Giuliana Mazzoni

• PhD
• Chair at University of Hull

Semantic knowledge plays an active role in many well-known false memory phenomena, including those emerging from the Deese–Roediger–McDermott (DRM) task. Indeed, in this experimental paradigm, humans tend to falsely recognize newly presented words via activation of other previously shown stimuli. In the present study we aimed to test what happens i...

Semantic knowledge plays an active role in many well-known false memory phenomena, including those emerging from the Deese–Roediger–McDermott (DRM) task. In this experimental paradigm, indeed, humans tend to falsely recognize newly presented words via activation of other previously shown stimuli. In the present study we aimed to test what happens i...

Individuals who possess a Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory (HSAM) can remember their own lives in exceptional detail, retrieving specific autobiographical events in response to dates (e.g., 15th April 1995). The phenomenon remains extremely rare, and little is known about why these individuals can remember substantially more than the general...

Robust evidence on deception detection highlights that humans perform at chance level, especially when a truth-default cognitive threshold is crossed by the deceiver. This systematic review examined whether identification of deceptive stimuli elicits specific physiological responses in the detectors of deception. Following Preferred Reporting Items...

Semantic knowledge plays an active role in many well-known false memory phenomena, including those emerging from the Deese–Roediger–McDermott (DRM) task. In this experimental paradigm, indeed, humans tend to falsely recognize newly presented words via activation of other previously shown stimuli. In the present study we aimed to test what happens i...

Semantic knowledge plays an active role in many well-known false memory phenomena, including those emerging from the Deese–Roediger–McDermott (DRM) task. In this experimental paradigm, indeed, humans tend to falsely recognize newly presented words via activation of other previously shown stimuli. In the present study we aimed to test what happens i...

Touch plays a crucial role in providing humans with information from the external environment and can be perceived by humans as positively or negatively valenced. It is well documented that touch can differentially influence social functions, but very little is known about how touch can modulate (meta)cognition. Utilizing a within‐subject design, p...

We present the first study to measure the beliefs held by Italian laypeople about how human memory works, using a newly developed tool: the Italian Memory Belief Questionnaire (IMBQ). Research conducted in other countries has demonstrated that beliefs about memory vary widely between different professional and non-professional groups, indicating th...

In a cognitive-behavioural theoretical framework, automatic negative thoughts are considered among the main determinants of depression and other disorders. Negative thinking is usually assessed through self-report scales, although several studies demonstrated their proneness to well-known confounds like introspective limits and social desirability....

Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory (HSAM) is a rare form of exceptional memory, characterised by an ability to recall personal episodes in response to dates. The single case “DT” is one of less than 100 HSAM individuals globally, and little is known about how these individuals organise the vast number of events they can recollect. We administe...

The formation of false memories is one of the most widely studied topics in cognitive psychology. The Deese–Roediger–McDermott (DRM) paradigm is a powerful tool for investigating false memories and revealing the cognitive mechanisms subserving their formation. In this task, participants first memorize a list of words (encoding phase) and next have...

This article delves into the intricate process of artificial intelligence-generated content detection, shedding light on automated detectors’ challenges and revealing human detection biases, strengths, and weaknesses.

Mental health conditions, recognised as a global crisis, were further exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Access to mental health services remains limited, particularly in low-income regions. Task-sharing interventions, exemplified by Problem Management Plus (PM+), have emerged as potential solutions to bridge this treatment gap. This study prese...

Smartphones are a fundamental part of modern life and have resulted in a vast increase in photo-taking. How smartphone use can affect cognitive processes, including memory, is poorly understood, but research shows taking photographs can result in a photo-taking-impairment effect. Across 3 laboratory experiments, we aimed to replicate the impairment...

Individuals possessing a Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory (HSAM) demonstrate an exceptional ability to recall their own past, excelling most when dates from their lifetime are used as retrieval cues. Fully understanding how neurocognitive mechanisms support exceptional memory could lead to benefits in areas of healthcare in which memory play...

