Tell me what you saw: The usefulness of verbal descriptions for others.

Describing what one saw to another person is common in everyday experience, such as spatial navigation and crime investigations. Past studies have examined the effects of recounting on one's own memory, neglecting an important function of memory recall in social communication. Here we report surprisingly low utility of one's verbal descriptions for others, even when visual memory for the stimuli has high capacity. Participants described photographs of common objects they had seen to enable judges to identify the target object from a foil in the same basic-level category. When describing from perception, participants were able to provide useful descriptions, allowing judges to accurately identify the target objects 87% of the time. Judges' accuracy decreased to just 57% when participants provided descriptions from memory acquired minutes ago, and to near chance (51.8%) when the verbal descriptions were based on memory acquired 24 hours ago. Comparison of participants' own identification accuracy with judges' accuracy suggests the presence of a common source of errors. This finding suggests that recall and recognition of visual objects share common memory sources. In addition, the low utility of one's verbal descriptions constrains theories about the extension of one's memory to the external world and has implications for eyewitness identification and laws governing it.

Memory across a short-delay: Systematic biases in memory for faces.

From geometric figures to human faces, many visual stimuli vary along a continuum in featural space, anchored at one end by a highly distinctive constellation of features, at the other by a neutral set. Here we used a continuum of morphed faces to test whether errors in visual short-term memory are symmetric in feature space around the target or systematically biased toward one or the other end of the continuum. Participants were shown a face for 1 s. After a brief delay, participants were asked to choose the face they had been shown among three face options, which consisted of the target face, one face that was slightly more distinctive, and one face that was slightly more neutral. Continuums of morphed faces ranged from an average, neutral face to different distinctive celebrity faces two experiments, or from neutral facial expressions to highly emotional expressions a third experiment. Results showed that when participants made an incorrect response, they were more likely to incorrectly identify the more distinctive face than the more neutral or average face as the target face. This bias toward more extreme faces, however, was not observed for unfamiliar (non-celebrity) faces that were emotionally neutral. These findings suggest that visual memory encodes distinctive features of stimuli that lead to biases in later recognition.

How visual memory changes with intervening recall.

Being asked to recount a visual memory is common in educational settings, spatial navigation, and crime investigation. Previous studies show that recounting one's memory can benefit subsequent memory, but most of this work either used verbal materials or conflated category memory with memory for visual details. To test whether recounting may introduce visually-specific interference effects, we tested people's memory for photographs of objects, but introduced an intervening phase in which people described their memory. We separated memory for the specific exemplar from memory for the basic-level category. Contrary to recent findings on maps and colours, the intervening retrieval practice did not consistently strengthen exemplar memory of objects. Instead, recounting one's visual memory appeared to introduce interference that sometimes cancelled the benefit of increased retrieval effort. Delaying the final memory test by 24 hr increased the benefit of retrieval practice. These findings suggest that intervening retrieval has multiple effects on visual memory. Instead of being a snapshot, this memory constantly changes with retrieval practice and with time.

The two processes underlying the testing effect- Evidence from Event-Related Potentials (ERPs).

Theoretical explanations of the testing effect (why people learn better from a test than a re-study) have largely focused on either the benefit of attempting to retrieve the answer or on the benefit of re-encoding the queried information after a successful retrieval. While a less parsimonious account, prior neuroimaging evidence has led us to postulate that both of these processes contribute to the benefit of testing over re-study. To provide further empirical support for our position, we recorded ERPs while subjects attempted to recall the second word of a pair when cued with the first. These ERPs were analyzed based on the current response accuracy and as a function of accuracy on the subsequent test, yielding three groups: the first and second tests were correct, the first was correct and the second was not, both were incorrect. Mean amplitude waveforms during the first test showed different patterns depending on the outcome patterns: Between 400 and 700 ms the amplitudes were most positive when both tests were correct and least positive when both were incorrect; mean amplitudes between 700 and 1000 ms only differed as a function of subsequent memory. They were more positive when the second test was correct. Importantly, the later component only predicted subsequent memory when the answers were not overlearned, i.e. only correctly recalled once previously. We interpret the 400-700 ms time window as a component reflecting a retrieval attempt process, which differs as a function of both current and subsequent accuracy, and the later time window as a component reflecting a re-encoding process, which only involves learning from tests, both of which are involved in the testing effect.

How memory is tested influences what is measured: Reply to Wyble and Chen (2017).

In this response to Wyble and Chen's (2017) commentary on attribute amnesia, we hope to achieve several goals. First, we clarify how our view diverges from that described by Wyble and Chen. We argue that because the surprise memory test is disruptive, it is an insensitive tool for measuring the persistence of recently attended target attributes in memory. Second, we identify points of agreement between our view and that of Wyble and Chen. Like them, we believe that the strength of a mental representation is a critical factor in determining whether the representation persists long enough to be used in a surprise recognition task. We also agree that consolidation is one means of strengthening this representation. Finally, we suggest questions that should be addressed to clarify the factors that determine whether attended information can be reported in a surprise memory test. (PsycINFO Database Record

Memory for recently accessed visual attributes.

Recent reports have suggested that the attended features of an item may be rapidly forgotten once they are no longer relevant for an ongoing task (attribute amnesia). This finding relies on a surprise memory procedure that places high demands on declarative memory. We used intertrial priming to examine whether the representation of an item's identity is lost completely once it becomes task irrelevant. If so, then the identity of a target on one trial should not influence performance on the next trial. In 3 experiments, we replicated the finding that a target's identity is poorly recognized in a surprise memory test. However, we also observed location and identity repetition priming across consecutive trials. These data suggest that, although explicit recognition on a surprise memory test may be impaired, some information about a particular target's identity can be retained after it is no longer needed for a task. (PsycINFO Database Record

What do love and jealousy taste like?

Metaphorical expressions linking love and jealousy to sweet, sour, and bitter tastes are common in normal language use and suggest that these emotions may influence perceptual taste judgments. Hence, we investigated whether the phenomenological experiences of love and jealousy are embodied in the taste sensations of sweetness, sourness, and bitterness. Studies 1A and 1B validated that these metaphors are widely endorsed. In three subsequent studies, participants induced to feel love rated a variety of tastants (sweet-sour candy, bitter-sweet chocolates, and distilled water) as sweeter than those who were induced to feel jealous, neutral, or happy. However, those induced to feel jealous did not differ from those induced to feel happy or neutral on bitter and sour ratings. These findings imply that emotions can influence basic perceptual judgments, but metaphors that refer to the body do not necessarily influence perceptual judgments the way they imply. We further suggest that future research in metaphoric social cognition and metaphor theory may benefit from investigating how such metaphors could have originated.

Can implicit appraisal concepts produce emotion-specific effects? A focus on unfairness and anger.

This research examined whether the non-conscious activation of an implicit appraisal concept could affect responses associated with the corresponding emotion as predicted by appraisal theories. Explicit and implicit emotional responses were examined. We focused on implicit unfairness and its effect on anger. The results show that subliminal activation of implicit unfairness affected implicit anger responses (anger facial expression and latency responses to anger words) but not explicit anger feelings (i.e., reported anger). The non-conscious effect of implicit unfairness was specific to anger, as no effect on sadness, fear, and guilt was found.