Ira E. Hyman

Western Washington University | WWU · Department of Psychology

Most people are not constantly watching for crimes and accidents. They are instead focused on other tasks. When people are focused on other tasks, they may fail to see crimes that should be obvious, a phenomenon called crime blindness. This article describes research on crime blindness, other attention failures, and eyewitness memory. When their at...

Inattentional blindness is a failure to become aware of an object or event that should be completely obvious due to focused attention. Inattentional blindness has important ramifications for the legal system. First, inattentional blindness may contribute to accidents. People often engage in divided attention tasks and perform tasks that require tra...

Understanding that suggestive practices can promote false beliefs and false memories for childhood events is important in many settings (e.g., psychotherapeutic, medical, legal). The generalizability of findings from memory implantation studies has been questioned due to variability in estimates across studies. Such variability is partly due to fal...

We investigated consistency of relationship memories. College undergraduates described five events (first meeting, first date, first fight, most embarrassing event, and favourite memory) from their current relationship or, if not currently dating, most recent relationship. Three months later, they were asked to describe the same events again. We sc...

What makes a thought feel intrusive? One possibility is that traumatic experiences are the primary cause of intrusive thoughts and memories. Another possibility is that experiences of intrusiveness arise from the features involved with re-experiencing. We investigated several features that may lead a thought to feel intrusive: task-congruence, repe...

Research on eyewitness identification often involves exposing participants to a simulated crime and later testing memory using a lineup. We conducted a systematic review showing that pre-event instructions, instructions given before event exposure, are rarely reported and those that are reported vary in the extent to which they warn participants ab...

People do not constantly watch for accidents and crimes. With their attention focused elsewhere, potential witnesses may fail to notice a crime and experience inattentional blindness. We investigated the impact of inattentional blindness on eyewitness awareness and memory. Participants watched a video in which a theft occurs. We manipulated the att...

People experience difficulties tracking the source of their memories following collaborative remembering. This results in a variety of source monitoring errors. Researchers have typically focused on one of these errors - instances of adopting information from external sources as one’s own memories. They have failed to investigate the frequency of o...

To appear in Cognition. This is the accepted manuscript prior to copy-editing by the publisher. ---- Abstract: People experience difficulties tracking the source of their memories following collaborative remembering. This results in a variety of source monitoring errors. Researchers have typically focused on one of these errors - instances of adopt...

Research on eyewitness identification often involves exposing participants to a simulated crime and later testing memory using a lineup. We conducted a systematic review showing that pre-event instructions, instructions given before event exposure, are rarely reported and those that are reported vary in the extent to which they warn participants ab...

Involuntary cognitions—thoughts that arise spontaneously without conscious effort—are an everyday phenomenon. These cognitions include future thoughts, autobiographical memories, and, perhaps most commonly, earworms. Earworms—the experience of having a song stuck in your head—provide a window into the mind. We used earworms of instrumental music to...

Brewin and Andrews (in press) reviewed the literature on false memories of autobiographical events, discussed those findings in the context of theoretical accounts of autobiographical memory, and concluded that no more than 15% of people exposed to suggestive influences come to develop robust false memories of significant childhood events. We note...

People frequently experience episodes of involuntary musical imagery. Our goal is to use involuntary musical imagery to understand the reasons songs return to awareness, investigate individual differences in involuntary thoughts, and explore the features that lead some songs to feel intrusive when they invade one’s awareness. We conducted two studi...

Following collaborative remembering, people may adopt their partner's contributions as their own memory. In two studies, we asked people to study partially overlapping lists of words. During collaborative remembering, dyads either worked to include all words no matter who studied them or limited recall to only words studied by both dyad members. Th...

How is it possible to drive home and have no awareness of the trip? We documented a new form of inattentional blindness in which people fail to become aware of obstacles that had guided their behavior. In our first study, we found that people talking on cell phones while walking waited longer to avoid an obstacle and were less likely to be aware th...

The majority of research on cell phone use has focused on adolescent and young adult users with less attention on cell phone use by those older than 25 years of age. In this study, adult participants from 18-68 years completed a survey about their own use of cell phones and the contexts in which they considered cell phone use appropriate. There wer...

Having a song stuck in your head is a commonly experienced intrusive thought. We explored the intrusive song phenomenon through a survey, an experimental diary study, and three laboratory experiments. Contrary to the belief that only obnoxious songs get stuck, we found that songs people know and like frequently became intrusive. We also found that...

Collaborative inhibition is the finding that collaborative groups recall less information than nominal groups (the combined output of an equal number of individuals). The retrieval strategy disruption explanation of collaborative inhibition argues that individuals' idiosyncratic retrieval strategies are disrupted by hearing the contributions of oth...

In a series of experiments, we investigated the effect of pun humor on memory. In all experiments, the participants were exposed to knock-knock jokes in either the original form retaining the pun or in a modified form that removed the pun. In Experiment 1, the authors found that pun humor improved both recall and recognition memory following incide...

We investigated the effects of divided attention during walking. Individuals were classified based on whether they were walking while talking on a cell phone, listening to an MP3 player, walking without any electronics, or walking in a pair. In the first study, we found that cell phone users walked more slowly, changed directions more frequently, a...

Characteristics of children's memory for a trauma and for a positive event were compared and relationships of memory characteristics to trauma symptoms examined in 30 children who experienced a traumatic event. Results revealed that memories for trauma tended to have less sensory detail and coherence, yet have more meaning and impact than did memor...

Workers need an efficient prenatal screener that can identify mothers at greatest risk of child abuse. Existing risk assessment methods are often invasive and difficult to administer. This study assessed child abuse risk in a sample of 49 expectant mothers using the Brigid Collins Risk Screener (BCRS). At three months postpartum, high-risk mothers...

