Memory最新文献

The global introduction of coercive control laws addressing patterns of psychological abuse in intimate partner violence has made it increasingly important to understand the cognitive impacts of tactics like gaslighting. Gaslighting directly targets cognitive processes involved in evaluating memories, potentially undermining victim-survivors' recollection, confidence, and self-trust, which are critical in forensic processes such as testimony. This study examined the effects of partner-led challenges on autobiographical memories within close relationships (i.e., friends and couples). It adapted memory conformity paradigms to capture gaslighting dynamics, where one partner pressures the other to adopt a different recollection of shared events. The study assessed how this pressure influences recall, confidence, self-perception, and wellbeing. It also explored how relationship factors (e.g., closeness, length) predict changes in recall. Results showed pressure from close partners increased misinformation acceptance, emphasising the role of interpersonal dynamics in memory conformity and the potential for abusive partners to manipulate recollections. While recall confidence decreased, self-esteem and mood showed positive trends, indicating complex interactions in processing memory challenges. These findings highlight the need for further research into psychological manipulation's effect on memory and self-trust in IPV, with focus on improving forensic responses and interventions for victim-survivors of psychological abuse.

Autobiographical memory specificity commonly declines with age, but the role of emotion in modulating this deficit is unclear. Prior studies have typically used the Autobiographical Memory Test (AMT) paradigm and have asked younger and older participants to produce autobiographical memories in response to emotional and neutral cue words. However, these studies have often confounded cue valence with cue concreteness. To address this problem, in this study younger and older adults completed an AMT task that used negative, neutral, and positive cue words, which were either abstract or concrete. Results showed an age-related decline in autobiographical memory specificity, but the magnitude of this deficit depended upon cue type. For abstract cue words, older adults' autobiographical memory specificity was lower than that of younger adults for the negative and neutral cues, but there was no age difference in specificity for the positive cues, a finding that aligns with other reports of age-related positivity effects. In contrast, for concrete cue words, cue valence did not impact autobiographical memory specificity, with similar age differences in specificity for all three cue valences. These findings highlight the importance of considering characteristics of the AMT cues when evaluating autobiographical memory specificity for younger and older adults.

Human memory is susceptible to various biases, often resulting from social interaction and communication. One example is the "saying-is-believing" (SIB) effect, where a communicator's memory is evaluatively biased by the previous tuning of messages about a target towards their audience's attitude, an effect explained by the communicator's shared reality creation with the audience. According to previous theorising (Echterhoff & Higgins, 2017), the communicators' initial, audience-independent judgments of a target are also likely to affect the evaluative tone of their subsequent memory. We investigated, for the first time, the role of the communicator's own judgment (OJ) as a possible moderator of the audience-congruent memory bias. Across three studies (total N = 1,070 participants), participants' OJs shaped the evaluative tone of their memory. However, there was no evidence that the audience-congruent recall bias depended on whether participants had initially formed a neutral or a valenced (positive or negative) own judgment of a target person. Hence, the audience-congruent memory bias persisted regardless of communicators' own initial judgments. We discuss implications for the study of memory and social influence. The findings are relevant for everyday life, given that people often talk about topics about which they have already formed their own judgment.

The significance of moral conflicts that emerge during traumatic events and their influence on posttraumatic stress (PTS) and related symptoms are increasingly recognised. However, characteristics of the memories of these conflicts and how central these memories are within autobiographical memory remain largely unclear. In this study, students recalling trauma memories with a moral conflict were compared to students whose trauma memories did not include a moral conflict, in terms of the event-centrality of the trauma memory, memory characteristics, current emotional distress, and PTS. Additionally, we examined to what extent event-centrality was associated with PTS and memory characteristics. Participants recalling trauma memories with a moral conflict referred to these memories as more central, self-defining, and were more often recalled from observer perspective with greater self-distance compared to participants recalling trauma memories without moral conflict. The former group experienced more shame, guilt, disgust, and horror during the traumatic event and reported more PTS and current emotional distress. Event-centrality was positively correlated with PTS. This study highlights that event-centrality and memory characteristics play an important role in trauma memories with moral conflict.

Research has shown that lying can affect memory differently depending on the type of strategy (e.g., false denials, feigning amnesia, fabrication). At present, no studies have investigated how using different strategies simultaneously while replying to questions concerning the event impacts on memory. Hence, in the present experiment, participants watched a mock crime video, then they either told the truth (i.e., truth-telling group) or lied about the crime by adopting the three deceptive strategies (i.e., mixed lying group). We also included a third group that did not answer any question (i.e., delayed testing-only control group). After one-week, all participants provided an honest account of their memory for the interview and the crime, along with memory and belief ratings. Lying exerted an undermining effect on memory. That is, liars reported an impaired recall (i.e., fewer correct details and higher commissions) of the event and the interview as compared with those in the truth-telling group. However, the delayed testing-only control group reported a higher impairment than liars and truth-tellers. These findings provide insightful information on the possible mechanisms behind the effects of lying on memory (e.g., lack of rehearsal).

