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The effect of nonprobative photographs on truthiness persists over time
Abstract
When making rapid judgments about the truth of a claim, related nonprobative information leads people to believe the claim-an effect called "truthiness" (Newman, Garry, Bernstein, Kantner, & Lindsay, 2012). For instance, within a matter of seconds, subjects judge the claim "The Mona Lisa has no eyebrows," to be true more often when it appears with a photograph of the Mona Lisa viewed at a distance by a person. But does truthiness persist longer than a few seconds? To determine if truthiness "sticks," we asked people to judge if each trivia claim in a series was true. Half of the claims appeared with nonprobative photos; the rest appeared alone. In a second session 48h later, people returned and made the same judgments about the same statements, but this time, all claims appeared without photos. We found that truthiness "stuck." The magnitude of the effect of photos on subjective feelings of truth was consistent over time. These results fit with those from cognitive and educational psychology, as well as with the related idea that photos make relevant information more available and familiar-and therefore feel more true-even after a delay.
... This so-called truthiness effect has been observed in several areas, such as judgments about personality traits of an unknown person (Abed et al., 2017), the credibility of witness statements (Derksen et al., 2020), or the subjective understanding of complicated processes (Cardwell et al., 2017). Fenn et al. (2013) showed that the truthiness effect is still present about 48 h after the presentation of statements and their corresponding photographs. Speaking to its external validity, the truthiness effect also occurred in a simulated social media environment (Fenn et al., 2019). ...
... Half of the statements were true, the other half were false. Thirty-two of the statements and associated pictures were already used in previous research on the truthiness effect (Nelson & Narens, 1980;Unkelbach, 2007; see also Fenn et al., 2013;Newman et al., 2012). An additional 28 statements were extracted from a norming of trivia statements (Jalbert et al., 2019). ...
... Newman et al., 2012;Newman et al., 2015) and approx. 48 h later (Fenn et al., 2013). Other than hypothesized, participants showed no truthiness effect: There was no bias to judge a statement as being true when judging the veracity of statements that were presented with versus without photos. ...
The truthiness effect (Newman et al., 2012) refers to the belief that any particular stimulus is truthful when it is accompanied by nonprobative information (e.g., a photograph). Accordingly, photo-accompanied statements are more likely to be judged as truthful compared to statements without a photo. In an online experiment (N = 98) with two assessment times, we aimed to replicate this effect and its persistence over time. Furthermore, we were interested in to what extent feedback on the actual veracity of statements would be affected by the presence of a photo. Participants rated the veracity of trivia statements either accompanied by a nonprobative photo or not. Feedback on veracity, with or without a nonprobative photo, was provided after some but not all veracity judgments. The truthiness effect could neither be replicated immediately nor after 48 h. Feedback facilitated discrimination between true and false statements − especially when accompanied by a photo. However, feedback also led to a bias towards responding "true". Our findings suggest using photos in feedback on veracity.
... To date, there has yet to be research examining this question within social media. However, the extant false memory research suggests that consuming false personal information should lead to false memories in the consumer (e.g., Garry, Manning, Loftus, & Sherman, 1996;Mazzoni & Memon, 2003;see Loftus, 2005, for a review) and/or, at the very least, should lead the consumer to believe the information to be more truthful (Fenn, Newman, Pezdek, & Garry, 2013). ...
... Similarly, in a study by Sacchi and colleagues, when experimenters provided participants with doctored photos in which a peaceful protest was made to look more aggressive, the participants were less likely to participate in future protests. In addition, the mere presence of a picture, which most articles include, may lead individuals to believe the false information to be more truthful (Newman, Garry, Bernstein, Kantner, & Lindsay, 2012) and this belief can last for up to 48 hours (Fenn et al., 2013). ...
... Second, if the source of information is viewed as not credible, the persuasiveness of the message may be diminished and, in turn, less likely to lead to false memories (Eagly & Chaiken, 1993;Petty & Cacioppo, 1986). For example, after viewing 50 images that depicted a story of a man robbing a car, participants in a study by Fenn and colleagues were provided with either accurate or inaccurate information (false information) and this information was made to look like it came from a Twitter feed or not (control condition) (Fenn et al., 2013). Surprisingly, when the inaccurate information was presented as if it came from a Twitter feed, participants were less confident in the veracity of the false information relative to the control condition. ...
Social media has become one of the most powerful and ubiquitous means by which individuals curate, share, and communicate information with their friends, family, and the world at large. Indeed, 90% of the American adolescents are active social media users, as well as 65% of American adults (Perrin, 2015; see also Duggan & Brenner, 2013). Despite this, psychologists are only beginning to understand the mnemonic consequences associated with social media use. In this article, we will distill this nascent literature by focusing on two primary factors: the type of information (personal vs. public) and the role (producer vs. consumer) individuals play when engaging with social media. In particular, we will highlight research examining induced forgetting for personal information as well as false memories and truthiness for public information. We will end by providing some tentative conclusions and a discussion of areas in need of additional research that will provide a more holistic understanding of the mnemonic consequences associated with social media use.
... The truth status of this claim is likely ambiguous for most people who have little information available to determine the correct response. However, a growing literature suggests that if a photo of a hippopotamus appeared with this trivia question, people may be more inclined to think the question was true compared to if it appeared alone (Abed et al., 2017;Fenn et al., 2013;Newman et al., 2012;Newman et al., 2015;Newman et al., 2020). Regardless of whether the claim is true or false, photos can make less-known trivia claims feel more truthful, even if the photo lacks useful information (i.e., the color of the milk). ...
... When judging whether a claim is true or false, people may rely on their subjective internal states to determine how true the claim feels (Fenn et al., 2013;Newman et al., 2012;Newman et al., 2015). Non-probative but related photographs can produce such a feeling of truth. ...
