Pedro B. Albuquerque

• PhD, Experimental Psychology
• Professor (Associate) at University of Minho

Background/Objectives: Cancer diagnosis and oncological treatments often lead to cognitive impairments, particularly in prospective memory, which affects the ability to recall future intentions. These difficulties can significantly impact therapeutic adherence, especially in the early stages of treatment, where timely medication and appointment adh...

Positive and negative life events play a decisive role in the development, maintenance, and recovery of eating disorders (Schmidt et al., 1997). For this reason, they can be considered risk and protective factors for eating disorders. However, little is known about how these life events relate to the experience of specific emotions or feelings and...

Prospective memory (PM) refers to the ability to remember to execute an intention in the future without having a permanent reminder. These intentions can be performed when they are not relevant or become no-longer needed, the so-called “commission errors”. The present study aims to understand the effect of cue salience on PM commission errors with...

The Self-Administered Interview (SAI©) elicits comprehensive initial statements from witnesses and can enhance subsequent statements. However, the SAI© requires a written response that may have disadvantages compared to a spoken account. This study tested the effect of SAI©’s response modality and its subsequent impact on a delayed retrieval attemp...

Although effective in reducing virus transmission, face masks might compromise face recognition and trait judgments. With this study, we aimed to observe the influence of masks on face recognition and trait judgments—more specifically, in trustworthiness, dominance, and distinctiveness judgments. Also, we wanted to observe the possible influence of...

Breast cancer is one of the most diagnosed cancers among women. Its effects on the cognitive and wellbeing domains have been widely reported in the literature, although with inconsistent results. The central goal of this review was to identify, in women with breast cancer, the main memory impairments, as measured by objective and subjective tools a...

To remember to whom we transmit a piece of information, we rely on destination memory, with worse performance occurring when participants share personal facts (e.g., my age is ...) compared to interesting ones (e.g., a shrimp's heart is in its head). When reporting personal information, the internal attentional focus decreases the attentional resou...

False memories have been extensively investigated over the past few decades using the Deese/Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm. In this paradigm, participants study lists of words associatively related to a non-presented critical lure. During a memory test, these critical lures are falsely recalled or recognized. Most studies have focused on false m...

Child sexual abuse (CSA) is widely recognized as a global public health problem with negative consequences for victims, their families, and society. The child's testimony is essential to the case outcome, given the frequent absence of physical or biological evidence of the abusive acts. Thus, the child forensic interview plays a decisive role in cr...

Destination memory can be defined as the capacity to remember to whom we transmit information. It is measured through the accuracy of retrieving the association between the information we transmit and the person to whom we transmit it. A destination memory procedure aims to emulate human interaction by sharing facts with celebrities (i.e., familiar...

It is well established that the recall of collaborative groups is lower than the pooled recall of an equal number of lone individuals—the collaborative inhibition effect (Weldon and Bellinger, J Exp Psychol Learn Memory Cogn 23(5):1160–1175, 1997). This is arguably the case because group members have conflicting retrieval strategies that disrupt ea...

We examined the effect of memory instructions on false memory using the Deese/Roediger–McDermott paradigm in second-language learners. Participants studied lists of words in L1 and L2 (e.g., note, sound, piano…) associatively related to a non-presented critical lure (e.g., MUSIC). In a later recognition test, critical lures appeared in the same or...

Considering the global pandemic we currently experience, face masks have become standard in our daily routine. Even though surgical masks are established as a safety measure against the dissemination of COVID-19, previous research showed that their wearing compromises face recognition. Consequently, the capacity to remember to whom we transmit info...

Previous studies have shown that emotions evoked through music can have transient effects on cognitive performance. Considering the importance of working memory (WM) in the processing of new information, in this study, we investigated the impact of positive and negative emotions evoked through music on visuospatial WM performance using a within-sub...

Considering the current state of the worldwide pandemic, it is still common to encounter people wearing face protection masks. Although a safety measure against COVID-19, face masks might be compromising our capacity for face recognition. We conducted an online study where 140 participants observed masked and unmasked faces in a within-subjects des...

The study of action observation and imagery, separately and combined, is expanding in diverse research areas (e.g., sports psychology, neurosciences), making clear the need for action-related stimuli (i.e., action statements, videos, and pictures). Although several databases of object and action pictures are available, norms on action videos are sc...

To remember to whom we transmit a piece of information, we rely on destination memory, with worse performance occurring when participants transmit personal facts (e.g., my age is ...) compared to interesting ones (e.g., a shrimp's heart is in its head). It seems that when reporting personal information, the internal attentional focus decreases the...

