Daniel M Bernstein

• PhD
• Chair at Kwantlen Polytechnic University

General Audience Summary False memory is a recollection that appears real despite being partially or completely fabricated. The implications of false memories range from minor misunderstandings to more serious consequences depending on the context. For example, inaccurate eyewitness identifications can lead to wrongful convictions of innocent peopl...

The sunk-cost effect (SCE) refers to the continuation of an activity after investing resources in the activity. Current developmental research on the SCE in childhood is mixed, but some researchers suggest that sunk-cost judgments decline with age after childhood. To better understand age differences in sunk-cost judgments across the lifespan, we c...

General Audience Summary When people encounter new information, it can be made easier to understand by an accompanying cocktail of words, gestures, and behaviors. The problem is this same cocktail—called semantic context—can also create the illusion of understanding. Take, for example, foreign films and television series. Subtitles help viewers und...

Introduction People are more likely to believe repeated information—this is known as the Illusory Truth Effect (ITE). Recent research on the ITE has shown that semantic processing of statements plays a key role. In our day to day experience, we are often multi-tasking which can impact our ongoing processing of information around us. In three experi...

The Transfer-appropriate Processing (TAP) framework has demonstrated enhanced recognition memory when processing operations engaged at encoding and at test match. Our research applied TAP to study the illusory truth effect (ITE). We investigated whether the match/mismatch of evaluative goals at encoding and at test affects the ITE. At encoding, par...

General Audience Summary Hindsight can cloud the past by biasing people’s beliefs about what was known prior to an outcome. Hindsight can also bias people’s beliefs about the foreseeability or inevitability of an outcome. We explored hindsight bias for COVID-19 in two experiments. In both experiments, Canadian and U.S. participants made foresight j...

When semantically-related photos appear with true-or-false trivia claims, people more often rate the claims as true compared to when photos are absent-truthiness. This occurs even when the photos lack information useful for assessing veracity. We tested whether truthiness changed in magnitude as a function of participants' age in a diverse sample u...

Some research suggests people are overconfident because of personality characteristics, lack of insight, or because overconfidence is beneficial in its own right. But other research fits with the possibility that fluent experience in the moment can rapidly drive overconfidence. For example, fluency can push people to become overconfident in their a...

People who learn the outcome to a situation or problem tend to overestimate what was known in the past-this is hindsight bias. Whereas previous research has revealed robust hindsight bias in the visual domain, little is known about how outcome information affects our memory of others' emotional expressions. The goal of the current work was to test...

The Deese/Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm has been used extensively to examine false memory. During the study session, participants learn lists of semantically related items (e.g., pillow, blanket, tired, bed), referred to as targets. Critical lures are items which are also associated with the lists but are intentionally omitted from study (e.g.,...

Participants ranging in age from 3 to 98 years (N = 708; approximately 60% female; 49% Caucasian, 38% Asian; 12% Other ethnicities, 1% Indigenous; modal household income > $80,000) completed a battery of tasks involving verbal ability, executive function, and perspective-taking. Wherever possible, all participants completed the same version of a ta...

Cross-examination is detrimental to the consistency and accuracy of children’s reports and a re-direct interview may rehabilitate accuracy. We compared the effects of cross-examination on reports provided by single-event and repeated-event children. Children participated in one or five magic shows. One week later they were interviewed in a supporti...

The sunk-cost effect (SCE) is the tendency to continue investing in something that is not working out because of previous investments that cannot be recovered. In three experiments, we examine the SCE when continued investment violates the ethic of care by harming others. In Experiment 1, the SCE was smaller if the sunk-cost decision resulted in ha...

Interrupting a sequence of episodic recognition decisions by a problem-solving task will change the hit and false alarm rate for the following item in a recognition test (Watkins & Peynircioglu, 1990). The mechanisms of this revelation effect have not yet been understood completely. We offer a new explanation based on the global matching model MINE...

Nonprobative but related photos can increase the perceived truth value of statements relative to when no photo is presented (truthiness). In two experiments, we tested whether truthiness generalizes to credibility judgments in a forensic context. Participants read short vignettes in which a witness viewed an offence. The vignettes were presented wi...

General Audience Summary Remembering to execute a future action (e.g., remembering to take medication) is known as prospective memory (PM). We hypothesized that forming an intent to execute a future task increases thoughts about that action, which makes one more likely to later misattribute memories of thoughts of that action as confirmation that t...

Prospective memory (PM) involves remembering to execute future intentions. Pairs played a word game (Taboo) with an embedded PM task. In Taboo, one player (clue giver) must get their partner (clue guesser) to say aloud a target word (e.g., ROOF) by offering clues such as “home” without saying certain taboo words (e.g., fiddler, house). The PM task...