When semantically-related photos appear with true-or-false trivia claims, people more often rate the claims as true compared to when photos are absent-truthiness. This occurs even when the photos lack information useful for assessing veracity. We tested whether truthiness changed in magnitude as a function of participants' age in a diverse sample using materials appropriate for all ages. We tested participants (N = 414; Age range = 3-87 years) in two culturally diverse environments: a community science center (First language: English (61.4%); Mandarin/Cantonese (11.6%); Spanish (6%), other (21%); ethnicity: unreported) and a psychology lab (First language: English (64.4%); Punjabi (9.8%); Mandarin/Cantonese (7.4%); other (18.4%); ethnicity: Caucasian (38%); South Asian (30.7%); Asian (22.7%); other/unreported (8.6%). Participants rated trivia claims as true or false. Half the claims appeared with a semantically related photo, and half appeared without a photo. Results showed that participants of all ages more often rated claims as true when claims appeared with a photo; however, this truthiness effect was stable across the lifespan. If truthiness age differences exist, they are likely negligible in the general population. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).
... Photos accompanied some of the statements; critically, the photos did not provide any evidence about the veracity of the claim (for example, simply providing a picture of a macadamia nut). Participants were biased to accept statements as true when they were accompanied by a photo (Fenn et al., 2013;Newman et al., 2015). This bias occurs outside of conscious awareness (Newman et al. 2018) and can persist for several days (Fenn et al. 2013). ...
... Participants were biased to accept statements as true when they were accompanied by a photo (Fenn et al., 2013;Newman et al., 2015). This bias occurs outside of conscious awareness (Newman et al. 2018) and can persist for several days (Fenn et al. 2013). Pairing a statement with a photo also increased participants' tendencies to like and share information in a simulated online environment (regardless of whether that information was true or false in reality; Fenn et al., 2019). ...
Why do consumers sometimes fall for spurious claims – e.g., brain training games that prevent cognitive decline, toning sneakers that sculpt one's body, flower essence that cures depression – and how can consumers protect themselves in the modern world where information is shared quickly and easily? As cognitive scientists, we view this problem through the lens of what we know, more generally, about how people evaluate information for its veracity, and how people update their beliefs. That is, the same processes that support true belief can also encourage people to sometimes believe misleading or false information. Anchoring on the large literature on truth and belief updating allows predictions about consumer behavior; it also highlights possible solutions while casting doubt on other possible responses to misleading communications.
... The photo-induced truth bias is robust and persistent. When subjects were invited back to the lab 48 hours after making 'true' or 'false' judgements about general knowledge claims, the statements that had previously been presented with photos were still more likely to be deemed true (Fenn, Newman, Pezdek, & Garry, 2013 Newman and co-workers have investigated the mechanisms underlying the photo-induced truth bias (Newman et al., 2012). One possibility is that photos increase 'truthiness' -the subjective and intuitive feeling that something is truebecause they provide a semantically rich context that facilitates the generation of related thoughts and images. ...
... Therefore, the truth bias effect is not restricted to photographs, per se, but rather any technique that facilitates elaboration by generating related ideas and images can lead people to conclude that claims are true. As the authors report, photos (and words) inflate 'truthiness' (Newman et al., 2012;Fenn et al., 2013). ...
... A growing body of work shows that even a brief exposure to a related but non-probative photo can bias people to believe that an associated claim is true, despite the fact that the photo offers no diagnostic evidence for the claim's veracity, a truthiness effect 2 (Fenn, Newman, Pezdek, & Garry, 2013;. This truthiness effect holds over several days and influences a range of judgments, including judgments about general knowledge facts, predictions about future events, and judgments about our own episodic memories. ...
... Paired with a related photo, such headlines may seem real at first, but many readers do not click beyond the headline itself, missing nuances in the longer text . Given that photos can have lasting effects on belief (Fenn et al., 2013) as well as producing false memories (Cardwell et al., 2016;Strange, Garry, Brenstein, & Lindsay, 2011), mere exposure to such photo-headline combinations might create and make false beliefs stick. ...
This open-access book examines the phenomenon of fake news by bringing together leading experts from different fields within psychology and related areas, and explores what has become a prominent feature of public discourse since the first Brexit referendum and the 2016 US election campaign. Thanks to funding from the Swiss National Science Foundation, all chapters can be downloaded free of charge at the publisher's website:
https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9780429295379
There is also an Amazon Kindle edition that's free of charge:
https://www.amazon.com/Psychology-Fake-News-Correcting-Misinformation-ebook-dp-B08FF54H53/dp/B08FF54H53/ref=mt_other?_encoding=UTF8&me=&qid=
... Even though the truthiness effect has been replicated several times (e.g., Fenn et al. 2013;Newman et al. 2015Newman et al. , 2020, its magnitude is typically quite small. For instance, a mini meta-analysis by Newman et al. (2020) showed an average effect size of d = 0.23. ...
... However, we did not find significant effects of truthiness-the phenomenon that non-probative pictures enhance people's truth judgments. Given the support for a basic truthiness effect in the literature (e.g., Fenn et al. 2013;Newman et al. 2012Newman et al. , 2020, it is surprising that it did not replicate in our experiments. At present, we can only speculate why the effect did not occur. ...
To better understand the spread of fake news in the Internet age, it is important to uncover the variables that influence the perceived truth of information. Although previous research identified several reliable predictors of truth judgments-such as source credibility, repeated information exposure, and presentation format-little is known about their simultaneous effects. In a series of four experiments, we investigated how the abovementioned factors jointly affect the perceived truth of statements (Experiments 1 and 2) and simulated social media postings (Experi-ments 3 and 4). Experiment 1 explored the role of source credibility (high vs. low vs. no source information) and presentation format (with vs. without a picture). In Experiments 2 and 3, we additionally manipulated repeated exposure (yes vs. no). Finally, Experiment 4 examined the role of source credibility (high vs. low) and type of repetition (congru-ent vs. incongruent vs. no repetition) in further detail. In sum, we found no effect of presentation format on truth judgments, but strong, additive effects of source credibility and repetition. Truth judgments were higher for information presented by credible sources than non-credible sources and information without sources. Moreover, congruent (i.e., verbatim) repetition increased perceived truth whereas semantically incongruent repetition decreased perceived truth, irrespectively of the source. Our findings show that people do not rely on a single judgment cue when evaluating a statement's truth but take source credibility and their meta-cognitive feelings into account.
