The disconnect between metamemory and memory for emotional images.

Emotional information is reliably predicted to be remembered better than neutral information, and this has been found for words, images, and facial expressions. However, many studies find that these judgments of learning (JOLs) are not predictive of memory performance (e.g. [Hourihan, K. L. (2020). Misleading emotions: Judgments of learning overestimate recognition of negative and positive emotional images. Cognition and Emotion, 34(4), 771-782. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699931.2019.1682972]). The present study investigates and rules out numerous potential causes for this discrepancy between memory predictions and performance, including (1) reactivity to making JOLs, (2) idiosyncrasies of specific images used, (3), type of memory test, and (4) effects of fluency. Three additional experiments investigate whether JOLs can become more predictive of memory performance, either by experience with the task or by manipulating prior beliefs about memory for emotional images. In all experiments, we found the same effect: Emotional images are inaccurately predicted to be remembered better than neutral images. The results suggest that emotion is used as a heuristic for learning, resulting in low metamnemonic accuracy for emotional stimuli.

Surviving with story characters: What do we remember?

Readers simulate story characters' emotions, memories, and perceptual experiences. The current study consists of three experiments that investigated whether survival threat would amplify the mnemonic experience of a narrative. First, a replication study of Nairne et al. (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 33 (2), 263-273, 2007) was conducted with minor methodological alternations and yielded improved recall for participants imagining themselves in a survival scenario over a moving scenario (Experiment 1). In Experiments 2 and 3, participants read stories about a character either stranded in the grasslands or moving to a foreign land. Improved recall for objects included in the story (Experiments 2 and 3) and recognition of story details (Experiment 3) was found when the character was in a survival situation. The largest effects were observed when the reader was asked to imagine themselves as the story character (Experiment 3). Overall, readers remembered survival-relevant details as if they were experiencing the story character's plight. These results extend research showing that survival processing enhances memory for word lists (e.g., Nairne et al., Psychological Science, 19 (2), 176-180, 2008).

Detecting valence from unidentified images: A link between familiarity and positivity in recognition without identification.

Research using the Recognition Without Identification paradigm (Cleary & Greene, 2000, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 26[4], 1063-1069; Peynircioǧlu, 1990, Journal of Memory and Language, 29, 493-500) has found that participants can discriminate between old and new stimuli even when the stimuli are obscured to a degree that they are unidentifiable. This methodology has been adapted in the past by using heavily obscured threatening and nonthreatening images and asking participants to try to identify each image followed by a familiarity rating of the image. Past results showed that threatening images that were not able to be identified were rated as more familiar than nonthreatening images that were not able to be identified (Cleary et al., 2013, Memory & Cognition, 41, 989-999). The current study used a similar methodology to explore the possibility that a sense of familiarity can serve to guide our attention toward potential threats in the environment. However, contrary to earlier results, we found that positive images were rated as more familiar than negative images. This pattern was found with both identified and unidentified images and was replicated across five experiments. The current findings are consistent with the view that feelings of positivity and familiarity are closely linked (e.g., de Vries et al., 2010, Psychological Science, 21[3], 321-328; Garcia-Marques et al., 2004, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 30, 585-593; Monin, 2003, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85[6], 1035-1048).

Framing the past (and future): Effects of generic photos on autobiographical judgments.

Do the images we see every day influence how we remember our lives? Research on this matter often concerns how entire memories of events can be created or shaped through the use of doctored photographs of personal (Wade et al., Psychonomic bulletin & review, 9 (3), 597-603, 2002) and public events (Sacchi et al., Applied Cognitive Psychology, 21 (8), 1005-1022, 2007). Although this paradigm has yielded insights into false memory production, it may underestimate the extent to which photographs can bias or distort memory in a subtler manner (i.e., without the use of doctored photographs or suggestion). In Experiments 1 (N = 95) and 2 (N = 186) of the present study, we examined whether the mere presence of generic images, typical of stock photography, could influence aspects of our memories. Given the parallel between autobiographical remembering and forecasting (Berntsen & Bohn, Memory & Cognition, 38(3), 265-278, 2010), we also examined (Experiment 3: N=204) how such images would influence future autobiographical judgments. Specifically, three experiments investigated whether photographs would bias autobiographical judgments for either quantitative (e.g., How many movies have you seen in the past year?) or affective (e.g., How enjoyable do you think your next date will be?) aspects of events in everyday life. We found that photographs reliably influenced judgments related to quantitative aspects of autobiographical events. Moreover, though less robustly, there was an indication that these photos could bias our affective construal of such events as well. Overall, we conclude that the mere presence of generic photographs may exert an influence on the way we think about our lives to an extent previously under-recognized.

