Physical exploration of a virtual reality environment: Effects on spatiotemporal associative recognition of episodic memory.

Associative memory has been increasingly investigated in immersive virtual reality (VR) environments, but conditions that enable physical exploration remain heavily under-investigated. To address this issue, we designed two museum rooms in VR throughout which participants could physically walk (i.e., high immersive and interactive fidelity). Participants were instructed to memorize all room details, which each contained nine paintings and two stone sculptures. On a subsequent old/new recognition task, we examined to what extent shared associated context (i.e., spatial boundaries, ordinal proximity) and physically travelled distance between paintings facilitated recognition of paintings from the museum rooms. Participants more often correctly recognized a sequentially probed old painting when the directly preceding painting was encoded within the same room or in a proximal position, relative to those encoded across rooms or in a distal position. A novel finding was that sequentially probed paintings from the same room were also recognized better when the physically travelled spatial or temporal distance between the probed paintings was shorter, as compared with longer distances. Taken together, our results in highly immersive VR support the notion that spatiotemporal context facilitates recognition of associated event content.

The Self-Report Symptom Inventory (SRSI) is sensitive to instructed feigning, but not to genuine psychopathology in male forensic inpatients: An initial study.

Objective: The Self-Report Symptom Inventory (SRSI) is a new symptom validity test that, unlike other symptom over-reporting measures, contains both genuine symptom and pseudosymptom scales. We tested whether its pseudosymptom scale is sensitive to genuine psychopathology and evaluated its discriminant validity in an instructed feigning experiment that relied on carefully selected forensic inpatients (n = 40). Method: We administered the SRSI twice: we instructed patients to respond honestly to the SRSI (T1) and then to exaggerate their symptoms in a convincing way (T2). Results: On T1, the pseudosymptom scale was insensitive to patients' actual psychopathology. Two patients (5%) had scores exceeding the liberal cut point (specificity = 0.95) and no patient scored above the more stringent cut point (specificity = 1.0). Also, the SRSI cut scores and ratio index discriminated well between honest (T1) and exaggerated (T2) responses (AUCs were 0.98 and 0.95, respectively). Conclusions: Given the relatively few false positives, our data suggest that the pseudosymptom scale of the SRSI is a useful measure of symptom over-reporting in forensic treatment settings.

Eliminating age differences in children's and adults' suggestibility and memory conformity effects.

We examined whether typical developmental trends in suggestion-induced false memories (i.e., age-related decrease) could be changed. Using theoretical principles from the spontaneous false memory field, we adapted 2 often-used false memory procedures: misinformation (Experiment 1) and memory conformity (Experiment 2). In Experiment 1, 7- to 9-year-old children (n = 33) and adults (n = 39) received stories containing associatively related details. They then listened to misinformation in the form of short narratives preserving the meaning of the story. Children and adults were equally susceptible to the misinformation effect. In Experiment 2, younger (7- to 8-year-olds, n = 30) and older (11- to 12-year-olds, n = 30) children and adults (n = 30) viewed pictures containing associatively related details. They viewed these pictures in pairs. Although the pictures differed, participants believed they had viewed the same pictures. Participants had to report what they could recollect during collaborative and individual recall tests. Children and adults were equally susceptible to memory conformity effects. When correcting for response bias, adults' false memory scores were even higher than children's. Our results show that age trends in suggestion-induced false memories are not developmentally invariant. (PsycINFO Database Record