Beliefs about how memory works explain several effects on prospective metamemory judgments (e.g., the effect of font size on judgments of learning; JOLs). Less is known about the effect of beliefs on retrospective judgments (i.e., confidence). Here, we tested whether font size also affects confidence ratings and whether beliefs play a similar role...

False memories in the Deese/Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm are explained in terms of the interplay between error-inflating and error-editing (e.g., monitoring) mechanisms. In this study, we focused on disqualifying monitoring, a decision process that helps to reject false memories through the recollection of collateral information (i.e., recall-...

Recent prospective memory (PM) studies have shown that an intention may be erroneously executed despite no-longer-needed (i.e., commission errors), especially under demanding ongoing activities. In the current study, we examined whether PM deactivation benefits from a retroactive interference mechanism. For this, we set up a procedure in which part...

Destination memory involves remembering to whom we told information. Low accuracy of this memory is linked to higher self‐focus and lower attentional resources allocated to the recipient of the information. The present paper aimed to investigate whether the existence of distinctive features (e.g., tattoos) of destination face would improve destinat...

Abstract: Judgments of learning (JOLs) are higher for high-frequency (common) than low-frequency (rare) words. However, this outcome could result from low-frequency words being so rare that participants consider them nonwords, which usually receive lower JOLs than words. To test this assumption, participants studied four types of words: high-freque...

The emergence and transmission of false memories often occur in the course of social interaction. However, the cognitive mechanisms underlying the production of false memories in collaborative memory tasks remain rather unexplored. The present work used the misinformation paradigm to examine how misinformation is transmitted and incorporated in col...

The capacity to remember to whom we transmit information - Destination Memory - is worse when participants shared personal facts compared to sharing non personal information (Gopie MacLeod, 2009 Johnson Jefferson, 2018). In two experiments where we apply the standard paradigm used to study destination memory, our goal was to replicate these results...

Research on familiar faces has been conducted in different countries and resort to celebrities faces, stimuli that are highly constrained by geographic context and cultural peculiarities, since many celebrities are only famous in particular countries. Despite their relevance to psychological research, there are no normative studies of celebrities’...

What happens when we unexpectedly see an attractive potential partner? Previous studies in laboratory settings suggest that the visualization of attractive and unattractive photographs influences the perception of time. The major aim of this research is to study time perception and attraction in a realistic social scenario, by investigating if chan...

Judgments of learning (JOLs) are usually higher for high-frequency words than for low-frequency words, which has been attributed to beliefs about how word frequency affects memory. The main goal of the present study was to explore if identifying word frequency as a relevant cue is necessary for it to affect JOLs. The idea is that for one to base ju...

Judgments of learning (JOLs) are higher for high-frequency (common) than low-frequency (rare) words. However, this result could be due to low-frequency words being so rare that participants could consider them nonwords. As nonwords are rated with lower JOLs than words, low-frequency words being considered nonwords could explain the lower JOL for lo...

The definition of episodic memory has evolved into a multifaceted concept that gathered great attention in several research areas in psychology and neuroscience. Prospective memory (PM), or the ability to remember to perform delayed intentions at a later moment in the future, represents one side of this capacity for which that has been a growing in...

Após a discussão com outra testemunha sobre um acontecimento, as pessoas podem incorporar nas suas próprias memórias informações novas e erradas e, consequentemente incluí-las em relatos posteriores ao evento. Este fenómeno apelida-se de conformidade da memória. O presente estudo teve como objetivo perceber de que forma as testemunhas podem ser pro...

Emotion is assumed to change how people process information by modulating attentional focus. Two recent studies (Spachtholz et al., 2014; Xie & Zhang, 2016) reported that self-reported negative emotion boosted the precision with which information was stored in visual working memory. Here we attempted and failed to replicate these findings across se...

The present study tested if word frequency effects on judgments of learning (JOLs) are exclusively due to beliefs or if the direct experience with the items also plays a role. Across four experiments, participants read prompts about the frequency of the words (high/low), which could be congruent/incongruent with the words’ actual frequency. They ma...

This paper is the first systematic review on the role of ongoing task load in prospective remembering, which was conducted according to the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis (PRISMA). Forty articles published between 1995 and 2020 were included. They evaluated prospective memory (PM) performance (i.e., the ability t...