There is a fervent debate about the processes underpinning false memories formation. Seminal theories have suggested that semantic memory would be involved in false memories production, while episodic memory would counter their formation. Yet, direct evidence corroborating such view is still lacking. Here, we tested this possibility by asking parti...

In three experiments, we investigated explicit and implicit knowledge about the location of letters on the QWERTY keyboard in young students, and the mechanisms involved. Participants completed a verbal report task in which they were asked to locate the 21 letters of the Italian alphabet on a blank QWERTY keyboard (explicit memory). Subsequently, t...

The formation of false memories is one of the most widely studied topics in cognitive psychology. The Deese–Roediger–McDermott (DRM) paradigm is a powerful tool for investigating false memories and revealing the cognitive mechanisms subserving their formation. In this task, participants first memorize a list of words (encoding phase) and next have...

Transliminality may be considered as the tendency for an individual to experience a blurring of boundaries between unconscious and conscious states. The purpose of this study was to assess the relationship between transliminality, suggestibility (hypnotic and imaginative) and a range of other personality traits. Despite several hypotheses being pro...

È possibile recuperare una memoria perduta? Questo intervento intende riaffermare alcuni elementi metodologici perché la pratica psicologica sia scientificamente qualificata. Si discutono importanti questioni circa l’impatto di Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing sulla memoria autobiografica umana, esaminando vantaggi e svantaggi della te...

Although long-term memory and Theory of Mind (ToM) are closely related across the whole lifespan, little is known about the relationship between ToM and semantic memory. Clinical studies have documented the co-occurrence of ToM impairments and semantic memory abnormalities in individuals with autism or semantic dementia. However, to date no study h...

Tests derived from the implicit social cognition framework allow practitioners to control faking outcomes in clinical and forensic assessments. The questionnaire-based Implicit Association Test (qIAT) is a new assessment technique, based on reaction times in a categorization task of items taken from self-report measures.The aim of this study is (1)...

Although mouse-tracking has been seen as a real-time window into different aspects of human decision-making processes, currently little is known about how the decision process unfolds in veridical and false memory retrieval. Here, we directly investigated decision-making processes by predicting participants' performance in a mouse-tracking version...

Autobiographical memories are thought to be retrieved using two possible ways: a generative one, which is effortful and follows a general-to-specific pathway, and a direct one, which is automatic and relatively effortless. These two retrieve processes are known to differ on the quantitative side (especially considering retrieval times), from a qual...

In the last decades many studies demonstrated that self-report measures are massively prone to malingering, especially in specific sensitive assessment contexts where socially desirable responding assumes a particularly relevant role (e.g., clinical assessment for the assignment of a disability pension). In this regard, within the tradition of impl...

È possibile recuperare una memoria andata perduta? Questo intervento si propone di commentare alcune importanti questioni rispetto all’impatto dell’Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing sulla memoria autobiografica. La tecnica EMDR si sta rapidamente diffondendo non solo come metodo di intervento di elezione per numerose forme di patologia,...

In February and March 2020, the Italian government decided to provide guidelines in order to counter the spreading of Coronavirus disease (COVID-19). Several studies have shown that the first Lockdown deeply affected the psychological well-being of the individuals, but the role of possible protective variables is currently not known. In the present...

The main assumption underlying the present investigation is that action observation elicits a mandatory mental simulation representing the action forward in time. In Experiment 1 participants observed pairs of photos portraying the initial and the final still frames of an action video; then they observed a photo depicting the very same action but e...

background After a year from the emergence of COVID-19 in February 2020, between March and May 2021 Italy faced its third wave of infections. Previous studies have shown that in the first phases of the pandemic certain factors had a protec- tive effect against distress. However, little is known regard- ing the role of possible protective variables...

It is assumed that the difference between voluntary and involuntary autobiographical memories lies in the intentionality to retrieve a memory assigned by the experimenter. Memories that are retrieved when people are instructed to do so in response to cues are considered voluntary (VAMs), those that pop up spontaneously are considered involuntary (I...

Which episodes from our lives will be remembered and which will be forgotten, and why? This question has still not been answered satisfactorily by research into autobiographical memory. Previous work has shown that retrieval-induced forgetting (RIF) might be a factor responsible for forgetting parts of the autobiographical memory content. However,...