Various multiple-disciplinary terms and concepts (although most commonly “interdisciplinarity,” which is used herein) are used to frame education, scholarship, research, and interactions within and outside academia. In principle, the premise of interdisciplinarity may appear to have many strengths; yet, the extent to which interdisciplinarity is em...

Hindsight Bias (HB) is the tendency to see known information as obvious. We studied Metacognitive Hindsight Bias (MC-HB)—a shift away from one’s original confidence regarding answers provided before learning the actual facts. In two experiments, participants answered general-knowledge questions in social scenarios and provided their confidence in e...

General Audience Summary This research examined peoples’ tendency to judge events mainly by the best/worst moment (the peak) and the last moment (the end)—a tendency known as the peak-end rule. The peak-end rule is generally useful for judging events quickly, but it can result in irrational judgments. Many studies have examined the peak-end rule fo...

We investigated the tendency of children and adults to rely on the most intense and final moments when judging positive experiences, a heuristic known as the peak-end rule. This rule allows us to judge experiences quickly, but it can bias judgments. In three experiments involving various age groups (N = 988, ages 2–97), we attempted to replicate pr...

The integrative memory model combines five core memory systems with an attributional system. We agree with Bastin et al. that this melding is the most novel aspect of the model. But we await further evidence that the model's substantial complexity informs our understanding of false memories or of the development of recollection and familiarity.

We conducted three experiments to test the fluency-misattribution account of auditory hindsight bias. According to this account, prior exposure to a clearly presented auditory stimulus produces fluent (improved) processing of a distorted version of that stimulus, which results in participants mistakenly rating that item as easy to identify. In all...

The term, false memory, describes outcomes to various procedures and techniques, such as coming to believe that suggested false events occurred, acceptance of post-event misinformation, and recognition of critical lures in the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) procedure. The literature to date indicates that these memory errors inter-correlate poorly,...

We conducted a systematic review of longitudinal theory of mind (ToM) studies, focusing on the precursors to and functional outcomes of ToM in typically-developing samples. Our search yielded 87 longitudinal studies, all of which involved children and adolescents. Early attention skills, executive function development, and the use of language are p...

False-belief reasoning, defined as the ability to reason about another person’s beliefs and appreciate that beliefs can differ from reality, is an important aspect of perspective taking. We tested 266 individuals, at various ages ranging from 3 to 92 years, on a continuous measure of false-belief reasoning (the Sandbox task). All age groups had dif...

Description of variables in the dataset. (DOCX)

Dataset used in the analysis. (XLSX)

In two studies, we examined young children’s performance on the paper-and-pencil version of the Sandbox task, a continuous measure of false belief, and its relations with other false belief and inhibition tasks. In Study 1, 96 children aged 3 to 7 years completed three false belief tasks (Sandbox, Unexpected Contents, and Appearance/Reality) and tw...

We report 4 experiments investigating auditory hindsight bias – the tendency to overestimate the intelligibility of distorted auditory stimuli after learning their identity. An associative priming manipulation was used to vary the amount of processing fluency independently of prior target knowledge. For hypothetical designs, in which hindsight judg...

Studies have demonstrated that perceptual fluency—the ease of perceiving stimuli—does not contribute to higher predictions of future memory performance (judgments of learning; JOLs) for words presented in a larger font (48 pt) than for words presented in a smaller font (18 pt). Here, we investigated whether stimulus size can affect JOLs through ano...

Judgments can depend on the activity directly preceding them. An example is the revelation effect whereby participants are more likely to claim that a stimulus is familiar after a preceding task, such as solving an anagram, than without a preceding task. We test conflicting predictions of four revelation-effect hypotheses in a meta-analysis of 26 y...

Tasks that precede a recognition probe induce a more liberal response criterion than do probes without tasks—the “revelation effect.” For example, participants are more likely to claim that a stimulus is familiar directly after solving an anagram, relative to a condition without an anagram. Revelation effect hypotheses disagree whether hard precedi...

Producing items (e.g., by saying them aloud or typing them) can improve recognition memory. To evaluate whether production increases item distinctiveness and/or memory strength we compared this effect as a function of the percentage of items that participants typed at encoding (i.e., 0%, 20%, 50%, 80%, and 100%). Experiment 1 revealed a strength-ba...

Egocentric bias is a core feature of autism. This phenomenon has been studied using the false belief task. However, typically developing children who pass categorical (pass or fail) false belief tasks may still show subtle egocentric bias. We examined 7- to 13-year-old children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD; n = 76) or typical development (n =...

