Memory最新文献

Eyewitness identification of strangers is vulnerable to error, even if the eyewitness reports high confidence at the initial police identification procedure. In support of this claim, we report a new meta-analysis of data from actual criminal investigations. This analysis shows that when eyewitnesses were tested in the field by a blind lineup administrator, 1/8 of the high confidence identifications were known errors, i.e., mistaken identifications of lineup fillers. We argue that these field data are more informative than the available wrongful conviction data because in the latter eyewitness confidence at the initial identification procedure was almost never recorded. Our claim is also supported by lab data, which show that error rates for high-confidence identifications of the suspect can range from 0 to 40%, depending on the level of bias against the suspect. We highlight three types of suspect bias: appearance-based suspicion, social media contamination, and misplaced prior familiarity.

Remembering past events usually takes less time than their actual duration - events are temporally compressed in memory. A recent study found that this compression is not systematic but emerges when continuous events exceed approximately 9 s. Unexpectedly, however, remembering shorter events (3-6 s) took more time than their actual duration. Here, we aimed to investigate the mechanisms behind this increased replay duration of short events. In Experiment 1, we developed a corrected measure accounting for recall initiation time - the time needed to access the beginning of the event. With this correction, the longer replay times for short events disappeared, suggesting the effect was partly due to unmeasured recall initiation time. In Experiment 2, we examined the potential role of a central tendency bias by exposing participants to different ranges of event durations. Replay duration was influenced by the event's relative position within the duration range, consistent with a central tendency bias. However, for events longer than 9 s, temporal compression occurred consistently across all conditions. Together, these findings suggest that while central tendency influences replay duration, temporal compression systematically emerges when events exceed a few seconds, likely reflecting memory capacity limits in representing continuous experiences.

Autobiographical memory plays a central role in behaviour regulation, social connection, and self-continuity, but may become emotionally biased after traumatic experiences. Resilience, defined as the capacity to adapt effectively to stress and adversity, is widely linked to psychological recovery. However, few studies have examined whether resilience can buffer emotional biases in daily autobiographical memory, particularly among trauma-exposed individuals. Therefore, the current study aimed to examine this relationship using ecological momentary assessment (EMA). Seventy-nine participants (mean age = 22.26, 68.4% women) completed the Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale (CD-RISC) and reported autobiographical memories five times daily for seven consecutive days. Emotional valence features were extracted using natural language processing (NLP), including lexical-level features (e.g., negative term frequency) and sentence-level semantic features (e.g., positive sentence ratio). Multilevel modelling showed that while resilience was not associated with lexical-level features, it significantly predicted more positive and fewer negative emotional expressions at the semantic level. Moreover, negative memory entries tended to be followed by similarly negative content in subsequent entries, whereas positive entries did not exhibit such continuity. These results suggest that resilience may serve as a protective factor against the emotional effects of trauma in daily memory recall, offering potential insights for clinical intervention.

Recognition memory is typically better for items learned after a free choice (independent of study material) than after a forced choice. However, previous studies presented to-be-remembered items in isolation, whereas everyday learning often occurs alongside distractors. Therefore, this study investigated the effect of free versus forced choice on recognition memory in a learning situation with both relevant (to-be-remembered) and irrelevant (to-be-ignored) items. Experiment 1 (N = 62) used word-picture combinations, and Experiment 2 (N = 59) used audio-visual word combinations. In both experiments, participants either chose themselves (free choice) or were instructed (forced choice) which item category to remember before presentation of the compound stimulus. Experiment 1 found better recognition for relevant than irrelevant items, with free choice additionally improving memory specifically for relevant items. Experiment 2 showed descriptively the same pattern, although the interaction was not significant. Exploratory pooled analyses across experiments confirmed that free choice selectively improved recognition memory for relevant, but not irrelevant items. Taken together, participants were able to learn selectively in the face of irrelevant distractors, and more importantly, having some control over the learning situation seemed to further improve memory specifically for relevant items. This suggests that self-directed learning is beneficial even in situations with irrelevant distraction.

Autobiographical memory involves the integration of self-referential memory into a coherent narrative of life experiences. Recently, several studies of healthy adults and older adults with neurodegenerative disorders have utilised diffusion imaging to construct a network of cortical regions that support autobiographical memory. We extend this work to an age range, 4 to 7 years, when autobiographical memory is still developing. We correlated the recall of autobiographical events with limbic white matter tracts that have been previously implicated in episodic and autobiographical recall, i.e., the uncinate fasciculus and cingulum bundle. While there was no evidence for a link between the uncinate and autobiographical memory, we found a strong association between cingulum microstructure (fractional anisotropy; FA) and the number of autobiographical details provided. No relation was found between limbic tract microstructure and other measures of episodic recall. These findings extend work in adult samples, suggesting that the cingulum bundle may contribute in a meaningful way to autobiographical memory across a wide age range.