© 2021, American Psychological Association. This paper is not the copy of record and may not exactly replicate the final, authoritative version of the article. Please do not copy or cite without authors' permission. The final article will be available, upon publication, on the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General via its DOI: 10.1037/xge0001...

Objectives While voluntary memories are intended and expected, involuntary memories are retrieved with no intention and are usually unexpected (when one is not waiting for a memory). The present study investigates the effects of retrieval intentionality ( wanting to retrieve a memory) and monitoring processes ( expecting a memory to appear) on the...

After a year from the emergence of the Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) on February 2020, between March and May 2021 Italy faced its third wave of infections. Previous studies have shown that in the first phases of the pandemic certain factors had a protective role against distress. However, as the months in the pandemic went by, people’s feelings an...

During February and March 2020, the Italian government decided to provide guidelines in order to counter the spreading of Coronavirus disease (COVID-19). Several studies have shown that the first Lockdown deeply affected the psychological well-being of the individuals, but the role of possible protective variables is currently not known. In the pre...

Despite mouse-tracking has been taken as a real-time window into different aspects of human decision-making processes, currently little is known about how the decision process unfolds in veridical and false memory retrieval. Here, we directly investigated these processes by predicting participants' performance in a mouse-tracking version of a typic...

There is a fervent debate about the processes underpinning false memories formation. Seminal theories have suggested that semantic memory would be involved in false memories production, while episodic memory would counter their formation. Yet, direct evidence corroborating such view is still missing. Here, we tested this possibility by asking parti...

Theories of autobiographical memory distinguish between involuntary and voluntary memories. While involuntary memories are retrieved with no conscious intention and are therefore unexpected, voluntary memories are both intended and expected. Recent research has shown that participants sometimes classify their memories as either involuntary or volun...

Action observation triggers by default a mental simulation of action unfolding in time. We assumed that this simulation is "embodied": the body is the medium through which observer's sensorimotor modalities simulate the observed action. The participants in two experiments observed videos, each depicting the central part of an action performed by an...

Available here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010945220304354 Traditionally, the cerebellum has been linked to motor functions, but recent evidence suggest that it is also involved in a wide range of cognitive processes. Given the uniformity of cerebellar cortex microstructure, it has been proposed that the same computational...

Background: The neural mechanisms of Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory are poorly understood. To shed light on the fMRI-informed neurobiology of this condition, in this study we characterise for the first time the neurofunctional architecture of a 20-year old individual (BB) with Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory and no concurrent neur...

Individuals misrecognise as seen the never-presented natural continuation of an action. These false memories derive from the running of kinematic mental models of the actions seen, which rest on motor inferences from implicit knowledge. We verified an implied prediction: kinematic false memories should be detectable even in children. The participan...

In the present study, the persistence of personal false memories (FM) after social feedback that denies their truth was assessed with a procedure similar to Nash, Wade and Lindsay (2009b). Participants imitated actions performed by the experimenter (Session 1) and watched a doctored video with performed and critical “fake” actions (Session 2), foll...

During the past 20 years involuntary memories have been established as a noteworthy phenomenon, which occur spontaneously in everyday life and with greater frequency than expected. Other types of ideations also occur involuntarily and very frequently, both in the normal population and in clinical groups. The aim of this paper was to assess for the...

Belief in occurrence is theorized to play a central role in remembering autobiographical events. Ernst and D'Argembeau (2017) proposed that belief in occurrence also plays a key role in determining the "realness" of future events, or the subjective sense that imagined future events will genuinely occur. They reported data indicating that belief in...

While involuntary memories are retrieved with no intention and are usually unexpected (when one is not waiting for a memory to arise), voluntary memories are intended and expected (when one is searching and waiting for a memory to arise). The present study aimed to investigate the effects of retrieval intentionality (i.e. wanting to retrieve a memo...

This is the first study to examine functional brain activation in a single case of Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory (HSAM) who shows no sign of OCD. While previous work has documented the existence of HSAM, information about brain areas involved in this exceptional form of memory for personal events relies on structural and resting state con...