... A growing body of work shows that even a brief exposure to a related but non-probative photo can bias people to believe that an associated claim is true, despite the fact that the photo offers no diagnostic evidence for the claim's veracity, a truthiness effect 2 (Fenn, Newman, Pezdek, & Garry, 2013;. This truthiness effect holds over several days and influences a range of judgments, including judgments about general knowledge facts, predictions about future events, and judgments about our own episodic memories. ...
... Paired with a related photo, such headlines may seem real at first, but many readers do not click beyond the headline itself, missing nuances in the longer text . Given that photos can have lasting effects on belief (Fenn et al., 2013) as well as producing false memories (Cardwell et al., 2016;Strange, Garry, Brenstein, & Lindsay, 2011), mere exposure to such photo-headline combinations might create and make false beliefs stick. ...
... true the statement feels (Newman, Garry, Bernstein, Kantner, & Lindsay, 2012). Indeed, presenting related, but nonprobative photos or words alongside statements increases the perceived truth value of the statements (Fenn, Newman, Pezdek, & Garry, 2013;Newman et al., 2012;Newman et al., 2015). Consider the following statement, "True or false? ...
... In past studies of the truthiness effect, participants read obscure true-or-false trivia statements either with or without a nonprobative, related photo. In these studies, participants made judgments of truth (see Fenn et al., 2013;Newman et al., 2015). We attempted to partially replicate the design of these earlier studies while changing the stimuli from obscure trivia statements to obscure witness statements in forensically relevant vignettes. ...
Non‐probative but related photos can increase the perceived truth value of statements relative to when no photo is presented (truthiness ). In 2 experiments, we tested whether truthiness generalizes to credibility judgements in a forensic context. Participants read short vignettes in which a witness viewed an offence. The vignettes were presented with or without a non‐probative, but related photo. In both experiments, participants gave higher witness credibility ratings to photo‐present vignettes compared to photo‐absent vignettes. In Experiment 2, half the vignettes included additional non‐probative information in the form of text. We replicated the photo presence effect in Experiment 2, but the non‐probative text did not significantly alter witness credibility. The results suggest that non‐probative photos can increase the perceived credibility of witnesses in legal contexts.
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... One common heuristic is confirmation bias-the tendency to accept information consistent with one's beliefs and reject information inconsistent with one's beliefs (Nickerson, 1998). Fast judgments can also be influenced by related but irrelevant information such as accompanying photos (Fenn, Newman, Pezdek & Garry, 2013). This heuristic cognitive processing style is responsible for people (a) rapidly judging news items to be true and then (b) sharing them (e.g., Li & Sakamoto, 2014), a major reason why false information spreads faster and farther than true news (Vosoughi, Roy, & Aral, 2018). ...
... On mobile devices, news headlines are typically scrolled through quickly and presented with accompanying photos, two cognitive processing factors that obscure the difference between true and false news. The "truthiness effect" is well established in the research literature; when statements are accompanied by photos, people have a bias to judge them to be "true, " and this truth bias persists for at least several days (Fenn et al., 2013). Our novel finding bolsters the potential for success of our proposed intervention to reduce the sharing of misinformation. ...
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... A growing body of work shows that even a brief exposure to a related, but non-probative photo, can bias people to believe that the associated claim is true, despite the fact that the photo offers no diagnostic evidence for the claim's veracity, a truthiness effect 2 (Fenn, Newman, Pezdek, & Garry, 2013;Newman, Garry, Bernstein, Kantner, & Lindsay, 2012;. This truthiness effect holds over several days and influences a range of judgments, including judgments about general knowledge facts, predictions about future events, and judgments about our own episodic memories. ...
... Paired with a related photo, such headlines may seem real at first, but many readers do not click beyond the headline itself, missing nuances in the longer text (Gabielkov, Ramachandran, Chaintreau, & Legout, 2016). Given that photos can have lasting effects on belief (Fenn et al., 2013) as well as producing false memories (Cardwell et al., 2016), mere exposure to such photo-headline combination might create and make false beliefs stick. ...
True or false? “A woodpecker is the only bird that can fly backwards.” When such a claim appears with a related, but non-probative photo (e.g., a photo of a woodpecker perched on a tree) people are more likely to think the claim is true—a truthiness effect. This truthiness effect holds across a range of judgments, including judgments about general knowledge facts, predictions about future events, and judgments about our own episodic memories. Throughout, adding a photograph to a claim rapidly increases people’s belief in that claim. We review the literature on truthiness, documenting the ways in which photos and other kinds of non-probative information can rapidly change people’s beliefs, memories, and estimations of their own general knowledge. We also examine the mechanisms contributing to truthiness and explore the implications for misinformation and fake news.
... These claims were recently updated and expanded (Tauber, Dunlosky, Rawson, Rhodes, & Sitzman, 2013) and a subset has been adapted to Spanish (Duñabeitia et al., 2016). These claims have been used as stimuli in studies of memory and source monitoring (Shimamura & Squire, 1987), judgments of truth (Fenn, Newman, Pezdek, & Garry, 2013;Newman et al., 2015), feelings of knowing (e.g., Metcalfe, 1986), tip of the tongue phenomena (Burke, MacKay, Worthley, & Wade, 1991), and metamnemonic judgments (Benjamin, Bjork, & Schwartz, 1998). ...