Parallel effects of retrieval ease on attributions about the past and the future.

The present study explored the role of task difficulty in judgments about the past and the future. Participants recalled events from childhood and imagined future events. The difficulty of the task was manipulated by asking participants to generate either four or twelve events. Participants then rated how well they could generally remember events from their childhood or how well planned their futures were. Consistent with past research (e.g., Winkielman, Schwarz, & Belli, 1998), participants in the difficult recall group rated their childhood memories as less complete than participants in the easy recall group. A parallel effect was found in participants' judgments of their futures. Participants who were asked to imagine twelve future events rated their future plans as less complete than those who imagined four events. Moreover, there was a negative correlation between the rated difficulty of the task and the degree to which participants found their memories and plans to be complete. We also examined the valence of the generated events. These results showed a strong positivity bias for both types of judgments, and the bias was particularly strong when thinking of future events. The results suggest that similar attributional processes mediate beliefs about the past and the future.

Picture (im)perfect: Illusions of recognition memory produced by photographs at test.

Photographs have been found to affect a variety of psychological judgments. For example, nonprobative but semantically related photographs may increase beliefs in the truth of general knowledge statements (Newman, Garry, Bernstein, Kantner, & Lindsay, Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 19(5), 969-974, 2012; Newman et al., Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 41(5), 1337-1348, 2015). Photographs can also create illusions of memory (Cardwell, Henkel, Garry, Newman, & Foster, Memory & Cognition, 44(6), 883-896, 2016; Henkel, Applied Cognitive Psychology, 25(1), 78-86, 2011; Henkel & Carbuto, 2008). A candidate mechanism for these effects is that a photograph increases the fluency with which a statement or an event is processed. The present study was conducted to determine whether photos at test can induce illusions of recognition memory and to test the viability of a conceptual fluency explanation of these effects. The results of the present study suggest that photographs enhance the fluency of related words (Experiment 1), that false memories can be produced by the mere presence of a related photo on a recognition memory test for words (Experiments 2 & 3), and that these effects appear to be limited to conceptually based recognition tests (Experiments 4 & 5). The results support the notion that photograph-based illusions of memory stem from the ability of related photographs to increase the speed and ease of conceptual processing.

Revelation effects in remembering, forecasting, and perspective taking.

The revelation effect is a robust phenomenon in episodic memory whereby stimuli that immediately follow a simple cognitive task are more likely to garner positive responses on a variety of memory tests, including autobiographical memory judgments. Six experiments investigated the revelation effect for judgments of past and future events as well as judgments made from others' perspectives. The purpose of this work was to determine whether these subjectively distinct judgments are subject to the same decision-making biases, as might be expected if they are governed by similar processes (e.g., Schacter, Addis, & Buckner 2007). College-aged participants were asked to rate a variety of life events according to whether the events had occurred during their childhoods or would occur during the next 10 years. Events that followed an anagram task were judged as more likely to have happened in the past and more likely to occur in the future. We also showed a revelation effect when participants were asked to adopt the perspective of others when making judgments about past and future events. When the task was reworded to be non-episodic (participants judged how common the events were during childhood and adulthood), no revelation effect was found for either past or future time frames, which suggests common boundary conditions for both types of judgments. The results are consistent with studies showing strong parallels between remembering and other forms of self-projection but not with semantic memory judgments.

