Applied Cognitive Psychology

Evidence has accumulated over the past 15 years that affect in humans is cyclical. In winter there is a tendency to depression, with remission in summer, and this effect is stronger at higher latitudes. In order to determine whether human cognition is similarly rhythmical, this study investigated the cognitive processes of 100 participants living at 69 degrees N. Participants were tested in summer and winter on a range of cognitive tasks, including verbal memory, attention and simple reaction time tasks. The seasonally counterbalanced design and the very northerly latitude of this study provide optimal conditions for detecting impaired cognitive performance in winter, and the conclusion is negative: of five tasks with seasonal effects, four had disadvantages in summer. Like the menstrual cycle, the circannual cycle appears to influence mood but not cognition.

Pezdek and Blandon-Gitlin (in press) found that 25% of their participants reported as plausible or very plausible that they themselves could have been a victim of childhood sexual abuse without being able to remember it. In addition, they found that the 25% figure increased to 61% for participants who reported that they were likely at some point in their life to seek psychotherapy. Given past work showing that it is easier to implant a false memory for plausible events, and counter to Pezdek and Blandon-Gitlin's conclusions, these data point to a substantial danger of implanting false memories of childhood sexual abuse during therapy in many people and in most people who are likely to go into therapy. Theoretical issues regarding plausibility are discussed.

The present study examined whether the use of human figure diagrams within a well-structured interview was associated with more elaborate and clearer accounts about physical contact that had occurred in the course of an alleged abuse. The sample included investigative interviews of 88 children ranging from 4 to 13 years of age. Children were interviewed using the NICHD Investigative Interview Protocol, and were then asked a series of questions in association with unclothed gender-neutral outline diagrams of a human body. A new coding scheme was developed to examine the types and clarity of touch-related information. Use of the HFDs was associated with reports of new touches not mentioned before and elaborations regarding the body parts reportedly touched. The HFDs especially helped clarify reports by the oldest rather than the youngest children. The clarity of children's accounts of touch was also greater when details were sought using recall prompts.

Adults have difficulties accurately judging how well they have learned text materials; unfortunately, such low levels of accuracy may obscure age-related deficits. Higher levels of accuracy have been obtained when younger adults make postdictions about which test questions they answered correctly. Accordingly, we focus on the accuracy of postdictive judgments to evaluate whether age deficits would emerge with higher levels of accuracy and whether people's postdictive accuracy would benefit from providing an appropriate standard of evlauation. Participants read texts with definitions embedded in them, attempted to recall each definition, and then made a postdictive judgment about the quality of their recall. When making these judgments, participants either received no standard or were presented the correct definition as a standard for evaluation. Age-related equivalence was found in the relative accuracy of these term-specific judgments, and older adults' absolute accuracy benefited from providing standards to the same degree as did younger adults.

Three-hundred and one young adults evaluated medical dilemmas in which a patient (1) was portrayed as either 40 or 70 years old, (2) decided to either refuse or consent to a risky treatment for a serious medical disorder, and (3) received either positively or negatively framed information about the potential effectiveness of a proposed medical treatment. Participants' evaluations of the patients' decisions reflected the implementation of a framing heuristic and an age heuristic. The framing heuristic influenced participants' judgements of patients who refused the proposed treatment. Specifically, information which was positively framed resulted in risk-avoiding judgements, while information which was negatively framed resulted in risk-taking judgements. The age heuristic predisposed participants to recommend that 40 year old patients, more so than 70-year-old patients, opt for high-risk medical treatments that could potentially add a large number of years to their lives.

Viewers looked at print advertisements as their eye movements were recorded. Half of them were asked to rate how much they liked each ad (for convenience, we will generally use the term 'ad' from this point on), while the other half were asked to rate the effectiveness of each ad. Previous research indicated that viewers who were asked to consider purchasing products in the ads looked at the text earlier and more often than the picture part of the ad. In contrast, viewers in the present experiment looked at the picture part of the ad earlier and longer than the text. The results indicate quite clearly that the goal of the viewer very much influences where (and for how long) viewers look at different parts of ads, but also indicate that the nature of the ad per se matters.

