Sarah Drivdahl

Northwest University · Psychology

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...

Relatively little attention has been paid to the potential role that reflecting on the meaning and implications of suggested events (i.e., conceptual elaboration) might play in promoting the creation of false memories. Two experiments assessed whether encouraging repeated conceptual elaboration, would, like perceptual elaboration, increase false me...

Two experiments employed an eyewitness suggestibility paradigm to examine the effects of emotional elaboration on the creation of false memories for suggested events. The results of both experiments converge in showing that reflectively elaborating on the emotional consequences of suggested events increases both false belief and false memory in hav...

Recently, a number of experiments have emphasized the degree to which subjects fail to detect large changes in visual scenes. This finding, referred to as "change blindness," is often considered surprising because many people have the intuition that such changes should be easy to detect. documented this intuition by showing that the majority of sub...

In two experiments, adults who witnessed a videotaped event subsequently engaged in face-to-face interviews during which they were forced to confabulate information about the events they had seen. The interviewer selectively reinforced some of the participants' confabulated responses by providing confirmatory feedback (e.g., "Yes, ______ is the cor...

Witnesses who are exposed to false or misleading information in the course of an investigation are often asked follow-up questions designed to elicit more detailed information about the alleged objects/events. The results of the present study showed that pressing witnesses to elaborate on the perceptual characteristics of suggested events increased...

Recent research has demonstrated that subjects fail to detect large between-view changes to natural and artificial scenes. Yet, most people (including psycholo-gists) believe that they would detect the changes. We report two experiments doc-umenting this metacognitive error. In Experiment 1, students in a large General Psychology class were asked i...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Kent State University, 2000. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 61-73). Microfiche.