Past research has shown that emotion enhances true memory, but that emotion can either increase or decrease false memory. Two theoretical possibilities-the distinctiveness of emotional stimuli and the conceptual relatedness of emotional content-have been implicated as being responsible for influencing both true and false memory for emotional content. In the present study, we sought to identify ...

The capability of adult and child witnesses to accurately recollect events from the past and provide reliable testimony has been hotly debated for more than 100 years. Prominent legal cases of the 1980s and 1990s sparked lengthy debates and important research questions surrounding the fallibility and general reliability of memory. But what lessons have we learned, some 35 years later, about the...

The present research investigated memory vulnerability to distortions. Different encoding strategies were used when categorized lists were studied. The authors assumed that an imagery strategy would be responsible for decreasing false memories more than a word-whispering strategy, which is consistent with the model of semantic access and previous research in the Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradig...

Overprecision (overconfidence in interval estimation) is a bias with clear implications for economic outcomes in industries reliant on forecasting possible ranges for future prices and unknown states of nature such as mineral and petroleum exploration. Prior research has shown the ranges people provide are too narrow given the knowledge they have – that is, they underestimate uncertainty and ar...

False memory paradigms can offer leverage on understanding the breakdowns in episodic memory that occur with healthy aging (see Balota, Cortese, et al., 1999; Budson, Daffner, Desikan, & Schacter, 2000; Kensinger & Schacter, 1999; Norman & Schacter, 1997; Tun, Wingfield, Rosen, & Blanchard, 1998; Watson, Balota, & SergentMarshall, 2001). In general, studies have demonstrated that relative to yo...

With the accumulation of our knowledge about how memories are formed, consolidated, retrieved, and updated, neuroscience is now reaching a point where discrete memories can be identified and manipulated at rapid timescales. Here, we start with historical studies that lead to the modern memory engram theory. Then, we will review recent advances in memory engram research that combine transgenic a...

We examined the relation between emotion and susceptibility to misinformation using a novel paradigm, the ambiguous stimuli affective priming (ASAP) paradigm. Participants (N = 88) viewed ambiguous neutral images primed either at encoding or retrieval to be interpreted as either highly positive or negative (or neutral/not primed). After viewing the images, they either were asked misleading or n...

Despite the fact that associative memory studies produce a large number of false memories, neuroimaging analyses utilizing this paradigm typically focus only on neural activity mediating successful retrieval. The current study sought to expand on this prior research by examining the neural basis of both true and false associative memories. Though associative false memories are substantially dif...

Schematic memory, or contextual knowledge derived from experience (Bartlett, 1932), benefits memory function by enhancing retention and speeding learning of related information (Bransford and Johnson, 1972; Tse et al., 2007). However, schematic memory can also promote memory errors, producing false memories. One demonstration is the "false memory effect" of the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) pa...

This article investigates the relation between misremembering and source judgments in both the misleading information paradigm and the false memory paradigm. A computational model, CHARM (Composite Holographic Associative Recall Model), is used to simulate source monitoring in both paradigms. Despite the fact that CHARM stores memories in a composite memory trace, it is shown that the model can...