Memories of past events often come to mind spontaneously, that is, without any preceding goal-directed search process. Such memories (termed ‘involuntary’ in the adult literature) have been studied extensively adults. However, little is known about how spontaneous recollections may appear children's everyday lives. To date, only a single diary study has conducted. We examined three-year-olds' (...

BACKGROUND Imagery rescripting (ImRs) is a process by which aversive autobiographical memories are rendered less unpleasant or emotional. ImRs is thought only to be effective if a change in the meaning-relevant (semantic) content of the mental image is produced, according to a cognitive hypothesis of ImRs. We propose an additional hypothesis: that ImRs can also be effective by the manipulation ...

Cued recall of categorized lists was used to examine effects of category structure on the creation of false memories. In three experiments, category members that had not been presented on studied categorized lists were nonetheless recalled by participants. Delaying the category cued recall test (Experiment 1) and priming category members that had been omitted from target lists (Experiment 3) in...

To test theoretical predictions about the role of meaning connections in false memory, the effects of semantic cues and list repetition on children’s false memories were evaluated across early childhood to midadolescence using the Deese–Roediger–McDermott (DRM) paradigm. True recall and false recall increased from 7 to 13 years. Study list repetition increased true recall of list words with the...

Individuals with a repressive coping style self-report low anxiety, but show high defensiveness and high physiological arousal. Repressors have impoverished negative autobiographical memories and are better able to suppress memory for negatively valenced and self-related laboratory materials when asked to do so. Research on spontaneous forgetting of negative information in repressors suggests t...

Roediger and McDermott (1995) recently re-introduced a paradigm to study the creation of false memories. Subjects hear short lists of related words (e.g., thread, pin, eye, sewing, etc.), all of which are associates of a critical nonpresented word (e.g., needle); on a free recall test given immediately after list presentation, subjects often erroneously recall the critical nonpresented word. Th...

Siddhartha Santra,1, 2, ∗ Omar Shehab,3 and Radhakrishnan Balu1, † U.S. Army Research Laboratory, Computational and Information Sciences Directorate, ATTN: CIH-N, Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, U.S.A. 21005-5069. Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Stanford University, 496 Lomita Mall, Stanford, California, U.S.A. 94305. Dept of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, Universit...

An internal model of the dynamics of a tool or an object is part of the motor memory acquired when learning to use the tool or to manipulate the object. Changes in synaptic efficacy may underlie acquisition and storage of memories. Here we studied the effect of pharmacological agents that interfere with synaptic plasticity on acquisition of new motor memories and on recall of a previously learn...

False memories created by the Deese/Roediger–McDermott (DRM) procedure typically show a developmental reversal whereby levels of false recall increase with age. In contrast, false memories produced by phonological lists have been shown to decrease as age increases. In the current study we show that phonological false memories, like semantic false memories produced by the DRM procedure, show a d...