Registered Replication Report: Hart & Albarracín (2011).

Language can be viewed as a complex set of cues that shape people's mental representations of situations. For example, people think of behavior described using imperfective aspect (i.e., what a person was doing) as a dynamic, unfolding sequence of actions, whereas the same behavior described using perfective aspect (i.e., what a person did) is perceived as a completed whole. A recent study found that aspect can also influence how we think about a person's intentions (Hart & Albarracín, 2011). Participants judged actions described in imperfective as being more intentional (d between 0.67 and 0.77) and they imagined these actions in more detail (d = 0.73). The fact that this finding has implications for legal decision making, coupled with the absence of other direct replication attempts, motivated this registered replication report (RRR). Multiple laboratories carried out 12 direct replication studies, including one MTurk study. A meta-analysis of these studies provides a precise estimate of the size of this effect free from publication bias. This RRR did not find that grammatical aspect affects intentionality (d between 0 and -0.24) or imagery (d = -0.08). We discuss possible explanations for the discrepancy between these results and those of the original study.

The role of metacognitive knowledge in recollection rejection.

Recollection rejection is a memory editing mechanism in which related lures are rejected because of the recollection of the lure's instantiating target (e.g., "I know it wasn't pretty because it was beautiful"). According to one view, recollection rejection requires an assumption on the part of the participant that both a word and its related lure could not have been studied. We examined this view by manipulating the instructions that were given to participants (Experiment 1) and the nature of the study list (Experiment 2). Estimates of recollection rejection derived from the phantom receive operating characteristic model found evidence for the role of metacognitive assumptions, but only when metacognitive knowledge was manipulated by varying the nature of the study list.

Compelling untruths: content borrowing and vivid false memories.

False memories are sometimes accompanied by surprisingly vivid experiential detail that makes them difficult to distinguish from actual memories. Such strikingly real false memories may be produced by a process called content borrowing in which details from presented items are errantly borrowed to corroborate the occurrence of the false memory item. In 2 experiments using think-out-loud protocols at both study and test, evidence for content borrowing occurred for more than half of the false remember judgments participants reported. The present study also provides evidence consistent with recollection rejection and distinctiveness playing a role in false-memory editing.