Trauma victims often come to remember experiencing more trauma than they initially reported. Our experiments are the first to investigate a plausible mechanism for this memory amplification, namely, that people incorporate new details contained in post-event information (PEI) into their event memory. In Experiment 1, participants viewed traumatic…

Knowledge questions frequently are used in survey research to measure respondents' topic-related cognitive ability and memory. However, in self-administered surveys, respondents can search external sources for additional information to answer a knowledge question correctly. In this case, the knowledge question measures accessible and procedural…

We present 21 prominent myths and misconceptions about hypnosis in order to promulgate accurate information and to highlight questions for future research. We argue that these myths and misconceptions have (a) fostered a skewed and stereotyped view of hypnosis among the lay public, (b) discouraged participant involvement in potentially helpful…

Consumers are exposed to large amounts of advertising every day. One way to avoid being manipulated is to monitor the sources of persuasive messages. In the present study it was tested whether high exposure to advertising affects the memory and guessing processes underlying source attributions. Participants were exposed to high or low proportions…

People's expectations help them make judgments about the world. In the area of spatial memory, the interaction of existing knowledge with incoming information is best illustrated in the category effect, a bias in positioning a target toward the prototypical location of its region (Huttenlocher et al., 1991). According to Bayesian principles, these…

Fake news can impair memory leading to societal controversies such as COVID-19 vaccine efficacy. The pernicious influence of fake news is clear when ineffective corrections leave memories outdated. A key theoretical issue is whether people should recall fake news while reading corrections with contradictory details. The familiarity backfire view…

This eye-tracking study examines how differences in sources' trustworthiness are used by readers to regulate and resolve conflicting scientific claims. One hundred forty-four university students were sequentially presented with two conflicting scientific claims (regarding nanotechnology) across two texts. The claims were indicated to stem from two…

Source monitoring involves attributing information to one of several sources. Schemas are known to influence source-monitoring processes, with enhanced memory for schematically unexpected sources (inconsistency effect) and biased schema-consistent source guessing. The authors investigated whether this guessing bias reflects a compensatory guessing…

Previous studies demonstrated that outdated information may be reactivated and disrupt subsequent processing of newly encoded information. However, previous studies focused on the impact of outdated information that had been backgrounded in memory. The present experiments examined the immediate influence of outdated information; backgrounding…

To account for natural variability in cognitive processing, it is standard practice to optimize a model's parameters by fitting it to behavioral data. Although most language-related theories acknowledge a large role for experience in language processing, variability reflecting that knowledge is usually ignored when evaluating a model's fit to…

"After the death of the last witnesses the memory of the Holocaust must not be left to historians alone, now is the time for works of art" Aharon Appelfeld. This study focuses on the role and contribution of monuments to educating about Holocaust commemoration in Israel. Holocaust monuments are located throughout Israel, from north to…

The purpose of this study was to test a hypothesized model that specified direct and indirect effects of textual and individual factors on readers' ability to integrate information about sources and content when reading multiple conflicting texts on a controversial socio-scientific issue. Using a path analytic approach with a sample of 140…

Human memory systems perform various functions beyond simple storage and retrieval of information. They link together information about events, build abstractions, and perform memory updating. In contrast, typical information storage and access technologies, such as note-taking applications and Wikipedia, tend to store information verbatim. In…

Despite the importance of source attention and evaluation for learning from texts, little is known about the particular conditions that encourage sourcing during reading. In this article, basic assumptions of the discrepancy-induced source comprehension (D-ISC) model are presented, which describes the moment-by-moment cognitive processes that…

Reconstructing memory for sequences is a complex process, likely involving multiple sources of information. In 3 experiments, we examined the source(s) of information that might underlie the ability to accurately place an event within a temporal context. The task was to estimate, after studying each list, the temporal position of a single test…