... More recently, these claims, or variations of these claims, have been used as stimuli for a number of studies that recruit participants online from the platform Mechanical Turk (MTurk; e.g., Birnbaum, Kornell, Bjork, & Bjork, 2013;Chua & Bliss-Moreau, 2016, Fenn et al., 2013Kornell, 2015, Newman et al., 2015, a website where users participate in surveys in exchange for monetary compensation. However, the repeated use of these trivia claims on MTurk may pose a problem because a small subset of participants complete a large percentage of the MTurk studies. ...
We normed one hundred trivia claims, each with a true and false version, by proportion of people who judged them to be true. Twenty claims were chosen for each of the following five categories: Science, geography, sports, animals, and food. This paper outlines the method of claim creation and includes all claims and truth rating data. Data was collected in November, 2016.
Citation:
Jalbert, M., Newman, E., & Schwarz, N. (2019). Trivia claim norming: Methods report and data. ResearchGate. doi: 10.6084/m9.figshare.9975602
... When people judge the truth of a statement that they know little about (e.g., "turtles are deaf"), they are more likely to call the statement true when it is accompanied by a nonprobative photo (e.g., a photo of a turtle) than when it is not (Newman, Garry, Bernstein, Kantner, & Lindsay, 2012). This effect, called the photo truthiness effect, has been widely replicated across different labs and stimuli (Abed, Fenn, & Pezdek, 2017;Cardwell, Henkel, Garry, Newman, & Foster, 2016), and persists over at least 48 h (Fenn, Newman, Pezdek, & Garry, 2013). In addition, the truthiness effect extends to personality judgments (Abed et al., 2017) and judgments about episodic memories (Cardwell et al., 2016). ...
... Each participant rated 64 statements randomly drawn from the pool of 516. Following previous truthiness effect research (Fenn et al., 2013;Newman et al., 2012;Newman et al., 2015), we sought statements yielding 40-60% accuracy. Of the 516 statements tested, 160 (112 true and 48 false) met this criterion. ...
General Audience Summary
Reducing the spread of false information is of increasing importance worldwide. Researchers and practitioners agree that cognitive science can help identify and reduce the impact of fake or misleading information online. We investigated one potential psychological influence on sharing behaviors online, the presence of related photos alongside general knowledge statements. Photos can bias people to believe accompanying information is true, even when the photos reveal nothing about the truth of the information (i.e., the “truthiness effect”). But do such photos also impact social media behaviors such as liking and sharing? This latter behavior, sharing, is a critical factor in the propagation of misinformation; false information that is shared is potentially more detrimental than false information that is not shared. Thus, the impact of photos on sharing true and false information was a central issue in this study. Further, prior studies examining the truthiness effect used tightly controlled laboratory procedures, unlike the evolving and dynamic online environment. We asked people to judge the truth of, their liking of, and their interest in sharing true and false general knowledge statements presented online in a mock social media environment that allowed people to scroll through, read, and respond to information at their own pace. Half of the statements appeared alone; half were paired with a photo that was related to the topic of the statement but did not reveal its truth. Statements accompanied by a photo were believed, shared, and liked more often than statements viewed alone. Accompanying photos can increase sharing of information online, even when that information is false.
... One common heuristic is confirmation bias-the tendency to accept information consistent with one's beliefs and reject information inconsistent with one's beliefs (Nickerson, 1998). Fast judgments can also be influenced by related but irrelevant information such as accompanying photos (Fenn, Newman, Pezdek & Garry, 2013). This heuristic cognitive processing style is responsible for people (a) rapidly judging news items to be true and then (b) sharing them (e.g., Li & Sakamoto, 2014), a major reason why false information spreads faster and farther than true news (Vosoughi, Roy, & Aral, 2018). ...
... On mobile devices, news headlines are typically scrolled through quickly and presented with accompanying photos, two cognitive processing factors that obscure the difference between true and false news. The "truthiness effect" is well established in the research literature; when statements are accompanied by photos, people have a bias to judge them to be "true, " and this truth bias persists for at least several days (Fenn et al., 2013). Our novel finding bolsters the potential for success of our proposed intervention to reduce the sharing of misinformation. ...
This PDF document was made available from www.rti.org as a public service of RTI International.
... We also know from recent work that nonprobative photos can more rapidly nudge people to find associated claims true (Fenn, Newman, Pezdek, & Garry, 2013;Newman, Garry, Bernstein, Kantner, & Lindsay, 2012). In this paradigm, people quickly judge a series of trivia claims (The liquid metal inside a thermometer is magnesium) as true or false. ...
... No significant Photo × Claim interaction emerged in either Experiment 1A or 1B, both Fs < 1.32, but the pattern suggests that photos exerted more of an influence on the Bincrease^than on the Bdecrease^claim (a pattern that we replicated in subsequent experiments). Taken together, our findings fit with recent research showing that nonprobative photos can promote the truthiness of associated claims (Fenn et al., 2013;Newman et al., 2012;Newman et al., 2015) Did subjects have any insight into the way that photos biased them? When we asked subjects at the end of Experiment 1A how the photographs influenced their decisions, 1 52 % of the people said the photographs helped them understand what the commodity was, 10 % told us that the photo helped them imagine the commodity, and only 10 % reported that the photo added credibility to the claim (another 28 % said that the photo did nothing or gave a different explanation, such as that the photo made them respond more slowly). ...
