Emotional valence of stimuli modulates false recognition: Using a modified version of the simplified conjoint recognition paradigm

Representation of shared surface information and false memory for abstract versus concrete pictures in the conjoint recognition paradigm

An effective factor by which false memories can arise is relatedness which includes not only semantic associations but also perceptual resemblance. This issue raises questions about how patterns of perceptual features are represented in memory and how they relate to semantic representations. In five experiments, we investigated the memory processes underlying the false recognition of perceptually or semantically related pictures from the perspective of fuzzy trace theory. Multinomial processing tree model analyses for the conjoint recognition paradigm showed that the parameter representing gist trace retrieval not only contributes to false acceptances of semantically related pictures, but also underlies the false recognition of non-semantically related abstract shapes. These results challenged the hypothesis that the false recognition of non-semantically related distractors is solely due to interference with the verbatim suppression process. These experiments also showed that adding a surface feature (colour) to the category exemplars increases false recognition of related distractors by enhancing the contribution of the familiarity process, but only for pictures of real objects. Comparisons between experiments showed that different variants of the conjoint recognition model, used to analyse the effects of the same experimental manipulation, can lead to partially different conclusions.

The different roles of sleep on false memory formation between young and older adults

Aging is accompanied by an increase in the probability of false memory. However, what role sleep plays in the age effect in false memory is less understood. Our study utilized a simplified conjoint recognition (SCR)-based Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm to investigate the role of sleep on false memory in young and older adults. The results showed that sleep effect in false memory was modulated by age, manifested as sleep increased young adults' falsely recognized critical lures, while it reduced older adults'. In addition, in a more fine-grained analysis, the results of multinomial processing tree (MPT) modeling further revealed that young adults were more likely to retrieve memory based on gist traces than older adults, and young adults were more susceptible to guess a probe as "old" than older adults in the sleep condition. Combined findings from the number and ratio of falsely recognized critical lures and the MPT modeling, the current study suggested that sleep might increase young adults' false memory via gist extraction, while it decreased older adults' false memory via verbatim trace consolidation. The study contributes to a comprehensive view on the age-by-sleep effect on false recognition, with the segregation of cognitive components of verbatim memory, gist memory, and response bias.

Creating emotional false recollections: Perceptual recombination and conceptual fluency mechanisms

We investigated the impact of 2 hypothetical mechanisms of episodic memory reconstruction-perceptual recombination and conceptual fluency-on objectively measured recollection accuracy and false recollections of neutral and emotional stimuli. Participants encoded negative, neutral, and positive pictures depicting objects and scenes (i.e., target pictures), each accompanied with a descriptive verbal label (e.g., "boy crying at funeral," "wooden basket on floor," "four chimpanzees laughing together"). Next, they encoded fragmented pictures of some of the scenes they did and did not earlier see (perceptual misinformation), or they received multiple presentations of the corresponding verbal labels (conceptual misinformation). Recollection of target pictures was then tested, using labels as retrieval cues. We had three key findings in each of two experiments. First, as in our prior work, both perceptual and conceptual misinformation significantly increased false recollection judgments of nonstudied pictures, including high-confidence errors. These effects implicate perceptual recombination and conceptual fluency mechanisms. Second, these misinformation effects generalized across all emotional categories, implicating separable roles of these two mechanisms on emotional recollections. Finally, conceptual misinformation was less likely to influence negative than neutral recollection errors, providing new evidence that emotion can improve retrieval monitoring accuracy and reduce false memories based on conceptual fluency (i.e., an emotional distinctiveness heuristic). (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Increased phantom recollection after sleep

Sleep is known to benefit memory consolidation, but its effect on false memory is less clear. We applied the simplified conjoint recognition paradigm to investigate how sleep affects the cognitive processes behind correct or false recognition, according to fuzzy-trace theory, and measured the retrieval of verbatim traces, retrieval of gist traces, and phantom recollection. Participants studied 24 lists of semantically related words lacking the strongest common associate or theme word. Recognition was tested 12 h later, following either a night's sleep or daytime wakefulness. The recognition test featured studied words, nonstudied theme words (false recognition), and unrelated words. False recognition rate was higher after sleep than after daytime wakefulness. True recognition rate was the same. Analysis of the cognitive processes underlying recognition showed that phantom recollection was higher after sleep. Assuming that phantom recollection reflects the retrieval of strong gist traces, sleep may strengthen gist traces and promote gist extraction.

Negative social emotions and cognition: Shame, guilt and working memory impairments

Negative emotions can have an impact on a variety of cognitive domains, including Working Memory (WM). The present work investigated whether shame and guilt modulate WM performance in a dual-task test both in a non-clinical and a clinical population. In Experiment 1, 76 non-clinical participants performed a dual-task before and after being randomly assigned to shame, guilt or neutral inductions elicited by the writing of autobiographical past experiences. Shame and guilt elicitations were related to impaired WM performances. In Experiment 2, 65 clinical inpatients with eating disorders were assigned to the same procedure. The negative relationship of self-conscious emotions and WM was confirmed. Taken together these results suggest that shame and guilt are related to impairments of WM in both clinical and non-clinical participants.