On the (elusive) role of oral motor-movements in fluency-based memory illusions.

It is well established that the ease with which a stimulus is processed affects many different types of evaluative judgments. Recently, it has been proposed that for verbal stimuli the effect of fluency on such judgments is mediated by the muscles that are involved in speech (Topolinski & Strack, 2009, 2010). Evidence for this claim can be found in studies that have shown that fluency effects are eliminated if such judgments are made while these muscles are otherwise engaged (such as while chewing gum or eating). Additional research has found that oral-motor tasks block familiarity-based responding on recognition memory tasks (Topolinski, 2012). The current study investigated the effect of an oral-motor task on recognition memory. Of particular interest was whether the fluency-blocking effects of an oral-motor task would extend to fluency-based illusions of recognition memory. Although we found robust fluency-based illusions of familiarity, we did not find that the effects were modulated by the nature of the concurrent task (gum-chewing vs. a manual-motor task). Moreover, we found no evidence that oral-motor tasks affected recognition more generally, nor did we find that an oral-motor task modulated affective ratings to repeated stimuli. We were also unable to replicate the finding that an oral-motor task blocks the false fame effect (Topolinski & Strack, 2010). These results call into question the assertion that oral-motor movements mediate fluency effects in recognition memory and other evaluative judgments.

The effect of processing fluency on impressions of familiarity and liking.

Processing fluency has been shown to have wide-ranging effects on disparate evaluative judgments, including judgments of liking and familiarity. One account of such effects is the hedonic marking hypothesis (Winkielman, Schwarz, Fazendeiro, & Reber, 2003), which posits that fluency is directly linked to affective preferences via a positive emotional reaction that is triggered by fluent processing. The evidence supporting this account suggests that fluency may exert a stronger influence on affective judgments than other judgments. The current study compared the effect of fluency on judgments of familiarity and liking. Contrary to predictions, liking judgments were not more strongly affected by fluency than familiarity judgments. In fact, the balance of the results showed the opposite pattern. When the type of judgment was manipulated between subjects (Experiment 1) or in a blocked design (Experiment 2), fluency had comparable effects on impressions of liking and familiarity. But when the type of judgment was manipulated in a mixed design (Experiments 3 and 6), or when both familiarity and liking judgments were given for all items (Experiments 4 and 5), only familiarity judgments were affected by the fluency manipulation. The dominance of the familiarity interpretation was found when fluency was manipulated artificially, via priming, and when inherent variations in fluency across the stimuli were considered. These results suggest that, within a given context, participants adopt a single interpretation for fluency, and the sense of familiarity that arises from fluent processing overshadows the sense of positivity, thus questioning aspects of the hedonic marking hypothesis.

Not enough familiarity for fluency: definitional encoding increases familiarity but does not lead to fluency attribution in associative recognition.

Five experiments were conducted to test whether encoding manipulations thought to encourage unitization would affect fluency attribution in associative recognition memory. Experiments 1a and 1b, which utilized a speeded recognition memory test, demonstrated that definitional encoding increased reliance on familiarity during the recognition memory test. Experiments 2a, 2b, and 3, however, replicated previous research that had shown that fluency is unlikely to be attributed as evidence of previous occurrence in associative recognition (Westerman, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 27:723-732, 2001). The results put limits on the degree to which fluency can influence recognition memory judgments, even in cases of enhanced familiarity, and are consistent with previous work suggesting that participants have preexperimental expectations about fluency that are difficult to change (e.g., Miller, Lloyd, & Westerman, Journal of Memory and Language 58:1080-1094, 2008), as well as with work suggesting that fluency has less of an influence on recognition memory decisions that are conceptual in nature (Parks, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 39:1280-1286, 2013).

Fluency effects in recognition memory: are perceptual fluency and conceptual fluency interchangeable?

