than the reverse (Experiments 1–3). This bias was interpreted as evidence for appropriation , a process in which individuals adopt another persons actions as their own. The extent to which children committed misattribution errors depended on their involvement as decision makers (Experiments 1 and 3) and on the outcomes of the collages themselves (Experiment 2). Importantly, misattribution errors were not simply an expression of encoding failures or response biases (Experiment 4). Implications of these findings for childrens memory and learning are discussed.

Developmental comparisons of the ability to discriminate between memories for symbolic play enactments

Childrens memory errors reveal the kinds of processing that may occur during source-monitoring judgments. After symbolically enacting everyday actions using toys or substitutes, preschoolers were more likely to claim they played with a toy when a substitute was involved as the instrument of action than the reverse (Experiments 1-3). We interpret this bias as evidence for the importance of the functional similarity between actions for childrens source-monitoring judgments

Pictures and images: Spatial and temporal information compared

These studies compared the spatial (Experiment 1) and temporal (Experiment 2) contextual information in memories of perceived pictures with that available in memories of imagined pictures. As expected, contextual information was generally superior for memories derived from perception.