Prior research suggests that recognition of a person's face can be facilitated by exaggerating the distinctive features of the face during training. We tested if this 'reverse-caricature effect' would be robust to procedural variations that created more difficult learning environments. Specifically, we examined whether the effect would emerge with frontal rather than three-quarter views, after very brief exposure to caricatures during the learning phase and after modest rotations of faces during the recognition phase. Results indicate that, even under these difficult training conditions, people are more accurate at recognizing unaltered faces if they are first familiarized with caricatures of the faces, rather than with the unaltered faces. These findings support the development of new training methods to improve face recognition.

Using previously collected data of fourth-grade children observed eating school meals and then interviewed, we categorized intrusions (food items reported but not observed eaten) as stretches (on the child's tray) or confabulations (not on the child's tray). We investigated intrusions, confabulations, and stretches, and the role of liking, at different retention intervals (morning interviews about the previous day's intake; evening interviews about that day's intake) and under different reporting-order prompts (forward; reverse). As retention interval between consumption and report increased, the likelihood 1) increased that reported items were intrusions, that reported items were confabulations, and that intrusions were confabulations; and 2) was constant that reported items were stretches. Results concerning reporting-order prompts were inconclusive. Liking ratings were higher for matches (reports of items observed eaten) than stretches, for confabulations than stretches, and for matches than omissions (unreported items observed eaten), but did not vary by retention interval or reporting-order prompts.

The current study examined cognitive-emotional distinctiveness (CED), the extent to which emotions are linked with event information, in memories associated with PTSD. Participants either with PTSD (n=68) or without PTSD (n=40) completed a modified multidimensional scaling technique to measure CED for their most negative and most positive events. The results revealed that participants in the PTSD group evidenced significantly lower levels of CED. This group difference remained significant when we limited the analysis to traumatic events that led to a PTSD diagnosis (n=33) in comparison to control participants who nominated a traumatic event that did not result in PTSD (n=32). Replicating previous findings, CED levels were higher in memories of negative events, in comparison to positive events. These results provide empirical evidence that memories associated with PTSD do contain special organizational features with respect to the links between emotions and memory. Implications for understanding and treating PTSD are discussed.

Experimental evidence and meta-analyses offer some support for gender-related differences in visuo-spatial ability. However, few studies addressed this issue in an ecological context and/or in everyday tasks implying spatial abilities, such as geographical orientation. Moreover, the relation of specific strategies and gender is still unclear. In the present investigation, we compared men and women in a newly designed battery of spatial orientation tasks in which landmark, route and survey knowledge were considered. In addition, four visuo-spatial working memory (VSWM) tasks were presented. Significant differences favouring men in VSWM tasks were reported, supporting existing evidence. However, men and women did not significantly differ in orientation tasks performance. The patterns of correlation between working memory and spatial orientation tasks indicated that men and women used somewhat different strategies in carrying out the orientation tasks. In particular, active processes seem to play a greater role in females' performance, thus confirming the importance of this variable in interpreting gender effect in VSWM tasks. Altogether, results indicate that gender effects could well result from differences in cognitive strategies and support data indicating that adequate training could reduce or eliminate them. Copyright (c) 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

This study identifies a number of sources of individual differences in SAT performance by examining the simultaneous contributions of factors from two otherwise disparate research areas, namely cognition/learning and social/personality. Preliminary analysis revealed that just the cognitive/learning measures accounted for 37.8, 41.4 and 21.9% of the variance in SAT, V-SAT and Q-SAT performance, respectively while just the social/personality measures accounted for 21.4, 18.2 and 17.3% of the variance. When combined, cognitive/learning and social/personality factors accounted for even larger amounts of variance in performance; specifically 43.4, 44.6 and 28% for the SAT, V-SAT and Q-SAT, respectively. Finally, the results revealed that three measures consistently predicted performance on the SAT, V-SAT and Q-SAT; two measures were the learning/cognitive factors of working memory and integration of new text-based information with information from long-term memory and one measure was the social/personality factor, test anxiety.

Collaborative cognition, in which two or more people work together on a cognitive task, may be typical of everyday life, and may even represent an important aspect of everyday cognitive adaptation for older adults. We examined collaborative memory for stories by comparing younger (n = 64) older (n = 66) individuals and dyads with collaborative performance produced by married spouses and stranger dyads. Overall, across four collaborative recall products (two positive and two negative performance indicators), some evidence for our hypothesis of general or selective collaborative effectiveness was observed. Moreover, such evidence was obtained at both an immediate and delayed recall episode. Discussion includes applications, limitations and suggestions for future research.