Culture and gender influence adults' ability to retrieve early memories. Previous research has mainly focused on White and Asian samples, leaving Black Americans understudied despite distinctive socialisation practices that could influence memory retrieval within and across gender. This study examined memory retrieval in Black (n = 97, 67% female) and White (n = 98, 77% female) participants (M_age = 21.65 years). Participants were given five minutes to recall memories from their first five years. They then estimated their age at each event and rated the memories on various dimensions. We hypothesised that Black participants and women would retrieve more and earlier memories and rate them as more robust but less independently remembered, with more pronounced gender differences in the White sample. Results partially supported our hypotheses. Black participants recalled more memories, marginally earlier first memories, and rated their memories as more important and independently remembered than White participants. White men reported the lowest scores for memory rehearsal and vividness. These patterns also varied by memory age. This study is the first to compare early memory retrieval between Black and White Americans using a memory fluency task, revealing previously undocumented autobiographical memory differences.

More and more people report their memories in cross-cultural contexts, including eyewitness interviews. In a pre-registered experiment (N = 64), we examined cultural differences in mock eyewitness reports, comparing Sub-Saharan African participants to a matched Western European group. Participants were interviewed about a mock crime video. We assessed differences in the number of correct, incorrect, subjective and total details, the type of details (person, action, object, surrounding), and accuracy. European participants provided significantly more details than African participants. Surprisingly, in free recall African participants used non-significantly more words to provide non-significantly fewer details. An exploratory analysis revealed that this may be due to the fact that Africans included more information that is not directly relevant to the event, such as moral evaluations. That finding supports existing literature on cultural differences in high- versus low-context communication styles. We found no significant differences between groups in the accuracy of witness reports. Because factual details about the event are typically required for criminal investigations, future research should assess how to elicit those from African individuals. Our findings emphasise the importance of considering cultural differences in memory reports and provide insight into the mechanisms underlying such cultural differences.

Individuals showed better memory performance for target-paired items compared to distractor-paired items during sequential target detection and memory encoding tasks, a phenomenon called target-paired memory enhancement (TPME). The TPME was considered to be triggered by the response when the detection stimulus preceded the memory item by 0.5 s without temporal overlap. However, this hypothesis has not been empirically verified. To test the hypothesis, we instructed participants to detect the target colour before memorizing words, varying the response requirements for the target colour across different tasks. Participants responded only to the target colour in the Go-target-0.5 s task (SOA = 0.5 s) and Go-target-1 s task (SOA = 1 s), to distractor colours in the No-Go-target task, and to all colours with different keys in the response-choice task. The results of the remember-know recognition test showed that TPME was consistent across all tasks for R responses, but only occurred in the Go-target-0.5 s task for corrected K responses. These results suggested that both target detection and response can independently contribute to TPME when the detection stimulus and the memory item were presented successively without temporal overlap. The target detection enhanced recollection and familiarity, while the response enhanced familiarity. The effect on recollection was lasting, while the effect on familiarity was transient.

ABSTRACTThe current study examines the age-related positivity bias and the age-related positivity effect using a one-year longitudinal design with a sample that spans adulthood (N = 374; age range 19-90; M_age = 47.41; SD_age= 16.75). Participants answered questions regarding their memories of learning about the outcome of the 2020 U.S. presidential election. Results provide evidence for the positivity bias (i.e., a main effect of age) but no evidence of the positivity effect (i.e., an age x valence interaction). Increased age was associated with reporting feeling less negative at the time of the event, and also remembering feeling more positive (elated and happy) when reconstructing the event one year later. Depressive symptoms partially mediated the relationship between age and valence variables, indicating that depressive symptoms may partly explain the age-related positivity bias.

Visual imagery is important for recalling environmental details, but individuals with aphantasia are reported to show intact spatial memory. We investigated spatial memories of previously experienced environments in individuals with and without aphantasia using self-report and route description tasks. Aphantasic participants (n = 113) and controls (n = 110) completed questionnaires on spatial navigation, memory, anxiety, and mood. A subgroup (aphantasic: n = 65, control: n = 72) completed a route description task assessing memory for details along frequently and infrequently travelled routes. Aphantasic participants did not differ significantly from controls on self-reported navigation ability or strategies. Both groups recalled similar numbers of spatial, entity, and sensory details when describing frequently travelled routes. However, aphantasic participants recalled fewer sensory details for infrequently travelled routes. This finding was corroborated by nominally lower ratings on self-reported memory for object locations and new routes. Findings suggest that spatial memory, including sensory content, remains intact in aphantasia for frequent routes. Impoverished sensory details for infrequent routes indicates that individuals with aphantasia may rely on compensatory strategies, like semanticization, for frequently experienced environments. This suggests that spatial memory for real-world environments involve dissociable processes, some of which are independent of imagery.