A vast literature on false memories reveals that they can result from several mental processes. We assume that false memories can result also from a kinematic mental simulation that individuals build in the attempt to understand what is going on when they observe a state of affairs. The participants in our study were invited to observe for 10 secon...

When receiving disconfirmatory social feedback about recollected events, people sometimes defend and sometimes reduce the belief that the event genuinely occurred. To improve estimates of the rates of memory defense and reduction, and the magnitude of the change in belief in occurrence that results, the current studies examined the effect of discon...

Our investigation focuses on memory for scenes depicted in photos. According to the mental model theory, the observation of a static scene depicted in a photo which portrays an actor near to perform an action can trigger a kinematic mental simulation of that action unfolding in time. The deriving prediction is that such a kinematic mental model sup...

This is an attempt to articulate and explore the relationship between the science of memory and the applied theatre project, The Not Knowns. The project was a collaboration between theatre practitioners and a psychologist who worked together with a group of young people known, problematically, as the ‘not knowns’ throughout 2014. For applied theatr...

Henry Otgaar, Alan Scoboria & Giuliana Mazzoni; Introduction to Special Issue: Theoretical and legal issues regarding autobiographical belief and recollection. Memory, 25 (7), 865-868 Special Issue Contents: Hartmut Blank (2017). Recollection, belief and metacognition: a reality check. Memory, 25, 869-875 Alan Scoboria, Robert A. Nash & Giuliana...

Nonbelieved memories (NBMs) highlight the independence between distinct metamemorial judgements that contribute to the experience of remembering. Initial definitions of NBMs portrayed them as involving the withdrawal of belief in occurrence despite sustained recollection. While people rate belief for their NBMs as weaker than recollection, the aver...

This article summarizes key advances in hypnosis research during the past two decades, including (i) clinical research supporting the efficacy of hypnosis for managing a number of clinical symptoms and conditions, (ii) research supporting the role of various divisions in the anterior cingulate and prefrontal cortices in hypnotic responding, and (ii...

Perspective: This article presents an experiment suggesting that a placebo treatment applied to a rubber hand during the rubber hand illusion can produce placebo analgesia. This finding indicates that embodiment may influence the placebo effect, a previously unexamined factor in the treatment process with potential applications to treatment admini...

While some studies have shown that providing a cue to selectively forget one subset of previously learned facts may cause specific forgetting of this information, little is known about the mechanisms underlying this memory phenomenon. In three experiments, we aimed to better understand the nature of the selective directed forgetting (SDF) effect. P...

Brewin and Andrews (2016) make many cogent observations on the state of knowledge about the development of false autobiographical beliefs and false recollections. Owing to inconsistent use of terminology and imprecise definitions, the framework they propose does not clearly map onto the studies that are summarized, making the resulting estimates of...

The aim of this paper is to investigate the relationship between self-efficacy and false memories using the Deese/Roediger–McDermott (DRM) paradigm, whereby people falsely remember words not presented in lists. In two studies participants were presented with DRM lists and asked to recall and recognize presented items. In the first study, we found a...

Eyewitnesses have always played a fundamental role in the legal process. However, eyewitness evidence is not always as reliable or as accurate as one might hope, given the weight that decision makers often ascribe to it. In this article, we review some of the many factors that can determine the reliability of witness testimony, including factors th...

In the present study we examined whether higher levels of object imagery, a stable characteristic that reflects the ability and preference in generating pictorial mental images of objects, facilitate involuntary and voluntary retrieval of autobiographical memories (ABMs). Individuals with high (High-OI) and low (Low-OI) levels of object imagery wer...

Hypnosis has long generated controversy as a recall-enhancement method. Concerns about hypnosis are warranted by findings of a tradeoff between the number of memories recalled and memory accuracy. Moreover, witnesses often express confidence in hypnotically augmented remembrances, regardless of their accuracy, increasing the risk of juror bias stem...