The emergence and transmission of false memories is well documented in individual memory tasks. However, the examination of these processes in the context of social interaction still presents mixed findings. The present study further examines the potential of collaboration in minimizing the acceptance and retrieval of misinformation. In Experiment...

Research on human memory has increased in the last decades. However, some studies have showed that several misconceptions about memory functioning still present in college students and practitioners of (Forensic) Psychology. We surveyed a large sample of undergraduate students from several areas (e.g., Psychology, Law) about their knowledge and bel...

Presentation inserted in the symposium "METAMEMORY: NEW INSIGHTS ON MEMORY MONITORING" Abstract Judgments of learning (JOLs) are usually higher for high-frequency words than for low-frequency words. This result can be explained by experience-based factors (e.g., fluency while encoding items) or by theory-driven factors (e.g., beliefs about how word...

The qualitative regulation of grain size allows witnesses to increase the accuracy of their reports by adding alternatives (e.g., “the robber concealed his face with a mask, with a stocking, or with a balaclava”). However, such answers may include incompatible alternatives which may make police officers and juries distrust witnesses. In four prereg...

Recent studies consistently show that prospective memory (PM) intentions are not always deactivated when no-longer needed and might be erroneously performed upon encountering the once relevant cue – termed PM commission errors. However, empirical evidence on the potential mechanisms that might lead to this kind of memory failure remains mostly unex...

Purpose This study aimed to study autobiographical memories in women with eating disorders regarding emotional verbal expression, according to age. Our hypotheses are threefold: due to the emotional avoidance that occurs in women with eating disorders, in the younger ages, it was hypothesized that younger participants with anorexia and bulimia nerv...

In this review, we investigated the influence of happy/pleasurable and sad/unpleasant emotional stimuli on working memory (WM) performance. Twenty-eight out of 356 articles were reviewed. We observed that emotional stimuli were used as mood inductors or as targets comprising the WM task. Results showed that WM modalities were influenced differently...

The Enhanced Cognitive Interview (CI) is a widely studied method to gather informative and accurate testimonies. Nevertheless, witnesses still commit errors and it can be very valuable to determine which statements are more likely to be accurate or inaccurate. This study examined whether qualitative confidence judgments could be used to evaluate re...

Destination memory refers to the capacity to remember the person to whom we have given specific information (Gopie & MacLeod, 2010). Past research (El-Haj, Antoine, & Nandrino, 2016; El-Haj, Saloppé & Nandrino, 2018) showed higher destination memory in participants with a high-tendency to deceive than in those with a low-tendency to deceive. Also,...

How do we perceive voices coming from different spatial locations, and how is this affected by emotion? The current study probed the interplay between space and emotion during voice perception. Thirty participants listened to nonverbal vocalizations coming from different locations around the head (left vs. right; front vs. back), and differing in v...

Emotional inductions through music (EIM) procedures have proved to evoke genuine emotions according to neuroimaging studies. However, the persistence of the emotional states after being exposed to musical excerpts remains mostly unexplored. This study aimed to investigate the curve of emotional state generated by an EIM paradigm over a 6-min recove...

The supplemental material includes a behavioural pilot study performed to determine the best excerpts to induce positive or negative emotions and neutral state. The participants of the pilot study were 40 undergraduate students without prior musical training and unfamiliar to the songs. Emotional Induction Through Music: Measuring Cardiac and Elec...

Recent research has provided evidence for memory modifications when a post-reactivation treatment (e.g., drugs, new learning) interferes with the memory re-stabilisation (reconsolidation) process. This finding contradicts the long-standing consolidation theory and has high practical and theoretical implications. With an object-learning paradigm, it...

Several studies (e.g., Nevonen& Broberg, 2000; Tozzi, Sullivan, Fear, McKenzie, & Bulik, 2003) have identified sad events as events that lead to the development of eating disorders and happy events as events that lead to recovery in different psychopathologies. However, some positive events can also be considered risk factors (Pike, Wilfley, Hilber...

The Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm is often used in the study of false memories. This paradigm typically uses lists of words associated with one critical lure. The primary objective of our study was to understand the production of false memories using the DRM paradigm when lists of words are associated with two critical lures. Three experi...

Raw data (accuracy) from a spatial location task (Experiment 1) and emotional recognition task (Experiment 2) with nonverbal emotional vocalizations. Manuscript - "Spatial location and emotion modulate voice perception"

This article addresses the process of emotional evaluation of a product, its relevance and suitability to a group of children from 3 to 5 years of age. It focuses on the role of emotions and feelings in human growth and emphasizes the notions of emotional design and positive design, which play a very important role in the stimulation of user experi...

