Memory of Medical Scenarios for End-of-Life Support Preferences.

We studied memory of health scenarios for end-of-life support decisions and stability of life support preferences. Psychology students (n = 36, age M = 27.25, SD = 6.21, 64% females) were administered the Life Support Preferences Questionnaire to assess their memory of six medical scenarios with different prognoses, care treatment, and end-of-life support choices. Recall, recognition, confidence and decision stability were assessed immediately and one month later. Correct recall decreased and incorrect recall increased from immediate to long-term recall, F(2, 68) = 74.38, p < .001, η2p = .69. In recall, participants spontaneously gave false information consistent with prior knowledge of illnesses and medical scenarios. Participants who had suffered a disease or serious accident did worse on correct recall, F(1, 34) = 6.59, p = .015, η2p = .16, and had more errors, F(1, 34) = 4.68, p = .038, η2p = .12, than participants who had not. In the recognition test there were no differences between hits and false alarms, showing the difficulty in discriminating between true and false contents. Confidence was greater for hits than for false alarms, F(1, 34) = 10.86, p = .002, η2p = .24, but this subjective measure did not seem to be a good predictor of accuracy because confidence was greater than the mean value for hits (p = .001, d = 1.74) and for false alarms (p = .001, d = 0.96). Long-term memory was quite poor and biased, but life support preferences did not change much.

Different bias mechanisms in recall and recognition of conceptual and perceptual information of an event / Diferentes mecanismos de los sesgos en el recuerdo y reconocimiento de información conceptual y perceptual de un evento

The aim of this research was to study the memory and response bias for conceptual and perceptual information in the recall and recognition of an event. The participants watched a movie trailer video and their memory of verbal and visual actions and details was evaluated using specific recall questions or a true/false recognition task. The participants recalled and recognized actions better than details, and visual information better than verbal information. Memory biases affected recall and recognition differently. The participants showed a high tendency to accept false verbal actions consistent with the gist of the event as true in the recognition task, while in the recall task the participants were more likely to answer incorrectly questions involving visual perceptual details. These results reflect the different mechanisms which are involved in the processing and cognitive management of conceptual and perceptual information of an event

El objetivo de esta investigación fue estudiar la memoria y sesgos de respuesta para información conceptual y perceptual en el recuerdo y reconocimiento de un evento. Los participantes vieron el video del tráiler de una película y se evaluó su memoria de las acciones y detalles, verbales y visuales, usando preguntas específicas en una tarea de recuerdo y frases con los mismos contenidos en una tarea de reconocimiento verdadero/falso. Los participantes recordaron y reconocieron mejor las acciones que los detalles y la información visual que la información verbal. Los sesgos de memoria afectaron de manera diferente al recuerdo y reconocimiento. Los participantes mostraron mayor tendencia a aceptar las acciones verbales falsas consistentes con la esencia del evento como verdaderas en la tarea de reconocimiento, mientras que en la tarea de recuerdo los participantes fueron más propensos a responder incorrectamente preguntas que implicaban detalles visuales. Estos resultados reflejan mecanismos diferentes implicados en el procesamiento y gestión cognitiva de la información conceptual y perceptual de un evento

Memory of medical scenarios for end-of-life support preferences

We studied memory of health scenarios for end-of-life support decisions and stability of life support preferences. Psychology students (n = 36, age M = 27.25, SD = 6.21, 64% females) were administered the Life Support Preferences Questionnaire to assess their memory of six medical scenarios with different prognoses, care treatment, and end-of-life support choices. Recall, recognition, confidence and decision stability were assessed immediately and one month later. Correct recall decreased and incorrect recall increased from immediate to long-term recall, F(2, 68) = 74.38, p < .001, η2p = .69. In recall, participants spontaneously gave false information consistent with prior knowledge of illnesses and medical scenarios. Participants who had suffered a disease or serious accident did worse on correct recall, F(1, 34) = 6.59, p = .015, η2p = .16, and had more errors, F(1, 34) = 4.68, p = .038, η2p = .12, than participants who had not. In the recognition test there were no differences between hits and false alarms, showing the difficulty in discriminating between true and false contents. Confidence was greater for hits than for false alarms, F(1, 34) = 10.86, p = .002, η2p = .24, but this subjective measure did not seem to be a good predictor of accuracy because confidence was greater than the mean value for hits (p = .001, d = 1.74) and for false alarms (p = .001, d = 0.96). Long-term memory was quite poor and biased, but life support preferences did not change much

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Age-Based Positivity Effects in Imagining and Recalling Future Positive and Negative Autobiographical Events.

