Remembering Pragmatic Inferences
نویسندگان
چکیده
After hearing that ‘the flimsy shelf weakened under the weight of the books,’ people often remember having heard that the shelf broke–an inference that is not logically necessitated by the statement. Indeed, when asked to choose which word was heard—weakened or broke—people often mistakenly choose broke, a pragmatic inference, as having been heard (McDermott & Chan, 2006). On what basis are these decisions made? The present study explored the subjective experience accompanying memory for pragmatic inferences with remember/know/guess classifications (Gardiner & Java, 1991; Tulving, 1985). The phenomenological experiences accompanying such false memories were indistinguishable from those of true memories. The dual process signal detection account proposed byWixted and Stretch (2004) provides a framework for understanding our results. Copyright# 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
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