When people rapidly judge the truth of claims about the present or the past, a related but nonprobative photo can produce “truthiness,” an increase in the perceived truth of those claims (Newman, Garry, Bernstein, Kantner, & Lindsay, 2012). What we do not know is the extent to which nonprobative photos cause truthiness for the future. We addressed this issue in four experiments. In each experiment, people judged the truth of claims that the price of certain commodities (such as manganese) would increase (or decrease). Half of the time, subjects saw a photo of the commodity paired with the claim. Experiments 1A and 1B produced a “rosiness” bias: Photos led people to believe positive claims about the future but had very little effect on people’s belief in negative claims. In Experiment 2, rosiness occurred for both close and distant future claims. In Experiments 3A and 3B, we tested whether rosiness was tied to the perceived positivity of a claim. Finally, in Experiments 4A and 4B, we tested the rosiness hypothesis and found that rosiness was unique to claims about the future: When people made the same judgments about the past, photos produced the usual truthiness pattern for both positive and negative claims. Considered all together, our data fit with the idea that photos may operate as hypothesis-confirming evidence for people’s tendency to anticipate rosy future outcomes.
... See also tinyurl.com/truthiness2012) [1], [17], [18]. For example, within seconds, people judge a claim such as ''The liquid metal inside a thermometer is magnesium'' to be true more often when it appears with a photo of a thermometer than when it appears alone. ...
... Moreover, Experiment 2 fits with Laham et al. [9], but is not merely a conceptual replication: we discovered a new and interesting route to truthiness [1], [17]. We found that people with easy names confer truthiness on claims relative to people with difficult names. ...
When people make judgments about the truth of a claim, related but nonprobative information rapidly leads them to believe the claim-an effect called "truthiness" [1]. Would the pronounceability of others' names also influence the truthiness of claims attributed to them? We replicated previous work by asking subjects to evaluate people's names on a positive dimension, and extended that work by asking subjects to rate those names on negative dimensions. Then we addressed a novel theoretical issue by asking subjects to read that same list of names, and judge the truth of claims attributed to them. Across all experiments, easily pronounced names trumped difficult names. Moreover, the effect of pronounceability produced truthiness for claims attributed to those names. Our findings are a new instantiation of truthiness, and extend research on the truth effect as well as persuasion by showing that subjective, tangential properties such as ease of processing can matter when people evaluate information attributed to a source.
... These nonprobative photos were semantically related to the claims but were not diagnostic of the problems. The photo truthiness effect was replicated in other studies (Fenn et al., 2013(Fenn et al., , 2019Newman et al., 2015Newman et al., , 2020, and a similar nonprobative photo effect was found in explanatory knowledge understanding (Cardwell et al., 2017) and memory judgment (Cardwell et al., 2016;Wilson & Westerman, 2018). According to Newman et al. (2012), nonprobative photos create a rich semantic context and promote fluency for trivia claim processing, making related thoughts come to mind easier and thus biasing judgments. ...
This study shows that exposure to topic-related but irrelevant information enhances both estimates of peer knowledge and our own sense of knowledge. In Experiment 1, participants were more confident in their answers to general knowledge questions and gave higher estimates of peer knowledge when such questions were accompanied by short paragraphs containing topic-related yet nondiagnostic information than when they were not. The inflated peer knowledge estimates were independent of the classic curse of knowledge. Experiments 2, 3, 5, and 6 demonstrated that irrelevant information biases knowledge estimation via its semantic relatedness to the test questions; response latencies were measured in Experiments 5 and 6 to examine the possible role of retrieval fluency in the semantic relatedness effect. Experiment 4 attributed the bias to information content (e.g., “it is generally known that keratin is responsible”), not comments on knowledge popularity (e.g., “what is responsible is generally known”). Importantly, the effect of irrelevant information on estimates of peer knowledge was fully mediated by confidence in own knowledge in Experiments 1, 2, 4, and 5. Experiment 6 manipulated retrieval fluency and failed to find conclusive evidence for its involvement in the semantic relatedness effect. We conclude that irrelevant information boosts peer knowledge estimation through its semantic relatedness to the problem at hand, and the effect is mostly explained by a corresponding increase in the individual’s own sense of knowledge.
... Presenting statements and pictures together is also the procedure used in experiments investigating truthiness, the phenomenon that people judge statements accompanied by pictures as truer than statements presented without any pictures (Fenn et al., 2013;Newman et al., 2012). Moreover, we did not limit response time for the truth judgments, although it is widely acknowledged that the effects of affective pictures are very short-lived (Cuthbert et al., 2000), and the impact of the positive affect manipulation on truth judgments in Experiment 1 was statistically significant only when slower judgments (> 5 s) are excluded from the data. ...
People believe repeated statements more than new ones, a phenomenon called the repetition-induced truth effect. It is chiefly explained with the subjective processing ease (i.e., fluency) for repeated as compared to new information. To date, the role of affective processes for the repetition induced truth effect is rather unclear. Different mechanisms may play a role: Affect influences processing styles, it may directly inform judgments, and positive affect may be misattributed to fluency/familiarity. In the current study, we compared mechanisms and tested whether a positive, neutral, or negative picture presented before a statement would influence the repetition-induced truth effect. Experiment 1 followed a classical repetition-induced truth effect procedure with two sessions that were a week apart. In the second session, each statement was preceded by an affec-tive picture. We replicated the repetition-induced truth effect, and we observed a statistically significant main effect of affect-statements were rated as truer after a positive rather than a negative or neutral picture, but the interaction between repetition and affect was not statistically significant. In Experiment 2, we aimed to clarify the mechanism behind this finding using only new statements preceded by affective pictures. No statistically significant main effect of affect emerged. We conclude that the results in Experiment 1 were due to the misattribution of positive affect to fluency/ familiarity, enhancing the perceived truth of the statements. In sum, our results suggest two factors that enhance truth judgments: repetition and positive affect, but the effects of affect depend on the exact paradigm used.
... Several studies have investigated the role of photos as a form of contextual information that may shape conceptual fluency and subsequent judgment (for a review see Newman & Zhang, 2021). For example, photos that are only tangentially related to a claim can lead people to be more confident in the veracity of a claim, despite the fact they are noninformative of truth, an effect described as truthiness (Newman et al., 2012; see also Fenn et al., 2013). In a recent study on eyewitness statements, when participants saw a claim like 'the man stole her wallet when she got off the bus', along with a tangentially related stock photo of a bus, people were more inclined to believe the witness statement was true (Derksen et al., 2020). ...
