Simay Ikier

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Associate Professor at Marmara University

Age is a major social categorization information because it is one of the first attributes that is perceived about an individual. The present study used the misinformation paradigm to investigate memory and false memory for information that is either expected or unexpected based on age stereotypes. Young adults were presented with a passage depicti...

When individuals become older, they sometimes interpret their autobiographical memories in perspective and remember them more positively. In the present study, we investigated whether simulating an autobiographical memory as if an older individual experienced it would change its phenomenological experience. In the first session of the experiment, y...

z Mizahı anlamanın yaşlanma ile değişimini inceleyen görgül araştırma sayısı oldukça azdır. Araştırmaların çoğunda benzer bir yöntem kullanılarak, katılımcılardan verilen bir öyküyü komik bir sonsöz ile tamamlayan seçeneği seçmeleri istenmiştir. Sonuçlar, özellikle yürütücü işlevler, zihin kuramı ve çalışma belleği uzamı ile mizahı anlama arasında...

In the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm, studying a list of semantically related words leads to false memory for the critical non-studied word that is related to all the words in the study list. Previous studies questioning whether bilinguals are more prone to false memory in their first language (L1) or second language (L2) in the DRM parad...

The question of whether human memory is reliable generated extensive research. Memory is open to reconstruction and false retrieval of unpresented information or unexperienced events. These can create problems in judgments and decisions that rely on memory accuracy. In the case of eyewitness testimony, these problems can result in injustice. Then a...

The present study investigated autobiographical memories of younger, middle-aged and older adults for the events that made them the happiest and the saddest in their lives. Participants generated these memory types and provided ratings about how positive and how negative the memory makes them feel when they currently think about it, and the positiv...

We investigated whether the phenomenological experience of mental time travel is similar when one travels as oneself versus with another possible self. Participants first described and rated their phenomenological experience for an autobiographical memory, a counterfactual event, and a future event (real‐self condition). Then, they imagined themsel...

The present study investigated intentional forgetting of emotional information in low vs. high anxiety groups, by using a directed forgetting paradigm. The groups were formed based on their scores on measures of state and trait anxiety. Participants were provided with positive, negative, and neutral photographs with either remember or forget instru...

The present study investigated the detection of expected and unexpected changes in visual stimuli. Two stimuli for which individuals have schemas about their expected movements were chosen. Stimulus 1 was a ball placed at the upper part of an inclined plane; Stimulus 2 was a clock with visible hour and minute hands. The original stimuli were either...

We investigated age differences in mental time travel by comparing young, middle-aged and older adults, with equal number of participants in each age decade, from age 22 to 79. Participants generated and phenomenologically rated one experienced and one imagined past event, and two imagined future events. The results showed event type effects with r...

Aging is associated with declines in attention, but also with a tendency to attend to emotionally positive information. When attention is engaged in an ongoing task, an unexpected stimulus may not be detected, resulting in inattentional blindness. Inattentional blindness increases in older age, due to reduced attentional capacity. In the present st...

Retrieval Induced Forgetting (RIF) demonstrates that retrieval of information can lead to forgetting of related information. The standard RIF paradigm involves studying a certain number of category-exemplar pairs; thereafter, half of the exemplars from half of the categories are retrieved. Finally, all studied pairs are recalled. RIF is revealed wh...

Directed Forgetting (DF) studies show that it is possible to exert cognitive control to intentionally forget information. The aim of the present study was to investigate how aware individuals are of the control they have over what they remember and forget when the information is emotional. Participants were presented with positive, negative and neu...

The advantage of processing early over late acquired items in lexical and semantic tasks across a number of languages is well documented. Interestingly contradictory evidence has been reported in recall tasks where participants perform better overall on late acquired items compared to early acquired items in English. Moreover, free recall is modula...

The primary goal of this study is to investigate the relationship between frontal lobe function (FLF) and inattentional blindness (IB) in children. While the inhibitory account predicts that children with better FLF will inhibit the unexpected stimulus better and thus show more IB, the developmental view predicts that older children with better FLF...

Stereotype threat is the decrease in the performance of a group when the negative stereotypes about the group's performance are activated. On cognitive tasks, women perform worse when gender stereotypes are activated and older adults perform worse when age stereotypes are activated. One particular group that may experience higher levels of threat i...

Memory block refers to a temporary inability to retrieve information. This study aimed to create the materials measuring memory block in Turkish, and to replicate the basic findings of memory block and facilitation. These materials consist of a target (e.g., ALLERGY), a competitor that is orthographically similar to the target (e.g., ANALOGY), and...

We assessed the extent to which implicit proactive interference results from automatic versus controlled retrieval among younger and older adults. During a study phase, targets (e.g., "ALLERGY") either were or were not preceded by nontarget competitors (e.g., "ANALOGY"). After a filled interval, the participants were asked to complete word fragment...

We assessed age differences in interference effects in priming by using fragment completion. In Experiment 1, noninterfering filler words preceded critical targets at study, and priming was age invariant. In Experiment 2, the same target items had interfering competitors at the beginning of the list, such that both the target and the competitor wer...

Anecdotal evidence suggests that twins may dispute ownership of autobiographical experiences. We investigated the frequency and characteristics of such disputed memories in comparison to memories with undisputed ownership. In the present study, monozygotic twins (MZ), dizygotic twins (DZ), and siblings were asked to remember disputed and non-disput...