Mental health clinicians are tasked to diagnose and treat the millions of people worldwide seeking help for mental health issues. This paper investigates the memory clinicians have for patient information. We hypothesize that clinicians encapsulate mental health knowledge through experience into more abstract concepts, as in other domains changing what clinicians remember about patients compared with non-professionals. We tested memory for realistic patient-therapist interactions in experienced clinicians, intermediately trained graduate students, and laypeople. Clinicians recalled fewer facts than intermediate trainees and as many as laypeople. Furthermore, clinicians reported more abstracted information than all other participants, providing the first empirical demonstration of knowledge encapsulation in the memory of mental health clinicians. We discuss how our results fit into the existing literature on clinical expertise in mental health and the implications of our findings for future research relevant to mental health care.

Survey respondents have been found to systematically overreport their participation in political elections. Although the sociodemographic correlates of this response bias are well known, only a few studies have analyzed the determinants predicted by two prominent theoretical explanations for vote overreporting: memory failure and social desirability bias. Both explanations have received empirical support in studies in which the probability of vote overreporting was found to increase (a) with the time between the election and the survey interview and (b) when respondents were more politically involved. In the present paper, we argue that the effect of each of these determinants is not simply additive, but depends on the value of the respective other factor. This interaction effect has been found with data from the American National Election Studies: The probability of vote overreporting increases significantly stronger with the respondents’ political involvement when more time has elapsed since the election day.

Many people claim to remember how they heard about the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001—including George W. Bush, the President of the United States at the time. On at least three occasions, the President was asked how he heard the news of the attacks. His answers contained substantial inconsistencies and provide a near-perfect example of a false flashbulb memory. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

In typical dual-task driving studies, participants concurrently perform pairs of driving-related and -unrelated tasks (e.g. vehicle braking and mental arithmetic). Requiring responses to both may implicitly equate their importance. In real-life driving, however, the potential for collision dictates that a concurrent task should be assigned far lower priority than driving. To better reflect naturalistic driving conditions, we not only instructed participants to assign maximum priority to braking in a simulated driving task, but also encouraged them to ignore the concurrent task altogether on dual-task trials. Despite these instructions, responses to the concurrent task often preceded braking, which suffered from dual-task interference. We also found that redundant signals to the lead vehicle's brake lights resulted in faster braking responses and an increased likelihood that the braking response would occur first. The results are consistent with the Central Bottleneck (CB) model of dual-task interference and may help guide the design of driver-assistance systems. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Previous research has documented the beneficial effects of expressive narrative writing, and especially the inclusion of cognitive processing and emotion words, for alleviating stress. In this study, 65 mostly white Emory University undergraduates of Judeo-Christian backgrounds recalled their emotional reaction upon hearing the news of 9/11 within 2 months of the event, and again one month and 6 months later. Between the initial and one month assessment, participants engaged in expressive writing for 20 minutes a day for 5 consecutive days. Individuals who had higher personal involvement in the events of 9/11, through knowing someone who was killed or having lived in the affected areas, recalled being more shocked and upset upon hearing the news across time, and used fewer cognitive processing and positive emotion words in their narratives, than those with no direct involvement. Individuals who used more cognitive processing and emotion words in their narratives subsequently recalled being less shocked and upset upon hearing the news. Implications of these finding for emotional memory and emotional regulation are discussed. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

We examined emotional reactions to and subsequent memory for the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in individuals with a history of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Surveys were conducted among clients, staff, and visitors of a Veterans Administration Hospital approximately one month and again 10 months after the attacks. As compared to a trauma-control group matched on age, sex, education, and veteran status, PTSD participants reported being more negatively affected by the attacks in the follow-up, but not in the initial survey. PTSD and matched trauma control participants were similar in various measures of their initial autobiographical memory and event memory for factual details of the attacks. However, within-subject comparison revealed significant forgetting over the 9 months in event memory only for the PTSD participants. Furthermore, PTSD participants exhibited a tendency to inflate the emotional aspects of their memory over time. Finally, only in the PTSD group, age was negatively correlated with event memory, suggesting an accelerated memory decline with age associated with PTSD. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Given the widespread appeal of conspiratorial beliefs, it is surprising that very little empirical research has examined the psychological variables associated with such beliefs. In the present study, we examined individual and demographic predictors of beliefs in conspiracy theories concerning the September 11, 2001 (9/11) attacks on the World Trade Centre and Pentagon among a representative British sample of 254 women and men. Results of structural equation modelling showed that 9/11 conspiracist beliefs were positively associated with belief in other conspiracy theories, exposure to 9/11 conspiracist ideas, political cynicism, defiance of authority and the Big Five personality factor of Agreeableness. In total, a model including demographics, personality and individual difference variables explained over 50% of the variance in 9/11 conspiracist ideas. The implications of these findings for the literature on conspiracy theories are discussed. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