Remote appearances for courtroom proceedings have become
common practice in recent years. When a court participant
appears remotely, they introduce new and often tangential cues
as part of their video background. We have seen varying (and at
times, controversial) background cues across virtual court
members, with scholars and legal professionals noting the
potential effects these cues may have on decisions and
impressions (e.g. Bandes & Feigenson, 2020). Advice is often
provided for how people should appear to virtual court, but this
is often made with no direct link to empirical evidence. In this
piece, we review psychological literature exploring how and why
background cues may influence impressions and decisionmaking.
In particular, we examine the role of cognitive factors
such as schema activation and consequences for memory and
truth assessment. We further consider social factors such as the
connection between physical spaces and personality in shaping
impression formation and decision-making. Finally, we highlight
future research opportunities to target unanswered questions
and ongoing innovations in virtual courts, in addition to
considering policies and procedures that can be implemented to
avoid background cue effects.
... These aspects are discussed below: Firstly, image is the total impression that an entity makes in the mind of another; it strongly influences how people see things and is essential in shaping marketing, advertising, and communication efforts (Dichter, 1985). Furthermore, it serves as a demonstration to increase the credibility of the content (Fenn et al., 2013). In the research by Hùng (2017), a photo that is well-balanced in color, beautifully designed, and delicate, and notes on handwriting in the image will create high reliability, attract the eyes, and attract attention. ...
This study aims to find and explore the influencing factors, as well as the changes in the interaction behavior of social network users in Facebook posts during the covid-19 pandemic. This study's four main interaction behaviors are: like, share, comment, and report. Applied qualitative and inductive research methods, conducting in-depth interviews with 12 individuals and a focus group with three individuals. The results showed a small aspect of proving reliability, so Trust in the source of information, and the Social influence factor can be said to be one of the discoveries. Meanwhile, other studies have also mentioned and explored some of the factors explored in this study, including the type of content, timing, attitude, and form of posts that affect interaction behavior on Facebook. This finding has proposed a model of influencing factors as a premise for future quantitative research. Besides that, the results also propose administrative implications to help businesses increase the efficiency of using Facebook in social media marketing strategies.
... However, a concurrent presentation of affective pictures and statements would be closer to a real-life setting and to how the news is generally presented. Presenting statements and pictures together is also the procedure used in experiments investigating truthiness, the phenomenon that people judge statements accompanied by pictures as truer than statements presented without any pictures (Fenn et al., 2013;Newman et al., 2012). Moreover, we did not limit response time for the truth judgments, although it is widely acknowledged that the effects of affective pictures are very short-lived (Cuthbert et al., 2000), and the impact of the positive affect manipulation on truth judgments in Experiment 1 was statistically significant only when slower judgments (> 5 s) are excluded from the data. ...
People believe repeated statements more than new ones, a phenomenon called the repetition-induced truth effect. It is chiefly explained with the subjective processing ease (i.e., fluency) for repeated as compared to new information. To date, the role of affective processes for the repetition-induced truth effect is rather unclear. Different mechanisms may play a role: Affect influences processing styles, it may directly inform judgments, and positive affect may be misattributed to fluency/familiarity. In the current study, we compared mechanisms and tested whether a positive, neutral, or negative picture presented before a statement would influence the repetition-induced truth effect. Experiment 1 followed a classical repetition-induced truth effect procedure with two sessions that were a week apart. In the second session, each statement was preceded by an affective picture. We replicated the repetition-induced truth effect, and we observed a statistically significant main effect of affect—statements were rated as truer after a positive rather than a negative or neutral picture, but the interaction between repetition and affect was not statistically significant. In Experiment 2, we aimed to clarify the mechanism behind this finding using only new statements preceded by affective pictures. No statistically significant main effect of affect emerged. We conclude that the results in Experiment 1 were due to the misattribution of positive affect to fluency/familiarity, enhancing the perceived truth of the statements. In sum, our results suggest two factors that enhance truth judgments: repetition and positive affect, but the effects of affect depend on the exact paradigm used.
... Photos are unique compared to other media in their apparent provision of "proof" that the depicted event actually occurred; despite individuals' awareness of how easily photographs can be altered, they are often viewed as a particularly credible form of evidence (Nash, 2018). An example of this is seen in the so-called "truthiness" effect, whereby the inclusion of a nonprobative photograph increases belief in inaccurate information (Fenn et al., 2013;Newman et al., 2012). Recent advances in digital photographic editing technology have allowed researchers to present participants with doctored photographs from their childhood, showing, for example, the participant taking a ride in a hot-air balloon with a relative. ...
Studies of eyewitness memory commonly employ variations on a standard misinformation paradigm. Participants are (a) exposed to an event (e.g., a simulated crime), (b) misled about certain details of the event and (c) questioned about their memory of the original event. Misinformation may be provided in the second step via a range of methods. Here, we directly compared the effectiveness of six misinformation delivery methods-leading questions, elaborate leading questions, doctored photographs, simple narratives, scrambled narratives, and missing word narratives. We presented 1182 participants with a video of a simulated robbery and randomly assigned them to receive misinformation about two out of four critical details via one of these methods. In line with the levels of processing account of memory, we report that methods that encourage deeper processing of misinformation result in more memory distortions. Contrary to previous reports, doctored photographs were not a successful method of implanting misinformation. The six delivery methods resulted in minimal differences in confidence and metamemory estimates, but participants were more likely to notice the presence of misinformation in the simple narrative condition. We conclude with suggestions for the selection of an appropriate method of misinformation delivery in future studies. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).