Outcome knowledge influences recall of earlier predictions of the event in question. Researchers have hypothesized that age-related declines in inhibitory control may underlie older adults’ increased susceptibility to the two underlying bias processes that contribute to this hindsight bias (HB) phenomenon, recollection bias and reconstruction bias....

Virtually every social interaction involves reasoning about the perspectives of others, or ‘theory of mind (ToM).’ Previous research suggests that it is difficult to ignore our current knowledge when reasoning about a more naïve perspective (i.e., the curse of knowledge). In this Mini Review, we discuss the implications of the curse of knowledge fo...

We examined 3- to 5-year-olds' understanding of general knowledge (e.g., knowing that clocks tell time) by investigating whether (1) they recognize that their own general knowledge has changed over time (i.e., they knew less as babies than they know now), and (2) such intraindividual knowledge differences are easier/harder to understand than interi...

Hindsight bias is the tendency to overestimate the foreseeability of an outcome once it is known. This bias has implications for decisions made within the legal system, ranging from judgments made during investigations to those in court proceedings. Legal decision makers should only consider what was known at the time an investigation was conducted...

In everyday life, we are often required to take medication at a certain time or deliver an important message to a friend. When these intentions must be delayed until an appropriate time in the future, they are referred to as prospective memory (Einstein & McDaniel, 1990). In the current study, we explored whether forming an intention to carry out a...

We explored whether forming an intention to perform a future action (prospective memory, PM) increases susceptibility to later falsely believing that the intention was carried out. Participants played a charades-like game called “Taboo” with an embedded PM task that led them to form intentions to say certain words and not others. A day later, parti...

The same event that appeared unpredictable in foresight can be judged as predictable in hindsight. Hindsight bias clouds judgments in all areas of life, including legal decisions, medical diagnoses, consumer satisfaction, sporting events, and election outcomes. We discuss three theoretical constructs related to hindsight bias: memory, reconstructio...

When people rapidly judge the truth of claims presented with or without related but nonprobative photos, the photos tend to inflate the subjective truth of those claims-a "truthiness" effect (Newman et al., 2012). For example, people more often judged the claim "Macadamia nuts are in the same evolutionary family as peaches" to be true when the clai...

We combined data across eight published experiments (N= 1369) to examine the formation and consequences of false autobiographical beliefs and memories. Our path models revealed that the formation of false autobiographical belief fully mediated the pathway between suggesting to people that they had experienced a positive or negative food-related eve...

Theory of mind (ToM) is the ability to take other people's perspective by inferring their mental state. Most 6-year olds pass the change-of-location false belief task that is commonly used to assess ToM. However, the change-of-location task is not suitable for individuals over 5 years of age, due to its discrete response options. In two experiments...

After learning an event's outcome, people's recollection of their former prediction of that event typically shifts toward the actual outcome. Erdfelder and Buchner (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 24, 387-414, 1998) developed a multinomial processing tree (MPT) model to identify the underlying processes contribu...

Unlabelled: BACKGROUND/STUDY CONTEXT: After learning an event's outcome, people's recollection of their former prediction of that event shifts towards the actual outcome. This hindsight bias (HB) phenomenon tends to be stronger in older compared with younger adults; however, it is unclear whether age-related changes in other cognitive abilities me...

When people make judgments about the truth of a claim, related but nonprobative information rapidly leads them to believe the claim-an effect called "truthiness" [1]. Would the pronounceability of others' names also influence the truthiness of claims attributed to them? We replicated previous work by asking subjects to evaluate people's names on a...

ABSTRACT� How can you tell if a particular memory,belonging to you or someone,else is true or false? Cognitive scientists use a variety of techniques to measure groups of memories, whereas police, lawyers, and other researchers use procedures to determine whether an individual can be believed or not. We discuss evidence from behavioral and neuroima...

A novel task, using a continuous spatial layout, was created to investigate the degree to which (in centimeters) 3-year-old children's (N = 63), 5-year-old children's (N = 60), and adults' (N = 60) own privileged knowledge of the location of an object biased their representation of a protagonist's false belief about the object's location. At all ag...

Objectives: Age reductions in theory of mind (ToM) are well documented, though underlying mechanisms are poorly understood. Research suggests that traditional cognitive abilities underlie ToM in part; however, whether age-associated health modifiers also predict ToM remains unknown. We investigated the role of pulse pressure (PP), an age-related m...

Eyewitnesses often report details of the witnessed crime incorrectly. However, there is usually more than 1 eyewitness observing a crime scene. If this is the case, one approach to reconstruct the details of a crime more accurately is aggregating across individual reports. Although aggregation likely improves accuracy, the degree of improvement lar...