Thoughts about the future reflect personal goals, and projections into the future enrich our emotional life. Researchers have taken an interest in determining whether the tendency to remember more positive than negative emotional events observed when recalling past events also appears when remembering imagined future events. The objective of this study was to examine the age-based positivity effect of recall for future positive and negative autobiographical events in young and older adults. Representative future events were first established to develop the cues used to prompt personal future events. In the production task, the participants were presented with eight positive and eight negative random future events of young or older adults as a model and the corresponding cues to generate their own positive and negative future autobiographical events. In the recall task, the participants recovered as many experiences as they could of the model and the positive and negative events produced by themselves. The participants correctly recalled more positive than negative events and committed more errors for negative than positive events, showing a clear tendency in both young and older adults to recall future imagined events as positive. Regarding age, the young adults recalled more events than the older participants whilst the older participants in particular showed better recall of their own imagined future events than the model's events, and committed more errors when recalling the model's events than their own imagined events. Regarding the positivity effect in incorrect recall, more than half of the errors were valence changes, most of these being from negative to positive events, and these valence changes were more pronounced in the older than in the younger adults. In general, there were fewer differences between young and older adults in the recall of positive events in comparison with negative events. Our findings suggest that people are well disposed toward recalling positive imagined future events and preserve a positive emotional state, suppressing negative memories.

Retrieval of past and future positive and negative autobiographical experiences.

We studied retrieval-induced forgetting for past or future autobiographical experiences. In the study phase, participants were given cues to remember past autobiographical experiences or to think about experiences that may occur in the future. In both conditions, half of the experiences were positive and half negative. In the retrieval-practice phase, for past and future experiences, participants retrieved either half of the positive or negative experiences using cued recall, or capitals of the world (control groups). Retrieval practice produced recall facilitation and enhanced memory for the practised positive and negative past and future experiences. While retrieval practice on positive experiences did not impair the recall of other positive experiences, we found inhibition for negative past and future experiences when participants practised negative experiences. Furthermore, retrieval practice on positive future experiences inhibited negative future experiences. These positivity biases for autobiographical memory may have practical implications for treatment of emotional disorders.

Differential retrieval of past and future autobiographical experiences.

Selective retrieval can both impair and enhance memory. In this study we analysed the effects of retrieval practice in the recall of past and future experiences. The participants generated past autobiographical experiences or imagined future experiences using recall cues of typical autobiographical experiences obtained in a previous study. The experiences were presented either in chronological or random order. Regardless of presentation order, retrieval practice produced facilitation in the free recall of practised past and future experiences. No retrieval-induced forgetting was observed for past experiences in the ordered presentation, showing that the temporal organisation of autobiographical experiences prevents the activation of inhibitory processes. Conversely, inhibition was significant in the free recall of future experiences presented in chronological order, possibly because future experiences present less welldefined temporal organisation, impairing the integration that suppresses inhibitory processes. Thus, retrieval-induced forgetting was evident in the random presentation of past and future autobiographical experiences.

Conceptual and perceptual encoding instructions differently affect event recall.

When recalling an event, people usually retrieve the main facts and a reduced proportion of specific details. The objective of this experiment was to study the effects of conceptually and perceptually driven encoding in the recall of conceptual and perceptual information of an event. The materials selected for the experiment were two movie trailers. To enhance the encoding instructions, after watching the first trailer participants answered conceptual or perceptual questions about the event, while a control group answered general knowledge questions. After watching the second trailer, all of the participants completed a closed-ended recall task consisting of conceptual and perceptual items. Conceptual information was better recalled than perceptual details and participants made more perceptual than conceptual commission errors. Conceptually driven processing enhanced the recall of conceptual information, while perceptually driven processing not only did not improve the recall of descriptive details, but also damaged the standard conceptual/perceptual recall relationship.

¿Quién hizo qué? Diferencias entre adultos jóvenes y mayores en la memoria para un atraco / Who did what? Differences between younger and older adults in memory for a robbery

La probabilidad de que una persona mayor tenga que declarar como testigo o víctima de un atraco o un suceso similar aumenta en función de la esperanza de vida de la población. Por ello, resulta relevante conocer si las personas mayores producen testimonios menos exactos que los jóvenes, así como determinar cuáles son las circunstancias en las que pueden ser más proclives a cometer errores. En este estudio utilizamos una prueba de reconocimiento para analizar la memoria para las acciones de un atraco en adultos jóvenes y mayores. Aunque no hubo diferencias en los aciertos, las personas mayores cometieron una proporción superior de falsas alarmas y resultaron menos exactas que los jóvenes en el reconocimiento de las acciones del suceso. Además, las personas mayores tuvieron más dificultades que los jóvenes a la hora determinar el autor de las acciones correctamente reconocidas como pertenecientes al atraco. Por lo tanto, los déficits de las personas mayores en el control del origen de la información que recuerdan podrían ayudar a explicar la menor exactitud de su memoria para el suceso, un hallazgo especialmente relevante al tomar declaración a una persona de edad avanzada