... Previous research found that statements of this type are more likely to be accepted as true when they are accompanied by a nonprobative photo of the subject of the claim, here a thermometer (Newman et al., 2012; for a review, see Newman & Zhang, 2020). Although nonprobative photos provide no meaningful evidence that the claims are true, they produce a sense of "truthiness", a feeling of truth that is not based on facts but can nevertheless persist over time (Fenn et al., 2013). ...
Claims are more likely to be judged true when presented with a related nonprobative photo (Newman, Garry, Bernstein, Kantner, & Lindsay, 2012). According to a processing fluency account, related photos facilitate processing and easy processing fosters acceptance of the claim. Alternatively, according to an illusion-of-evidence account, related photos may increase acceptance of the claim because they are treated as tentative supportive evidence. We disentangle these potential mechanisms by using comparative claims. In forming comparative judgments, people first assess attributes of the linguistic subject of comparison and subsequently compare them to attributes of the referent (Tversky, 1977). Hence, photos of the linguistic subject in a sentence should facilitate, but photos of the linguistic referent impair, fluent processing of this sequence. In contrast, a photo of either the subject or the referent can be perceived as tentative evidence. In two experiments (total N = 1200), photos of the subject increased acceptance of comparative claims relative to a no-photo condition (a truthiness effect), but only when the subject was otherwise difficult to visualize. Photos of the referent decreased acceptance of comparative claims relative to a no-photo condition (a falsiness effect), but only when the subject of comparison was otherwise easy to visualize. All results are consistent with a context-sensitive fluency account: increases in fluency foster, and decreases in fluency impair, acceptance of a claim as true. The results provide no support for an illusion-of-evidence account.
... Visual stimuli, like pictures, seem to be another factor that can lead to heightened perceptions of truthiness. For example, pictures have been shown to increase the believability of general knowledge claims (Fenn, Newman, Pezdek, & Garry, 2013;Newman et al., 2012), particularly in within-subjects designs (Newman et al., 2015). One explanation for this effect is that pictures often do not contain much useful information and, therefore, a vague relatedness that a photo provides can lead to erroneous associations of prior experience and knowledge. ...
Fake news, deliberately inaccurate and often biased information that is presented as accurate reporting, is perceived as a serious threat. Recent research on fake news has documented a high general susceptibility to the phenomenon and has focused on investigating potential explanatory factors. The present study examined how features of news headlines affected their perceived accuracy. Across four experiments (total N = 659), we examined the effects of pictures, perceptual clarity, and repeated exposure on the perceived accuracy of news headlines. In all experiments, participants received a set of true and false news headlines and rated their accuracy. The presence of pictures and repeated exposure increased perceived accuracy, whereas manipulations of perceptual clarity did not show the predicted effects. The effects of pictures and repeated exposure were similar for true and false headlines. These results demonstrate that accompanying pictures and repeated exposure can affect evaluations of truth of news headlines.
... A growing body of work suggests that expectation is wrong. In fact, photos that are thematically related to a claim but do not provide any evidence for the claim's veracitylike the woodpecker in Fig. 1 can systematically bias people into believing claims are true (Fenn, Newman, Pezdek, & Garry, 2013;Newman et al., 2012; for a review see Newman & Zhang, in press). ...
Ease of processing-cognitive fluency-is a central input in assessments of truth, but little is known about individual differences in susceptibility to fluency-based biases in truth assessment. Focusing on two paradigms-truthiness and the illusory truth effect-we consider the role of Need for Cognition (NFC), an individual difference variable capturing one's preference for elaborative thought. Across five experiments, we replicated basic truthiness and illusory truth effects. We found very little evidence that NFC moderates truthiness. However, we found some evidence that (without an experimental warning), people high on NFC may be more susceptible to the illusory truth effect. This may reflect that elaborative thought increases the fluency with which encoded statements are processed after a delay (thus increasing the illusory truth effect). Future research may fruitfully test whether the influence of NFC and other individual difference measures depends on whether people are making immediate or delayed truth judgments.
... Second, misinformation spreads across social media, as the 2016 U.S. presidential election made abundantly clear, and people act on such information (e.g., Edgar Madisson Welch entering the Comet Ping Pong pizza shop in Washington, D.C., with a loaded rifle and handgun in an effort to investigate whether Hillary Clinton was running a child sex ring). Notably, individuals are more likely to falsely accept and remember misinformation when (a) it coheres with their prior belief system (e.g., Travis, 2010), (b) the source is viewed as credible (Fenn, Newman, Pezdek, & Garry, 2013), and (c) the information is corroborated by multiple sources (e.g., a tweet being corroborated by multiple tweets; Fragale & Heath, 2004;Zubiagi & Ji, 2014). ...
Throughout much of the 20th century, psychologists have largely examined mnemonic processes through an individualistic lens at the expense of social influences (see Danziger, 2009 for a review). However, this perspective began to change toward the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st century, thanks in large part to the work of Bartlett (1933/1995), Neisser (1976), Tulving (Tulving & Thomson, 1973), and Vygotsky and Luria (1994), when psychologists began to better appreciate the social nature of remembering. In the present paper, we focus on a relatively recent and important evolution of this line of research: the emergence of a psychological approach to collective memory. Using Hirst & Manier's (2008) epidemiological approach to collective memory, we attempt to distil the extant and relevant psychological research and focus on how (collective) memories transmit, converge, and remain stable over time while considering the bi‐directional relationship between collective memory and a mnemonic community's (Zarubavel, 1996) identity. We conclude with a discussion of research areas psychologists should examine moving forward, which will ultimately provide a more holistic understanding of how collective memories emerge, remain stable and/or change over time.