On a recognition memory test, both perceptual and conceptual fluency can engender a sense of familiarity and elicit recognition memory illusions. To date, perceptual and conceptual fluency have been studied separately but are they interchangeable in terms of their influence on recognition judgments? Five experiments compared the effect of perceptual and conceptual fluency on recognition. The results suggest that under standard intentional encoding instructions participants were influenced by conceptual and perceptual fluency manipulations to a similar degree (Experiments 1a and 1b). When the perceptual features of the stimuli were emphasized during encoding, the perceptual fluency manipulation had a stronger influence on recognition memory decisions than the conceptual fluency manipulation (Experiment 2). Enhanced conceptual processing at encoding served to nullify the influence of both perceptual and conceptual fluency on the test (Experiment 3). The nature of the test instructions also influenced the relative contribution of perceptual versus conceptual fluency manipulations to the recognition judgment. In Experiment 4, the influence of conceptual fluency was larger when the recognition instructions were meaning based (a synonym recognition test) than with standard recognition instructions. Collectively, the results suggest that the relative contribution of perceptual and conceptual fluency depends on both encoding and test factors.

The role of perceived threat in the survival processing memory advantage.

Information that is processed in relation to survival tends to promote superior recall relative to other elaborate encoding manipulations (e.g., Nairne, Thompson, & Pandeirada, 2007). The current research examines whether perceived threat plays a role in the survival processing memory advantage. In the current experiment survival processing was manipulated such that participants were presented with an ancestral (grasslands) or modern (city) context, and either a low, medium, or high threat level. The results revealed a strong survival processing advantage, with the magnitude of the advantage related to level of perceived threat. The findings as a whole suggest that perceived threat contributes to the recall advantage.

Can fluency be interpreted as novelty? Retraining the interpretation of fluency in recognition memory.

Stimuli that are processed fluently tend to be regarded as more familiar and are more likely to be classified as old on a recognition test compared with less fluent stimuli. Recently it was shown that the standard relationship between fluency and positive recognition judgments can be reversed if participants are trained that previously studied stimuli are associated with lower levels of fluency. Under such conditions, fluent stimuli are more likely to be classified as new on a recognition test (C. Unkelbach, 2006), which suggests that the interpretation of fluency is malleable and context dependent. Five experiments investigated the resilience of this reversed fluency effect. Using 2 different fluency manipulations, the finding of a reversed fluency effect after training was replicated. However, it was also found that the reversal depends on explicit feedback during training and is specific to the particular fluency manipulation used during training. Moreover, it was found that the reversal did not generalize to similar memory judgments. The balance of experimental results suggest that the standard interpretation of fluency as indicating higher levels of familiarity is quite stable and is resistant to reinterpretation.

Source memory for unidentified stimuli.

Two experiments were conducted to determine whether participants have source memory for test stimuli that they cannot identify. Using a paradigm developed to investigate the phenomenon of recognition without identification (Peynircioglu, 1990), we found that even when participants could not identify a previously studied item, they nonetheless exhibited above-chance performance on a source discrimination task. Most surprising was that source accuracy for unidentified items was independent of old-new discrimination and not different from that of identified items. These results are interpreted as evidence that source memory is based on a continuous, as opposed to a threshold-like, process and suggest that recollection may, in some circumstances, contribute to the phenomenon of recognition without identification.

Aging and fluency-based illusions in recognition memory.

We examined age-related differences in susceptibility to fluency-based memory illusions. The results from 2 experiments, in which 2 different methods were used to enhance the fluency of recognition test items, revealed that older and young adults did not differ significantly in terms of their overall susceptibility to this type of memory illusion. Older and young adults were also similar in that perceptual fluency did not influence recognition memory responses when there was a mismatch in the sensory modality of the study and test phases. Likewise, a more conceptual fluency manipulation influenced recognition memory responses in both older and young adults regardless of the match in modality. Overall, the results indicate that older adults may not be more vulnerable than young adults to fluency-based illusions of recognition memory. Moreover, young and older adults appear to be comparable in their sensitivity to factors that modulate the influence of fluency on recognition decisions.

Relative fluency and illusions of recognition memory.

