The influence of distinctive processing manipulations on older adults' false memory.

Covertly generating item-specific characteristics for each studied word from DRM (Deese-Roediger-McDermott) lists decreases false memory in young adults. The typical interpretation of this finding is that item-specific characteristics act as additional unique source information bound to each studied item at encoding, and at retrieval young adults can use the absence of this type of information to reject non-presented associated words that might otherwise be falsely remembered. In two experiments, we examined whether healthy older adults could use this strategy to reduce their false memories in the DRM paradigm. In Experiment 1, low frontal lobe functioning was associated with increased false memory in the item-specific strategy condition. Experiment 2 found more memory intrusions under item-specific encoding and the same amount of false memory in auditory and visual presentation conditions, i.e., no modality effect, even with 8 s of encoding time. Both findings are consistent with impaired distinctive processing by older adults.

Improving extreme-scale problem solving: assessing electronic brainstorming effectiveness in an industrial setting.

OBJECTIVE: An experiment was conducted to compare the effectiveness of individual versus group electronic brainstorming to address difficult, real-world challenges. BACKGROUND: Although industrial reliance on electronic communications has become ubiquitous, empirical and theoretical understanding of the bounds of its effectiveness have been limited. Previous research using short-term laboratory experiments have engaged small groups of students in answering questions irrelevant to an industrial setting. The present experiment extends current findings beyond the laboratory to larger groups of real-world employees addressing organization-relevant challenges during the course of 4 days. METHODS: Employees and contractors at a national laboratory participated, either in a group setting or individually, in an electronic brainstorm to pose solutions to a real-world problem. RESULTS: The data demonstrate that (for this design) individuals perform at least as well as groups in producing quantity of electronic ideas, regardless of brainstorming duration. However, when judged with respect to quality along three dimensions (originality, feasibility, and effectiveness), the individuals significantly (p < .05) outperformed the group. CONCLUSION: When quality is used to benchmark success, these data indicate that work-relevant challenges are better solved by aggregating electronic individual responses rather than by electronically convening a group. APPLICATION: This research suggests that industrial reliance on electronic problem-solving groups should be tempered, and large nominal groups may be more appropriate corporate problem-solving vehicles.

Age-related deficits in reality monitoring of action memories.

The authors describe 3 theoretical accounts of age-related increases in falsely remembering that imagined actions were performed (A. K. Thomas & J. B. Bulevich, 2006). To investigate these accounts and further explore age-related changes in reality monitoring of action memories, the authors used a new paradigm in which actions were (a) imagined only, (b) actually performed, or (c) both imagined and performed. Older adults were more likely than younger adults to misremember the source of imagined-only actions, with older adults more often specifying that the action was imagined and also that it was performed. For both age groups, illusions that the actions were only performed decreased as repetitions of the imagined-only events increased. These patterns suggest that both older and younger adults use qualitative characteristics when making reality-monitoring judgments and that repeated imagination produces richer records of both sensory details and cognitive operations. However, sensory information derived from imagination appears to be more similar to that derived from performance for older adults than for younger adults.

The Cognitive Interview enhances long-term free recall of older adults.

The Cognitive Interview, a retrieval-based mnemonic technique, has received only limited attention in its application with older adults, and based on previous findings, its benefit to older adults is unclear. The authors found that the Cognitive Interview effectively increased older adults' recall relative to standard recall instructions at a 3-week delay. These findings demonstrate the benefit of a standardized (rather than the prototypically interactive) Cognitive Interview as applied to perceptually impoverished, text-based stimuli. Both theoretical and practical implications of the findings are discussed.

Disentangling encoding versus retrieval explanations of the bizarreness effect: implications for distinctiveness.

Recall effects attributed to distinctiveness have been explained by both encoding and retrieval accounts. Resolution of this theoretical controversy has been clouded because the typical methodology confounds the encoding and retrieval contexts. Using bizarre and common sentences as materials, we introduce a paradigm that decouples the nature of the encoding context (mixed vs. unmixed lists of items) from the retrieval set (mixed vs. unmixed retrieval sets). Experiment 1 presented unmixed lists for study, and Experiment 2 presented mixed lists for study. In both experiments, significant bizarreness effects were obtained in free recall when the retrieval set intermixed items but not when the retrieval set consisted of only one item type. Also, Experiment 1, using a repeated testing procedure, did not reveal evidence for more extensive encoding of bizarre sentences than of common sentences. The results support the idea that retrieval dynamics primarily mediate the bizarreness effect, and perhaps more generally, distinctiveness effects.

Age differences in veridical and false recall are not inevitable: the role of frontal lobe function.

The relationship of neuropsychological measures of frontal lobe function to age differences in false recall was assessed using the Deese/Roediger-McDermott associative false memory paradigm (Deese, 1959; Roediger & McDermott, 1995). As other studies have found, older adults were less likely to correctly recall studied items and more likely to falsely recall highly related but nonpresented items than were younger adults. When older adults were divided based on a composite measure of frontal lobe functioning, this age difference was found only for low frontal lobe functioning individuals. High frontal lobe functioning older adults and young adults had equivalent levels of false recall, as well as equivalent levels of veridical recall. These results suggest that age differences in memory may be due to declines in frontal lobe function. More important, our findings indicate that declines in veridical recall and increases in false recall are not an inevitable consequence of aging.