When people evaluate claims, they often rely on what comedian Stephen Colbert calls "truthiness," or subjective feelings of truth. In four experiments, we examined the impact of nonprobative information on truthiness. In Experiments 1A and 1B, people saw familiar and unfamiliar celebrity names and, for each, quickly responded "true" or "false" to t...

This study reports on a new false belief measure in a sample of 124 children and adolescents with or without high functioning autism (HFASD). In the classic paradigm, a participant predicts in which of two discrete locations a deceived protagonist will look for an object. In the current Sandbox task, the object is buried and reburied in a sandbox,...

The revelation effect is a change in response behavior induced by a preceding problem-solving task. Previous studies have shown a revelation effect for faces when the problem-solving task includes attractiveness ratings of the faces. Immediately after this problem-solving task participants judged faces as more familiar than without the problem-solv...

People who know the outcome of an event tend to overestimate their own prior knowledge or others' naïve knowledge of it. This hindsight bias pervades cognition, lending the world an unwarranted air of inevitability. In four experiments, we showed how knowing the identities of words causes people to overestimate others' naïve ability to identify mod...

Theory of mind (ToM), or the ability to understand mental states, is a fundamental aspect of social cognition. Previous research has documented marked advances in ToM in preschoolers, and declines in ToM in older-aged adults. In the present study, younger (n=37), middle-aged (n=20), and older (n=37) adults completed a continuous false belief task m...

This chapter presents a model of autobiographical belief formation.

A growing body of work shows how easy it is to manipulate memory for past events. In this chapter, we review recent research on false memories that can be planted about a non-existent past experience with a particular food or alcohol. These false memories have consequences for people; if the false memory is unpleasant, people avoid the food or drin...

Background: The false belief task is widely used to determine Theory of Mind in autism. However, the task lacks sensitivity to false belief reasoning after childhood, especially in high functioning (normal IQ) individuals with autism (HFASD). Objectives: This study reports on a more sensitive false belief measure that allows for direct compar...

Reports an error in "Hindsight bias from 3 to 95 years of age" by Daniel M. Bernstein, Edgar Erdfelder, Andrew N. Meltzoff, William Peria and Geoffrey R. Loftus (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 2011[Mar], Vol 37[2], 378-391). On page 381, the notation in Figure 1 is incorrect. The corrected notations are discuss...

Upon learning the outcome to a problem, people tend to believe that they knew it all along (hindsight bias). Here, we report the first study to trace the development of hindsight bias across the life span. One hundred ninety-four participants aged 3 to 95 years completed 3 tasks designed to measure visual and verbal hindsight bias. All age groups d...

Consumer judgement and decision making is guided by phenomenological experiences (Whittlesea, 1997), also called ‘non- emotional feelings’ (Clore, 1992) associated with cognitions. These feelings, such as certainty, surprise, and confusion, are considered non- emotional because they are feelings associated with a state of knowledge (Clore, 1992), a...

What is the effect on memory when seemingly innocuous photos accompany false reports of the news? We asked people to read news headlines of world events, some of which were false. Half the headlines appeared with photographs that were tangentially related to the event; others were presented without photographs. People saw each headline only once, a...

We examined 240 children's (3.5-, 4.5-, and 5.5-year-olds) latency to respond to questions on a battery of false-belief tasks. Response latencies exhibited a significant cross-over interaction as a function of age and response type (correct vs. incorrect). 3.5-year-olds'incorrect latencies were faster than their correct latencies, whereas the oppos...

In the present paper we suggest that people experience history from four perspec‑ tives: Participant, Witness, Contemporary and Successor. These perspectives differ in the proportion of experience, knowledge and personal meaning that is avail‑ able. We empirically demonstrated greater malleability of memories about terror‑ ist attacks that were exp...

How can you tell if a particular memory belonging to you or someone else is true or false? Cognitive scientists use a variety of techniques to measure groups of memories, whereas police, lawyers, and other researchers use procedures to determine whether an individual can be believed or not. We discuss evidence from behavioral and neuroimaging studi...

The subjective and objective sequelae accompanying mild head injury (MHI) are discussed in an attempt to clarify MHI's immediate and long-term consequences. Areas covered include epidemiology, classification, the post-concussive syndrome (PCS), malingering, extent of recovery, rehabilitation and guidelines for clinical practice. Special emphasis is...

Participants provided information about their childhood by rating their confidence about whether they had experienced various events (e.g., "broke a window playing ball"). On some trials, participants unscrambled a key word from the event phrase (e.g., wdinwo-window) or an unrelated word (e.g., gnutge-nugget) before seeing the event and giving thei...