We tested Turkish participants' (n=483) autobiographical and event memory for the events of September 11, 2001 3 days, 6 months, and 1 year after the event. The amount of autobiographical detail participants reported was very high after one year. The accuracy of event memory was moderate at 3 days, and declined sharply by 6 months. The consistency of autobiographical memory was higher than that of event memory at all time lags; however, there was no interaction between time lag and memory type. The data also provided partial support for Pezdek's (2003) conceptualization that the degree of involvement has different effects on event and autobiographical memory. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

This study examines flashbulb memories of a salient recent and a distant public event to assess patterns of forgetting in the formal characteristics of these memories. Memories of a recent event (September 11) were compared to memories of a distant event (the death of Princess Diana) in several samples of British and one sample of Italian participants. In British participants, the 51-month old memories of the death of Princess Diana were as detailed and specific as their memories of a 3-month old event, September 11. Moreover, their memories of Princess Diana were not different from memories of September 11 collected immediately or very soon after September 11 in two other groups of British participants. Results suggest that flashbulb memories of a distant public event can be as detailed, specific and vivid as memories of a very recent event. For Italian participants, however, flashbulb memory scores for September 11 were reliably higher than for the death of Princess Diana. There was also a small albeit reliable loss of specificity in British participants' memories of September 11 over the subsequent three months. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The recollection of particularly salient, surprising or consequential events is often called ‘flashbulb memories’. We tested people's autobiographical memory for details of 11 September 2001 by gathering a large national random sample (N = 678) of people's reports immediately following the attacks, and then by contacting them twice more, in September 2002 and August 2003. Three novel findings emerged. First, memory consistency did not vary as a function of demographic variables such as gender, geographical location, age or education. Second, memory consistency did not vary as a function of whether memory was tested before or after the 1-year anniversary of the event, suggesting that media coverage associated with the anniversary did not impact memory. Third, the conditional probability of consistent recollection in 2003 given consistent recollection in 2002 was p = .73. In contrast, the conditional probability of consistent recollection in 2003 given inconsistent recollection in 2002 was p = .18. Finally, and in agreement with several prior studies, confidence in memory far exceeded consistency in the long term. Also, those respondents who revealed evidence for consistent flashbulb memory experienced more anxiety in response to the event, and engaged in more covert rehearsal than respondents who did not reveal evidence for consistent flashbulb memory. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Participants reconstructed the serial order of events associated with the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Accuracy was stable as the retention interval doubled from 9 weeks to 18 weeks, but most participants (63%) made errors sequencing even the ‘unforgettable’ events of that day, with most errors (72%) falling within one position of being correct. This positional gradient (near misses more common than far misses) mirrored that found in laboratory studies of order memory, despite basic differences in how ordinal information was presented to observers, suggesting that the positional gradient may generalize across many different circumstances of serial-order reconstruction. Monte Carlo simulations illustrate this possibility by showing that simple constraints on pairs of events explain substantial variance in the data. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

One week and six months following 9/11, University of Toronto students completed a questionnaire that assessed memory for that day's events. Questions assessed personal autobiographical information and event-related information. Recently, Pezdek (2003) reported that ‘flash-bulb memories’ for event and autobiographical information varied with the extent of participant involvement: as emotional involvement increased, event memory improved whereas autobiographical memory declined. This dichotomy was further explored in this study with a Canadian sample, a group expected to be less personally involved in the events. In accordance with Pezdek's hypothesis, the consistency of recall was better for autobiographical information than for event information. The two types of memories were also differentially affected by (1) emotion: event memory was better for those who experienced higher levels of emotion, whereas autobiographical memory was unaffected by emotion; and (2) the passage of time: over the six-month interval, the accuracy of event memory declined, whereas the number of personal information details actually increased. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.