Recent research findings have illustrated that false memories induced in the laboratory can be dissociated from the beliefs that the events had in fact occurred. In this study we assessed whether this dissociability is a quality peculiar to false memory, or whether it represents a general characteristic of autobiographical memory. To this end we ex...

This study explores whether self-reported depth of hypnosis and hypnotic suggestibility are associated with individual differences in neuroanatomy and/or levels of functional connectivity. Twenty-nine people varying in suggestibility were recruited and underwent structural, and after a hypnotic induction, functional magnetic resonance imaging at re...

Recent research on involuntary autobiographical memories (IAMs) has shown that these memories can be elicited and studied in the laboratory under controlled conditions. Employing a modified version of a vigilance task developed by Schlagman and Kvavilashvili (Mem Cogn 36:920-932, 2008) to elicit IAMs, we investigated the effects of varying the freq...

In this paper, we review the state of knowledge about a previously assumed to be rare memory phenomenon called nonbelieved memories. Nonbelieved memories refer to a counterintuitive phenomenon in which vivid autobiographical memories are no longer believed to have happened although vivid recollective features remain present. Such memories stand in...

One of the most persistent beliefs about hypnosis is its ability to transcend mnemonic abilities. This belief has paved the way to the use of hypnosis in the clinical and legal arenas. The authors review the phenomena of hypnotic hypermnesia, pseudo-memories, and amnesia in light of current knowledge of hypnosis and memory. The investigation of the...

In two experiments, pictorial cues were compared with their verbal labels to assess their effectiveness in eliciting involuntary autobiographical memories. Cues were relatively complex in Experiment 1 (e.g., relaxing on a beach) and simple objects in Experiment 2 (e.g., a ball). In both experiments, participants went through a vigilance task in whi...

When people try not to think about a certain item, they can accomplish this goal by using a thought substitution strategy and think about something else. Research conducted with the think/no-think (TNT) paradigm indicates that such strategy leads subsequently to forgetting the information participants tried not to think about. The present study pur...

Recent studies have shown that involuntary autobiographical memories (IAMs) can be elicited in the laboratory. Here we assessed whether the specific instructions given to participants can change the nature of the IAMs reported, in terms of both their frequency and their characteristics. People were either made or not made aware that the aim of the...

Previous studies have shown that many people hold personal memories for events that they no longer believe occurred. This study examines the reasons that people provide for choosing to reduce autobiographical belief in vividly recollected autobiographical memories. A body of nonbelieved memories provided by 374 individuals was reviewed to develop a...

Aging is thought to involve a decline in executive-control capacities although evidence regarding this claim is not always clear. Thus, while studies exist that suggest impoverished inhibitory memory control in older adults relative to younger adults, experiments with the list-method direct forgetting procedure have mostly failed to show adult-age...

The effects of posthypnotic suggestion on health-related behavior, using a behavioral measure of adherence, were investigated. Three hundred twenty-three students covering the full range of hypnotic suggestibility were prescribed an easy (mood rating) or a difficult (physical activity) task. Participants were randomly assigned to receive either a)...

Metacognitive monitoring and control are two interdependent mechanisms by which people regulate encoding and retrieval processes in memory. While much is known about monitoring, and how the results of monitoring processes affect control at encoding, much less evidence is available for the monitoring–control relationship with respect to the regulati...

This paper examines the idea that believing that events occurred in the past is a non-memorial decision which reflects underlying processes that are distinct from recollecting events. Research on autobiographical memory has often focused on events that are both believed to have occurred and remembered, thus tending to overlook the distinction betwe...

The purpose of the current study was to determine whether the level of metacognitive sensitivity previously observed in global Judgments-of-Learning (JOLs) in temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) patients could also be established when making item-by-item JOLs. Fourteen TLE patients and 14 control participants were compared on a memory task where 39 semant...

The role of the plausibility of suggested events in the formation of false autobiographical beliefs and memories has long been debated. In two studies, the shape of the relationship between presuggestion personal plausibility and the development of postsuggestion false beliefs was examined. Participants rated personal plausibility and autobiographi...

