Correcting false memories: Errors must be noticed and replaced.

Memory can be unreliable. For example, after reading The new baby stayed awake all night, people often misremember that the new baby cried all night (Brewer, 1977); similarly, after hearing bed, rest, and tired, people often falsely remember that sleep was on the list (Roediger & McDermott, 1995). In general, such false memories are difficult to correct, persisting despite warnings and additional study opportunities. We argue that errors must first be detected to be corrected; consistent with this argument, two experiments showed that false memories were nearly eliminated when conditions facilitated comparisons between participants' errors and corrective feedback (e.g., immediate trial-by-trial feedback that allowed direct comparisons between their responses and the correct information). However, knowledge that they had made an error was insufficient; unless the feedback message also contained the correct answer, the rate of false memories remained relatively constant. On the one hand, there is nothing special about correcting false memories: simply labeling an error as "wrong" is also insufficient for correcting other memory errors, including misremembered facts or mistranslations. However, unlike these other types of errors--which often benefit from the spacing afforded by delayed feedback--false memories require a special consideration: Learners may fail to notice their errors unless the correction conditions specifically highlight them.

Recent study, but not retrieval, of knowledge protects against learning errors.

Surprisingly, people incorporate errors into their knowledge bases even when they have the correct knowledge stored in memory (e.g., Fazio, Barber, Rajaram, Ornstein, & Marsh, 2013). We examined whether heightening the accessibility of correct knowledge would protect people from later reproducing misleading information that they encountered in fictional stories. In Experiment 1, participants studied a series of target general knowledge questions and their correct answers either a few minutes (high accessibility of knowledge) or 1 week (low accessibility of knowledge) before exposure to misleading story references. In Experiments 2a and 2b, participants instead retrieved the answers to the target general knowledge questions either a few minutes or 1 week before the rest of the experiment. Reading the relevant knowledge directly before the story-reading phase protected against reproduction of the misleading story answers on a later general knowledge test, but retrieving that same correct information did not. Retrieving stored knowledge from memory might actually enhance the encoding of relevant misinformation.

Prospective memory: effects of divided attention on spontaneous retrieval.

We examined the effects of divided attention on the spontaneous retrieval of a prospective memory intention. Participants performed an ongoing lexical decision task with an embedded prospective memory demand, and also performed a divided-attention task during some segments of lexical decision trials. In all experiments, monitoring was highly discouraged, and we observed no evidence that participants engaged monitoring processes. In Experiment 1, performing a moderately demanding divided-attention task (a digit detection task) did not affect prospective memory performance. In Experiment 2, performing a more challenging divided-attention task (random number generation) impaired prospective memory. Experiment 3 showed that this impairment was eliminated when the prospective memory cue was perceptually salient. Taken together, the results indicate that spontaneous retrieval is not automatic and that challenging divided-attention tasks interfere with spontaneous retrieval and not with the execution of a retrieved intention.

Prospective memory and aging: evidence for preserved spontaneous retrieval with exact but not related cues.

We examined whether normal aging spares or compromises cue-driven spontaneous retrieval processes that support prospective remembering. In Experiment 1, young and older adults performed prospective-memory tasks that required either strategic monitoring processes for retrieval (nonfocal) or for which participants relied on spontaneous retrieval processes (focal). We found age differences for nonfocal, but not focal, prospective-memory performance. Experiments 2 and 3 used an intention-interference paradigm in which participants were asked to perform a prospective-memory task (e.g., press "Q" when the word money appears) in the context of an image-rating task and were then told to suspend their prospective-memory intention until after completing an intervening lexical-decision task. During the lexical-decision task, we presented the exact prospective-memory cue (e.g., money; Experiments 2 and 3) or a semantically related lure (e.g., wallet; Experiment 3), and we inferred spontaneous retrieval from slowed lexical-decision responses to these items relative to matched control items. Young and older adults showed significant slowing when the exact prospective-memory cue was presented. Only young adults, however, showed significant slowing to the semantically related lure items. Collectively, these results partially support the multiprocess theory prediction that aging spares spontaneous retrieval processes. Spontaneous retrieval processes may become less sensitive with aging, such that older adults are less likely to respond to cues that do not exactly match their encoded targets.

Resource depletion does not influence prospective memory in college students.

This paper reports an experiment designed to investigate the potential influence of prior acts of self-control on subsequent prospective memory performance. College undergraduates (n=146) performed either a cognitively depleting initial task (e.g., mostly incongruent Stroop task) or a less resource-consuming version of that task (e.g., all congruent Stroop task). Subsequently, participants completed a prospective memory task that required attentionally demanding monitoring processes. The results demonstrated that prior acts of self-control do not impair the ability to execute a future intention in college-aged adults. We conceptually replicated these results in three additional depletion and prospective memory experiments. This research extends a growing number of studies demonstrating the boundary conditions of the resource depletion effect in cognitive tasks.