Due to the increased life expectancy of the older population, there is a growing probability for an elderly person to testify as an eyewitness or a victim of a robbery or a similar crime. However, little is known about aging effects on testimony accuracy and about circumstances in which older adults would be more prone to memory errors than younger adults. In this study older and younger adults' memory for actions of a robbery was examined with a recognition test. Although no differences were found in hits, the older adults had a higher proportion of false alarms and showed less accurate recognition than younger adults. In addition, the older adults were less able to attribute actions that occurred during the robbery to their correct sources. Thus, source-memory deficits may contribute to explain older adults’ less accurate recognition, a finding that should be taken into account in real-life eyewitness situations where an elderly person is involved

The role of exemplar typicality and encoding strategies in category retrieval-induced forgetting.

Selective retrieval practice of category exemplars often impairs the recall of related items, a phenomenon known as retrieval-induced forgetting (RIF). In Experiment 1 the role of item typicality (high, low) and presentation format of category exemplars (random, grouped) were analysed, while in Experiment 2 two encoding strategies (inter and intracategory) to modulate RIF were tested. Exemplar typicality was the critical factor underlying RIF. Competition during retrieval practice rendered RIF in the typical exemplars, but RIF did not appear when the exemplars were low typicality. The greater impairment of strong exemplars is in line with the inhibitory account of RIF and the notion of interference dependence. Inhibition appeared with random and grouped presentations suggesting that presentation format of the exemplars is not a critical factor in modulating RIF in a category-cued recall task. Distinctive processing instructions using sentences that connected items from different categories (intercategory strategy) and integration instructions by using size to organise the exemplars within categories (intracategory strategy) easily avoided competition and the need of inhibition processes in recall.

Script-driven processing affords protection from retrieval-induced forgetting in the recall of everyday activities.

Using the retrieval-practice paradigm, we examined the effects of script and selective retrieval on the recall of high- and low-typicality actions of everyday activities. The participants studied two activities, Getting up in the morning and Going to a restaurant, each consisting of high-typicality and low-typicality actions. They then practised half of the high- or low-typicality actions of an activity, with recall of the unpractised activity serving as baseline. Script-driven processing prompted the recall of high-typicality actions and produced more high-typicality than low-typicality intrusions. Selective retrieval practice of the high-typicality script actions did not have an adverse effect on the recall of high- or low-typicality actions, while practising low-typicality actions not representative of the scripts produced retrieval-induced forgetting of other low-typicality actions. Scripts provide the cognitive system with flexibility and economy, but side-effects such as high-typicality intrusions and poor memory for detail can also derive from script processing.

An integrative study of autobiographical memory for positive and negative experiences

In this study we examined autobiographical memory for emotional experiences from an integrative perspective, analyzing nature, distribution, content and phenomenological assessment of the experiences. Undergraduate students produced positive or negative life experiences, dated them and indicated their emotional level. Afterwards, they chose an experience to narrate, and rated their memory for the experience. The positive and negative experiences were grouped into 14 categories, although most of them fell into four areas: studies, family, friends and couple. The number of positive and negative experiences progressively increased from very few childhood memories to a larger percentage of more recent events. The distribution was equivalent, except during adolescence, in which a greater number of negative than positive experiences were recorded. The negative narratives included more emotional details, references to cognitive processes, mental rehearsal and justifications than the positive narratives. But the positive experiences obtained higher ratings in vividness and sensorial details than the negative experiences (AU)

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The power of script knowledge and selective retrieval in the recall of daily activities.

In this study we examined the effects of script knowledge and selective retrieval on the recall of daily activities. The participants studied daily activities typically performed over the course of a normal day from morning to bedtime, presented in chronological order or as a random list. Then half of the participants practiced retrieval for part of the activities. The use of the script improved recall in the ordered presentation. The facilitation effect caused by retrieval practice was greater in the random presentation, showing that retrieval is a powerful mnemonic enhancer, especially for nonorganized materials. Script-driven processing in the ordered presentation prevented inhibitory effects derived from selective retrieval practice, whereas retrieval-induced forgetting was observed in the random presentation, which lacked the temporal and causal structure of the script. The results show the power of the script to moderate inhibition and the effectiveness of retrieval practice in the recall of daily activities.

False recognition and source attribution for actions of an emotional event in older and younger adults.