Focuses an extreme form of memory suggestibility—being subject to false memory creation. The authors describe fundamental mechanisms necessarily involved in false memory reports and provide examples of empirical research that illustrate the mechanisms in operation. The research on false childhood memories has extended the work on eyewitness memory...

In the present study, we examined the similarities and differences between memory ratings for traumatic, negative, and positive life experiences. A sample of 113 female undergraduates completed a packet of questionnaires that included memory rating scales for all three types of experiences and measures of psychological functioning. Analyses reveale...

People will create false memories of childhood experiences. In this article, the research that demonstrates the creation of false memories is first described. Three processes that may be involved in memory creation are then outlined. First, individuals must accept a suggested event as plausible. Second, they construct an image and narrative of the...

Why have some researchers found reports of flashbulb memories to be stable, while others have observed inconsistencies? Paradoxically, it appears that relatively long delays between event and initial documentation have produced greater consistency of participants' reports. To investigate this directly, we collected the initial documentation of hear...

Memory for fear onset events was examined in 43 dog-fearful and 48 blood/injection-fearful participants. Half of each fear type was administered the Phobia Origins Questionnaire (POQ), and half the Phobia Origins Structured Interview (POSI). Written accounts of recalled onset experiences were sent to participants' parents for verification. More par...

"In Sacai,... the... earthquake was so terrible unto them, that many were bereft of their senses: and others by that horrible spectacle so much amazed that they knew not what they did. " Blasius, a Christian the reporter of the news, was so affrighted for his part, that though it were two months after, he was scarce his own man, neither could he dr...

Memory is always constructive. People create the past based on the information that remains in memory, their general knowledge, and the social demands of the retrieval situation. Thus, memories will often contain some small errors and occasionally some large errors. In this article, we describe several different types of memory errors and consider...

SUMMARY In two experiments we investigated individual diÄerences related to memory errors. In Experi- ment 1, we conducted an exploratory study of several factors possibly related to the tendency to change source monitoring decisions for an autobiographical memory. We found that only the Dissociative Experiences Scale (DES) was related to this auto...

In two experiments we investigated individual differences related to memory errors. In Experiment 1, we conducted an exploratory study of several factors possibly related to the tendency to change source monitoring decisions for an autobiographical memory. We found that only the Dissociative Experiences Scale (DES) was related to this autobiographi...

We investigated memory qualities that a€ect judgements of whether a recollection is a personal memory or self-knowledge. In Experiment 1, college students described three types of child-hood experiences: remembered, known but not remembered, and unsure whether remembered or known. After describing the experiences, they rated their memories on sever...

Persons with Alzheimer's disease (AD) experience progressive memory and language losses. To assess how these losses influenced the ability to share a per- sonal narrative, we listened to the narratives of six persons with AD and six persons without cognitive losses. Narratives of persons with AD were less chronologically organized, included repetit...

We investigated if college students will create false childhood memories, the role of self-knowledge in memory creation, and if there are reliable individual differences related to memory creation. Based on information obtained from parents, we asked college students about several true childhood experiences. We also asked each student about one fal...

The authenticity of memories of childhood sexual abuse has become one of the major social controversies of the 1990’s. As persons who report histories of abuse have sought remedies in civil and criminal proceedings in the courts, the accuracy of their memories--particularly when they have been recalled after a period of time--has been subject to in...

This chapter discusses cognitive and neurocognitive research issues on memory and trauma. A conceptual approach, identifying central clinical constructs and how they might relate to existing cognitive and neurocognitive ideas, is taken. The relationship between cognitive psychological theory and 4 constructs that have been central in clinical discu...

We investigated whether guided imagery instructions would increase the likelihood of false memory creation and of remembering previously unremembered true events. In three interviews, participants repeatedly were asked to remember several true events (based on parent reports) and one false event (created by the experimenters). In a guided imagery c...

We conducted two experiments to investigate if college students would create false memories of childhood experiences in response to misleading information and repeated interviews. In both experiments we contacted parents to obtain information about events that happened to the students during childhood. In a series of interviews we asked the student...

This research investigated the role social context plays in determining the content and organization of remembered information. As a manipulation of social context, subjects talked about a short story either with another subject (dyads) or for an experimenter (experimenter-tested). In addition, the instructions were manipulated: Subjects were asked...

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The reconstructive view of image construction suggests some constraints on discovery using mental images—namely, discovering something about the gist or consistent details should be fairly straightforward, discovering something about less important details or something that contradicts the gist should be more difficult. This reconstructive view of...

Although many theorists have postulated a variety of functions of autobiographical memory — including directive, self definitional, and social — there has been little investigation of how people actually use their autobiographical memories on a daily basis. Using two different methods of soliciting autobiographical memories with different subject p...

It has often been suggested that memory for life experiences is primarily orga-nized around the self. To test this hypothesis, students who had participated in a semester-long seminar were asked to recall various events (e.g., discussions in which they had participated, reports that they or others had presented, class demonstrations, interruptions,...

In two experiments, we found that people could discover new interpretations of ambiguous figures using mental imagery. Mental imagery is open for inspection, somewhat similarly to viewing a picture or object. Maintaining the image requires extra capacity and may limit the ability of people to discover new interpretations from imagery.

Seventy-six undergraduates were given the titles and first lines of Beatles' songs and asked to recall the songs. Seven hundred and four different undergraduates were cued with one line from each of 25 Beatles' songs and asked to recall the title. The probability of recalling a line was best predicted by the number of times a line was repeated in t...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Emory University, 1990. Includes bibliographical references (p. 90-96). Photocopy.

Thesis (M.A.)--Emory University, 1989. Director of this thesis, Dr. Ulric Neisser, Dept. of Psychology. Includes bibliographical references.