Mental time travel involves mental imagery to recollect past experiences and envision future events, eliciting anticipatory emotional responses that motivate goal-directed behaviour. However, the temporal dynamics of neural, physiological, and affective processing of mental time travel remain elusive. This study examined late positive potential (LPP), skin conductance responses (SCR), and behavioural affect ratings in response to mental time travel. Forty-eight participants (52% female) viewed 16 neutral, positive, and negative stimuli from the International Affective Picture System ("encoding task"). Participants then vividly imagined the stimuli ("recall task") and imagined a scenario involving the presented stimuli as if it might occur after leaving the lab ("prospection task"). Results showed enhanced LPP amplitudes when recalling negative and prospecting positive experiences, alongside elevated self-reported affect and arousal during these emotional recall and prospection tasks. These findings suggest that mental time travel through emotionally salient events is associated with increased LPP amplitudes akin to the processing of immediate experiences. This might reflect a neural mechanism of anticipatory affective responses to mental representations.

We challenge the longstanding belief that wrongful convictions mainly reflect the unreliability of eyewitness memory, arguing instead that they often reflect the criminal justice system's failure to heed the witness's initial identification decision. The initial memory test is special because it minimises the two main threats to accuracy - forgetting and contamination. Several lines of evidence suggest that eyewitnesses are more reliable on the initial test than previously recognised. First, laboratory studies show that initial confidence strongly predicts accuracy. Second, field studies using pristine lineups report few high-confidence misidentifications of innocent suspects. And third, analyses of DNA exoneration cases suggest that confident misidentifications at trial often contradict the witness's initial decision. On the initial test, these eyewitnesses often provided reliable evidence of innocence. This understanding offers a new approach to exonerating the innocent and preventing wrongful convictions: evaluate only the initial test, whether or not it was properly conducted.

This study used an odd (isolated) item inserted into a homogeneous serial list to investigate process differences between absolute- and relative-order judgments. The serial list consisted of eight names of people ordered in height. These were all male or female names except the fourth name which was of the opposite gender. A name/rank pair accuracy recognition test was used as the absolute judgment, and a comparative judgment (comparing height ranks between two names) as the relative judgment. Reaction time (RT) was the dependent measure for the close-to-ceiling accurate performance. Although the isolated item gained a memory advantage in both the absolute and relative judgments, the magnitudes of the effects differed greatly between the two judgments. For the absolute judgment, the isolated item's RT dropped below the levels of the two end terms, transforming the homogeneous condition's bow-shaped serial-position curve into one with two fully blown bowings. On the other hand, the isolated item caused only a moderate dent on the relative-judgment function with the curve keeping the original overall single-bowing shape. A hypothesis suggesting that absolute judgments are based more on individual-item specific information processing whereas relative judgments more on relational-information processing was proposed to explain the asymmetric isolation effects.

The prospective and retrospective memory questionnaire (PRMQ) is one of the most widely used questionnaires to assess subjective memory through self-reporting of common memory failures. There have been mixed results in the literature regarding its internal structure. The early studies favoured a tripartite structure with one factor representing a general memory and two group factors representing retrospective (RM) and prospective memory (PM) components. Other findings favoured different structures, such as with only a single factor or only two factors (PM and RM). The objective of the present study was to verify the internal structure of the PRMQ in a very large sample and with precise modelling. We analysed data from 297,242 adult participants, with ages ranging from 18 to 79 years, and used exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis to examine the internal structure of PRMQ. The results showed that the model that best describes the data was one with a single factor. The tripartite model failed to converge and our results indicate that the PRMQ is a unidimensional instrument. This is relevant especially for researchers interested in using the PRMQ in future studies and professionals using the questionnaire in clinical settings.

During Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy, patients recall traumatic memories while performing dual attention tasks to tax the limited capacity of the working memory (WM). Increasing WM load during recall has shown to improve memory-degrading effects. This research aims to explore how technological tools can be used to more effectively increase WM load. Two experiments involving healthy participants utilised Random Interval Repetition (RIR) tasks to investigate the WM-taxing effects of specific digital dual-attention tasks and task manipulations. In experiment 1 (N = 41), conducted in a lab-based virtual reality setting, participants performed auditory RIR tasks while varying the speed and direction of eye movements (EM), with or without an additional visual RIR task. Experiment 2 (N = 49), conducted online via a smartphone application, compared solo and combined auditory and visual RIR tasks presented either simultaneously or serially under varying EM speeds. Results showed that combining RIR tasks increased auditory RTs, while a simultaneous combination and higher EM speeds selectively increased visual RTs only. These findings suggest that task addition and manipulation effectively increase WM load, though the involvement of WM sub-modalities and high-demand tasks influences their effects. These insights could refine face-to-face and online EMDR practices and optimise therapeutic effectiveness.