A hallmark of the experience of perceptual fluency is the sense that a familiar stimulus seems to pop out from its background, such as when one notices the face of a friend in a crowd of strangers. This experience suggests that fluency-based illusions of recognition memory may be more powerful when there are only a few fluent stimuli presented in a recognition context. The results of the present study were consistent with this prediction. The magnitude of fluency-based illusions of recognition memory was inversely related to the percentage of fluent stimuli on a recognition test. Furthermore, standard fluency manipulations did not impact recognition responses in between-participants designs. The results suggest that illusions of recognition memory may be more powerful when fluency is encountered in a context in which the surrounding stimuli are less fluent.

Processing fluency affects subjective claims of recollection.

Previous studies that have used the remember-know paradigm to investigate subjective awareness in memory have shown that fluency manipulations have an impact on "know" responses but not on "remember" responses (e.g., Rajaram, 1993), a finding typically accounted for by invoking inferential processing in judgments of familiarity but not of recollection. However, in light of several researchers' criticisms of this procedure, as well as findings documenting the influence of processing fluency on various subjective judgments, the present study was conducted in order to investigate whether judgments of recollection might also be subject to inferential processes and not solely the product of conscious retrieval. When the standard remember-know procedure was used (Experiment 1), manipulations of perceptual fluency increased "know" responses but had no effect on "remember" responses, replicating previous findings. However, when an independent ratings method was employed (Higham & Vokey, 2004), manipulations of perceptual fluency (Experiment 2) and conceptual fluency (Experiment 3) reliably increased claims of both familiarity and recollection, suggesting that the conclusion that fluency affects only "know" responses may be an artifact of the standard remember-know procedure.

Familiarity from orthographic information: extensions of the recognition without identification effect.

Two experiments were conducted to investigate the effect of letter location information in recognition memory judgments. The experiments used the recognition without identification paradigm (Peynircioglu, 1990), in which participants first attempt to identify the test item and then make a recognition decision as to whether or not the item was studied. In these studies, items that are not identified but that correspond to items that were presented are typically still rated as more likely to have been studied than those that were not presented. The present experiments demonstrated this finding with a variant of the conjunction lure paradigm. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants were tested with word fragments that were made from the letters of two words. When the letters were from studied items, fragments were rated higher than when the test items were derived from two unstudied items, or one studied item and one unstudied item, suggesting that recognition without identification is prone to the same types of errors as recognition with identification. Results are discussed in terms of familiarity effects in recognition memory.

Are first impressions lasting impressions? An exploration of the generality of the primacy effect in memory for repetitions.

In five experiments, we investigated the primacy effect in memory for repetitions (DiGirolamo & Hintzman, 1997), the finding that when participants are shown a study list that contains two very similar versions of the same stimulus, memory is biased in the direction of the version that was presented first. In the experiments reported, the generality of the effect was examined by manipulating the orientation and features of the repeated stimuli. The results confirmed that the effect is reliable when stimulus changes affect the accidental properties of the stimulus (properties of the stimulus that give information about distance or angle but do little to aid in identification). However, the effect was not found when changes were made to other aspects of the stimulus. The results suggest that the primacy effect in memory for repetitions is not robust across all stimulus changes and converge with previous findings that have demonstrated that such properties of stimuli as orientation and size are represented differently in memory than are other stimulus characteristics.

Change in perceptual form attenuates the use of the fluency heuristic in recognition.

Four experiments (total N=295) were conducted to determine whether within-modality changes in perceptual form between the study and the test phases of an experiment would moderate the role of the fluency heuristic in recognition memory. Experiment 1 showed that a change from pictures to words reduced the role of fluency in recognition memory. In Experiment 2, the same result was found using counterfeit study lists that supposedly consisted of pictures or words. Experiments 3 and 4 showed that changes in the font used to present the study and test words also attenuated the contribution of fluency to the recognition decision when font change was manipulated between subjects, but not within subjects. Results suggest that the fluency heuristic is subject to metacognitive control, since participants' attributions of perceptual fluency depend on the perceived usefulness of fluency as a cue to recognition.