In two experiments recognition of actions of a robbery presented in a video was examined in older and younger adults. In both experiments older adults had more false alarms and showed less accurate recognition than younger adults. In addition, when participants were asked in Experiment 1 to indicate Remember/Know/Guess judgments for actions they considered true, older adults accepted more false actions with Remember judgments. And when participants were asked in Experiment 2 to attribute the source (i.e., perpetrator), the older adults were less able to attribute actions that occurred during the robbery to their correct sources. Furthermore, we found a robust positive correlation between source attribution ability and recognition accuracy. Thus, source-memory deficits may contribute to older adults' false memories in real-life eyewitness situations.

Memory for actions of an event: older and younger adults compared.

Previous studies have shown increased false memory effects in older compared to younger adults. To investigate this phenomenon in event memory, in the present study, the authors presented younger and older adults with a robbery. A distinction was made between verbal and visual actions of the event, and recognition and subjective experience of retrieval (remember/know/guess judgments) were analyzed. Although there were no differences in hits, older adults accepted more false information as true and, consequently, showed less accurate recognition than younger adults. Moreover, older adults were more likely than younger adults to accompany these errors with remember judgments. Young adults accepted fewer false verbal actions than visual ones and awarded fewer remember judgments to their false alarms for verbal than for visual actions. Older adults, however, did not show this effect of type of information. These results suggest that aging is a relevant factor in memory for real-life eyewitness situations.

When stereotype knowledge prevents retrieval-induced forgetting.

In the present study, we examined the effects of stereotypes and the typicality of traits in retrieval-induced forgetting (RIF). The participants in the experiment practiced half of the high-typicality, low-typicality or control traits associated with the name of a stereotype (athlete, scientist) or with the name of a person (Mikel, Jon). With the person name the high-typicality, low-typicality or control traits produced no evidence of stereotype activation. The traits were processed as independent features and generated RIF both immediately and at a one-week interval. Stereotype activation during encoding facilitated the integration of high-typicality traits, avoiding RIF in immediate and one-week recall. Moreover, both high-typicality and low-typicality traits benefited from stereotypes in one-week recognition. These findings show that previous knowledge contributes to integrate stereotypic traits that would otherwise compete for retrieval, thus producing RIF.

Script knowledge modulates retrieval-induced forgetting for eyewitness events.

To determine the influence of knowledge schemata on inhibitory processes we analysed how the typicality of the actions of an event modulated retrieval-induced forgetting (RIF). Participants were presented with a realistic videotape of a bank robbery. Based on a normative study, high- and low-typicality actions of the event were determined. After watching the video, participants practised retrieving either half of the high- or half of the low-typicality actions, and their performance was compared against a no-practice control group. Tests given immediately after the event and after a 1-week retention interval demonstrated significant RIF for low-typicality actions exclusively when low-typicality actions were practised, but a comparable forgetting effect did not emerge for highly schematic actions. These findings confirm that highly integrated script knowledge protects high-typicality actions of an event from inhibitory processes, and demonstrate that RIF's effects last far longer than has been previously found.

Influence of the typicality of the actions in a mugging script on retrieval-induced forgetting

La investigación ha mostrado que el simple acto de recordar puede causar olvido temporal o inhibición de contenidos relacionados en la memoria. En este estudio se amplía el efecto del olvido inducido por la recuperación a la memoria de las acciones de un suceso. A partir de un estudio normativo se seleccionaron acciones de tipicidad alta y baja de un robo a una persona en la calle. Los participantes estudiaron hechos comprobados (acciones de tipicidad alta) y hechos no comprobados (acciones de tipicidad baja). Después recuperaron la mitad delas acciones de tipicidad alta, baja o, en el caso del grupo control, sin práctica de recuperación. En la prueba final los tres grupos recordaron los hechos comprobados y no comprobados estudiados. En las acciones de tipicidad baja se obtuvo el olvido inducido por la recuperación convencional, pero no se produjo inhibición en las acciones de tipicidad alta. Este resultado sugiere que la activación del guión del suceso pudo protegerla información de tipicidad alta del olvido inducido por la recuperación. La integración de las acciones que forman el guión del suceso hace que sean resistentes a procesos inhibitorios (AU)

Research has demonstrated that the act of remembering can prompt temporary forgetting or inhibition of related contents in memory. This study extends the retrieval-induced forgetting effect to the recall of actions of an event. Based on a normative data study, high- and low-typicality actions of a mugging event were selected. The participants studied verified facts (hightypicalityactions) and non-verified facts (low-typicality actions). They then practiced retrieving half of the high- or low-typicality actions of the event, and a non-practice control group was added. In the final task the three groups tried to recall both verified and non-verified facts of the event. Conventional retrieval-induced forgetting was found for low-typicality actions, but a comparable forgetting effect did not emerge in the hightypicalityactions. This finding suggests that the activation of scripts may protect typical event information from retrieval-induced forgetting. The integration of the script actions makes them resistant to inhibitory processes (AU)