False memories, or memories for events that never occurred, have been documented in the real world and in the laboratory. In the real world, false memories involving trauma and abuse have resulted in real-life consequences. In the laboratory, researchers have just begun to study the consequences of false memories. We review this laboratory-based wo...

Two conceptual replications of research by Zhong and Liljenquist (2006) are reported. The conceptual replications were carried out by two independent laboratories that did not collaborate or communicate with one another about the current studies. Study 1 (N = 210) replicated a study by Zhong and Liljenquist (2006) showing that participants who reca...

It is well known in the literature on decision-making that utility can be derived from the anticipation of, the experience of, or the recollection of an event (Elster and Lowenstein 1992). We propose a fourth source of utility, utility derived from a false memory. We show that people can be influenced by false suggestion (for a consumption experien...

False beliefs and memories can affect people's attitudes, at least in the short term. But can they produce real changes in behavior? This study explored whether falsely suggesting to subjects that they had experienced a food-related event in their childhood would lead to a change in their behavior shortly after the suggestion and up to 4 months lat...

Do false beliefs last? To explore this question, this study planted false beliefs or memories of a childhood experience with asparagus. We found that these false beliefs had consequences for subjects, when assessed directly after the suggestive manipulation. Moreover, subjects were brought back two weeks later to see if their false beliefs persiste...

In past research, we planted false memories for food related childhood events using a simple false feedback procedure. Some critics have worried that our findings may be due to demand characteristics. In the present studies, we developed a novel procedure designed to reduce the influence of demand characteristics by providing an alternate magnet fo...

In two experiments, involving 231 subjects, we planted the suggestion that subjects loved to eat asparagus as children. Relative to controls, subjects receiving the suggestion became more confident that they had loved asparagus the first time the tried it. These new (false) beliefs had consequences for those who formed them, including increased gen...

Participants in Experiment 1 completed a 36-item life events inventory (LEI) in their native language (Russian) two separate times, over a 1-week period. Between the two LEIs, participants got 12 items translated from Russian into English and 12 items in Russian. They performed a series of English-language exercises on translated items and Russian-...

In this experiment, we ask whether photographs can lead to false memories for elements of a newspaper story. Participants played the role of a newspaper editor, identifying minor typographical errors in three newspaper articles and marking the text where they thought an accompanying photo should be placed when the story was printed. The critical ar...

We tested a fluency-misattribution theory of visual hindsight bias, and examined how perceptual and conceptual fluency contribute to the bias. In Experiment 1a observers identified celebrity faces that began blurred and then clarified (Forward baseline), or indicated when faces that began clear and then blurred were no longer recognisable (Backward...

Although hindsight bias (the "I knew it all along" phenomenon) has been documented in adults, its development has not been investigated. This is despite the fact that hindsight bias errors closely resemble the errors children make on theory of mind (ToM) tasks. Two main goals of the present work were to (a) create a battery of hindsight tasks for p...

We propose that hindsight bias in adults and some limitations in children's "theory of mind" (ToM), or mental-state reasoning, share a core cognitive constraint: a tendency to be biased by one's current knowledge when at- tempting to recall, or reason about, a more naive cognitive state—regardless of whether that more naive state is one's own earli...

Unscrambling an anagram prior to making a recognition judgement about that target word or an unrelated word increases one's claims of having seen the target word before (the revelation effect). We examined whether a revelation effect would occur with brand name recognition and preference. When participants had to solve an anagram prior to seeing a...

When given suggestive information, some people can be led to believe that they had experiences that they did not actually have. For example, they may come to believe falsely that they got sick eating particular foods as children, and as a result of that belief they may avoid the foods. But how do we know that someone has developed a false belief or...

We suggested to 228 subjects in two experiments that, as children, they had had negative experiences with a fattening food. An additional 107 subjects received no such suggestion and served as controls. In Experiment 1, a minority of subjects came to believe that they had felt ill after eating strawberry ice cream as children, and these subjects we...

The current work explores how people make recognition and belief judgments in the presence of obvious repetition primes. In two experiments, subjects received a 200-ms prime ("cheetah"), either before or after reading a trivia question ("What is the fastest animal?") but always before being presented with the target answer ("cheetah"). Results show...

We introduce computer-based methodologies for investigating object identification in 3- to 5-year-old children. In two experiments, preschool children and adults indicated when they could identify degraded pictures of common objects as those pictures either gradually improved or degraded in clarity. Clarity transformations were implemented in four...

In two experiments, we suggested to 336 participants that as children they had become ill after eating either hard-boiled eggs or dill pickles. Eighty-three additional control participants in Experiment 1 received no suggestion. In both experiments, participants' confidence increased in line with the suggestion. In the second experiment, we used a...