This work consists of a theoretical review with the aim of historically framing the way false memories have been studied. Although most of the studies on false memories have been developed since the last decade of the 20th century, the earliest dating from the late 19th century. With the aim of pointing out the great historical milestones in the r...

This work consists of a theoretical review with the aim of historically framing the way false memories have been studied. Although most of the studies on false memories have been developed since the last decade of the 20th century, the earliest is dated from the late 19th century. With the aim of pointing out the great historical milestones in the...

General Audience Summary Often in criminal cases, multiple witnesses observe the crime. Co-witnesses might remember the details of the event differently, due to differing viewpoints, differences in arousal or attention, or mistakes due to the fallibility of memory. Co-witnesses often talk amongst themselves before being interviewed by police. This...

Different studies regarding verbal emotional expressions in women with eating disorders have obtained opposite results. With an inhibitory task, Seddon and Waller had observed that women aged between 22 and 40 and with more bulimic symptoms exhibited an attentional bias for negative emotional words. In contrast, younger women – between the ages of...

Words presented in larger font size are considered more memorable and rated with higher judgments of learning (JOLs). One explanation for this phenomenon is that people believe that font size affects memory. However, it is not clear why people hold this belief. One alternative is that font size represents importance, with larger fonts implying more...

Items presented in large font are rated with higher judgments of learning (JOLs) than those presented in small font. According to current explanations of this phenomenon in terms of processing fluency or implicit beliefs, this effect should be present no matter the type of material under study. However, we hypothesized that the linguistic cues pres...

Baddeley (2007) propôs o Detector Hedônico para explicar a relação entre as emoções e memória operacional (MO). Esta revisão teve como objetivo sistematizar evidências da influência das emoções no desempenho em tarefas de MO a partir de artigos atuais e sua associação com o sistema Hedônico. Para isso, foi realizada uma pesquisa em variadas bases d...

Baddeley (2007) proposed the Hedonic Detection to explain the connection between emotion and working memory (WM). This review aimed to systematize evidence of the influence of emotion on performance of WM tasks and its association with the Hedonic system on current studies. We carried out a database research that generated 103 papers in a restricte...

Baddeley (2007) proposed the Hedonic Detection to explain the connection between emotion and working memory (WM). This review aimed to systematize evidence of the influence of emotion on performance of WM tasks and its association with the Hedonic system on current studies. We carried out a database research that generated 103 papers in a restricte...

PM is essential to daily life and its failures may cause devastating consequences in some real-world environments, such as on air traffic control navigation. Prospective memory (PM) research has recently focused on the execution of intentions that are no longer relevant, such as make the same payment twice – termed PM commission errors. Studies hav...

Judgments of Learning (JOLs) are usually higher for High Frequency words (HFW) than for Low Frequency words (LFW). These findings have been attributed to the belief that HFW will be better remembered than LFW. However, in Study 1, participants were presented with lists of words with increasing differences in word frequency and results showed that t...

Self-report instruments that allow to characterize the frequency of daily memory failures are essential for a comprehensive assessment of memory functioning. In this context, we aimed to provide preliminary evidence of validity and reliability for the European Portuguese adaptation of the Prospective and Retrospective Memory Questionnaire (PRMQ). A...

Evidence indicate that emotional states may affect differently visuospatial working memory (WM) performance depending on arousal and valence of the stimuli. However, how musical mood induction procedure (MMIP) influence visuospatial WM tasks still unclear. This experiment aimed to investigate self-report and physiological aspects of the relationshi...

Research has shown that a target event can spontaneously retrieve prospective memory (PM) intentions causing commission errors (i.e., performing intended actions when no longer relevant). We investigated potential mechanisms that might influence unfulfilled intentions deactivation by manipulating cognitive load during the finished-PM phase (i.e., w...

Judgments of learning (JOLs) are usually higher for high frequency words (HFW) than for low frequency words (LFW). In the present study, we explored the effect of congruent (vs. incongruent) prompts about word frequency on pre-study JOLs, immediate JOLs, and recall.

Production frequency has often been used to identify central and peripheral information, under the assumption that high frequency implies that the item is central. However, no research to date has tested the relationship between centrality and frequency. Participants watched a video of a bank robbery and completed a free recall test, from which fre...

Do attitudes toward and perceptions of infidelity depend on perceived relationship quality? A prediction was made that there should be a positive correlation between perceived relationship quality and negative attitudes and perceptions of infidelity, and that these correlations should be stronger for males than for females. These predictions were c...