Retrieval-induced forgetting (RIF) is the finding of impaired memory performance for information stored in long-term memory due to retrieval of a related set of information. This phenomenon is often assigned to operations of a specialized mechanism recruited to resolve interference during retrieval by deactivating competing memory representations....

A controversy in the field of hypnosis has centered on the question of whether there is a uniquely hypnotic state of consciousness and, if so, whether it is causally related to responsiveness to suggestion. Evidence from brain imaging studies has been used to support claims for various altered state hypotheses, without resolving the debate. The des...

Memory is prone to illusions. When people are presented with lists of words associated with a non-presented critical lure, they produce a high level of false recognitions (false memories) for non-presented related stimuli indistinguishable, at the explicit level, from presented words (DRM paradigm). We assessed whether true and false DRM memories c...

A recent study showed that many people spontaneously report vivid memories of events that they do not believe to have occurred [1]. In the present experiment we tested for the first time whether, after powerful false memories have been created, debriefing might leave behind nonbelieved memories for the fake events. In Session 1 participants imitate...

The twenty five memory characteristics rated for each of the six critical actions. Ratings were on 7-point scales. (DOC)

Memory for visual objects, although typically highly accurate, can be distorted, especially in older adults. Here we asked whether also erroneous identifications of visual objects subsequently corrected and replaced by a correct identification might induce false recognitions, and whether this is more likely to occur in older people. For this aim a...

This study investigated the relationship between hostile false memories (violent and verbal/aggressive) and engagement in traditional and cyberbullying, controlling for their co-occurrence. Two hundred eleven adolescents completed measures of traditional and cyberbullying and performed a modified version of the “DRM paradigm”, a false memory task f...

This study investigated the relationship between hostile false memories (violent and verbal/aggressive) and engagement in traditional and cyberbullying, controlling for their co-occurrence. Two hundred eleven adolescents completed measures of traditional and cyberbullying and performed a modified version of the ''DRM paradigm'', a false memory task...

Prémio de Melhor Poster

This functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) study investigated high and low suggestible people responding to two visual hallucination suggestions with and without a hypnotic induction. Participants in the study were asked to see color while looking at a grey image, and to see shades of grey while looking at a color image. High suggestible par...

Recent accounts suggest that prime-to-behavior effects are mediated by changes to the active self-concept. Likewise, recent reports of post-suppression behavioral rebound have attributed changes to behavior to changes in the self-concept. According to such accounts, whenever an activated trait or stereotype can be easily incorporated into the activ...

Memory for visual objects, although typically highly accurate, can be distorted, especially in older adults. Here we asked whether also erroneous identifications of visual objects subsequently corrected and replaced by a correct identification might induce false recognitions, and whether this is more likely to occur in older people. For this aim a...

The present research was designed to investigate the consequences of suppressing social stereotypes on behavior in intrapersonal and interpersonal contexts. In two experiments, the authors manipulated the behavioral context in which postsuppression effects were measured. In intrapersonal contexts, postsuppression behavior was consistent with the su...

A reduction in false alarms to critical lures is observed in the DRM paradigm (Roediger & McDermott, 1995) when distinctive information is presented at encoding. Two mechanisms have been proposed to account for this reduction. According to the monitoring theory (e.g., the distinctiveness heuristic), lack of diagnostic recollection serves as a basis...

Recent studies have shown that lack of control induces illusory pattern perception. In this study, we demonstrate that lacking control also affected identification responses to degraded pictures of visual objects. As compared with control participants, participants in whom lack of control was experimentally induced produced identification responses...

This article reports a consensus that was reached at an Advanced Workshop in Experimen-tal Hypnosis held as part of the joint annual conference of the British Society of Medical and Dental Hypnosis (BSMDH) and the British Society of Experimental and Clinical Hyp-nosis (BSECH). The unanimous consensus was that conventional definitions of hypnosis an...

Whittlesea’s statement suggests that retrieval can depend on expectations, and that a degree of freedom can be added to the retrieval processes. This additional freedom provides room for voluntary pre-retrieval strategies used when responding to an environmental cue. These pre-retrieval strategies are the focus of this contribution.