Evaluating performance validity is essential in neuropsychological and forensic assessments. Nonetheless, most psychological assessment tests are unable to detect performance validity and other methods must be used for this purpose. A new Performance Validity Test (DETECTS – Memory Performance Validity Test) was developed with several characteristi...

Past research has shown that the perceptual characteristics of studied items (e.g., font size) leads to a metamemory illusion, and that delayed JOLs are better predictors of memory performance than immediate JOLs. Here, we tested whether delayed JOLs could reduce or eliminate the effect of perceptual characteristics on JOLs and restudy decisions. W...

Objective: This study aims to compare the influence of immediate and postponed responses in the detection of prospective memory (PM) target cues and consequent PM retrieval, while also varying the ongoing task demands. This comparison can have important implications in the design of PM tasks, especially because there has been an interchangeable use...

In the retroactive cueing paradigm, a cue is given retrospectively to the participants before the probe's onset and after the retention interval, when the stimuli are no longer available to perception. The retro-cues are acknoledged to enahnce performace in a similar way as predictive cues, which demonstrate that attention can be allocated not only...

The Cognitive Interview (CI) is one of the most widely studied and used methods to interview witnesses. However, new component techniques for further increasing correct recall are still crucial. We focused on how a new and simpler interview strategy, Category Clustering Recall (CCR), could increase recall in comparison with witness-compatible quest...

Effects of emotion on working memory (WM) are controversial. Besides, the influence of valenced music on WM remains largely unclear. Due to this factors a paradigm of mood induction was developed specially to investigate the impact of mood induction procedure by music with positive, negative, neutral valences, and a non-induction condition on subse...

Working memory (WM) deficits are often reported in patients with Bipolar Disorder (BD). However, it is not clear about the nature of these WM deficits (update or serial order processes) and their association with each BD states (euthymic, mania, and depressive). This review investigated the association between BD patient's states and the functionin...

Studies on collaborative memory have revealed an interesting phenomenon called collaborative inhibition (CI) (i.e., nominal groups recall more information than collaborative groups). However, the results of studies on false memories in collaborative memory tasks are controversial. This study aimed to understand the production of false memories in c...

The present study aimed to investigate the impact of mood induction by music with positive and negative valences on subsequent verbal and visuospatial working memory performance.

(Results presented on ICOM-6) The testing effect occurs when repeated testing benefits long-term retention (compared to non-testing/repeated studying). There is a growing interest on transferring the testing effect to the classroom. Test format (multiple-choice or short-answer) moderates the magnitude of testing, and testing may promote retention o...

The testing effect consists in the enhancement of long-term retention after repeated testing when compared to non-testing/repeated studying. There are practical implications on transferring the testing effect to the classroom (e.g., guide how teachers build tests). Test format (multiple-choice or short-answer) moderates the magnitude of testing, an...

Increasing recall is crucial for investigative interviews. The enhanced cognitive interview (ECI) has been widely used for this purpose and found to be generally effective. We focused on further increasing recall with a new interview strategy, category clustering recall (CCR). Participants watched a mock robbery video and were interviewed 48 hours...

Background: The disruption of retrieval strategies hypothesis (Basden, Basden, Bryner, & Thomas, 1997) has been identified as the main reason for the occurrence of the collaborative inhibition effect. This study aims to test this hypothesis applying the same retrieval strategy to all participants. Method: To accomplish this, we compared nominal...

Our study explored the testing effect in the classroom, as well as the effects of repeated testing on non-tested related material. 75 college students answered 12 weekly-one-topic Quizzes and two Intermediate Tests about 6 topics each, with repeated, related, and new questions. Results showed that students’ performance was better for repeated (M=.7...

After years of research on the functioning of human memory as an individual process of retention and retrieval of information, currently an increasing number of studies is appearing focused on the understanding of memory as a group process - collaborative memory. This paper aims, by means of a literature review, to summarize some of the most releva...

Little research has examined what happens to attention and memory as a whole when humans see someone attractive. Hence, we investigated whether attractive stimuli gather more attention and are better remembered than unattractive stimuli. Participants took part in an attention task – in which matrices containing attractive and unattractive male natu...

We review the literature on sensory, short-term, long-term, and working memory for tactile and haptic inputs, focusing on research using interference tasks and issues arising from the use of this methodology. We then present two studies that investigated the effects of haptic, verbal, spatial, and motor interference on haptic object recognition. Ex...