... This is particularly supported in one of the included studies, which found that adding photographic evidence from the defense's side (showing the plaintiff's positive recovery long after the injury) counteracted the increased verdicts from having the plaintiff's side alone present gruesome photographs of the plaintiff's injury (Edelman, 2009; in most studies the photographs supported the prosecution's case). The truthiness effect of photographs has been demonstrated to persist 48 hours after viewing a photograph (Fenn, Newman, Pezdek, & Garry, 2013), making it plausible that photographs may have influence for a lengthy portion of a given trial. In both the neutral-photograph and gruesome-photograph conditions, the charge against the defendant may seem more credible (as compared with the same trial without any photographs). ...
Gruesome crime scene and autopsy photographs are admissible evidence under the Federal Rules of Evidence (FRE) if their probative value substantially outweighs their prejudicial impact. Despite important methodological differences and mixed results from past studies, recommendations from the psychological literature have been made about the prejudicial impact of gruesome photographs perhaps prematurely. This meta-analysis investigates whether there is sufficient empirical evidence that presenting gruesome photographs in a trial affects legal decisions. The analysis of 23 studies and 4868 participants shows a small but statistically significant effect of gruesome photographs increasing guilty/liable verdicts or punishments, Hedge's g = 0.143, 95% CI: [0.055, 0.232]. However, this effect is significantly, Q(1) = 8.086, p = .004, and substantially moderated by an important methodological distinction: the effect is much larger when studies compare gruesome photographs with no photographs (g = 0.450) than when they are compared with neutral photographs (g = 0.077). These results suggest that gruesome photographs do increase affirmative verdicts, both through a small effect of gruesome content as well as a larger additive of having visual material. These findings help shed light on the mixed empirical results and suggest that important additional research is needed.
... This is particularly supported in one of the included studies, which found that adding photographic evidence from the defense's side (showing the plaintiff's positive recovery long after the injury) counteracted the increased verdicts from having the plaintiff's side alone present gruesome photographs of the plaintiff's injury (Edelman, 2009; in most studies the photographs supported the prosecution's case). The truthiness effect of photographs has been demonstrated to persist 48 hours after viewing a photograph (Fenn, Newman, Pezdek, & Garry, 2013), making it plausible that photographs may have influence for a lengthy portion of a given trial. In both the neutral-photograph and gruesome-photograph conditions, the charge against the defendant may seem more credible (as compared with the same trial without any photographs). ...
... Researchers have reported that when making rapid truth judgments about statements, nonprobative photos accompanying the statements (e.g., "turtles are deaf") can increase the likelihood that participants will respond "true" to those statements regardless of the actual veracity of the semantic information. These rapid intuitive feelings of truth are referred to as "truthiness," a term coined by Stephen Colbert (Fenn, Newman, Pezdek, & Garry, 2013;Newman et al., 2012). ...
General Audience Summary
In light of the fact that every day, people are inundated with a wealth of photos from many different sources (e.g., advertisements, newspapers, social media, etc.), it is important to understand the effect these photos have on our understanding of and response to information. According to previous research, when information is presented alongside a photo, people are more likely to think that information is true, even when the photo doesn’t provide any information about the truth of a statement (e.g., Newman, Garry, Bernstein, Kantner, & Lindsay, 2012). We tested whether photos can similarly affect people’s judgments about personality traits, and if it matters whether the person being judged is well-known (i.e., the self or a best friend) or not at all known (i.e., a stranger). We found that people were more likely to say that personality traits were descriptive of a stranger when the personality trait appeared alongside a trait-descriptive photo than when the personality trait appeared by itself. However, photos did not affect judgments about well-known people (the self or a best friend), and when we gave people background information about a stranger, photos no longer affected personality judgments about them, either. These results may indicate that photos can affect our judgments about people, but only if we don’t have much information about them.
Some ideas that we have feel mundane, but others are imbued with a sense of profundity. We propose that Aha! moments make an idea feel more true or valuable in order to aid quick and efficient decision-making, akin to a heuristic. To demonstrate where the heuristic may incur errors, we hypothesized that facts would appear more true if they were artificially accompanied by an Aha! moment elicited using an anagram task. In a preregistered experiment, we found that participants (n=300) provided higher truth ratings for statements accompanied by solved anagrams even if the facts were false, and the effect was particularly pronounced when participants reported an Aha! experience (d = .629). Recent work suggests that feelings of insight usually accompany correct ideas. However, here we show that feelings of insight can be overgeneralized and bias how true an idea or fact appears, simply if it occurs in the temporal 'neighbourhood' of an Aha! moment. We raise the possibility that feelings of insight, epiphanies, and Aha! moments have a dark side, and discuss some circumstances where they may even inspire false beliefs and delusions, with potential clinical importance.
Deceptive claims surround us, embedded in fake news, advertisements, political propaganda, and rumors. How do people know what to believe? Truth judgments reflect inferences drawn from three types of information: base rates, feelings, and consistency with information retrieved from memory. First, people exhibit a bias to accept incoming information, because most claims in our environments are true. Second, people interpret feelings, like ease of processing, as evidence of truth. And third, people can (but do not always) consider whether assertions match facts and source information stored in memory. This three-part framework predicts specific illusions (e.g., truthiness, illusory truth), offers ways to correct stubborn misconceptions, and suggests the importance of converging cues in a post-truth world in which falsehoods travel further and faster than the truth.
Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Psychology, Volume 71 is January 4, 2020. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.
Authors use in-text citations to provide support for their claims and to acknowledge work done by others. How much do such citations increase the believability of an author's claims? It is possible that readers (especially novices) might ignore citations as they read. Alternatively, citations ostensibly serve as evidence for a claim, which justifies using them as a basis for a judgment of truth. In six experiments, subjects saw true and false trivia claims of varying difficulty presented with and without in-text citations (e.g., The cat is the only pet not mentioned in the bible) and rated the likelihood that each statement was true. A mini meta-analysis summarizing the results of all six experiments indicated that citations had a small but reliable effect on judgments of truth (d = 0.13, 95% CI [0.06, 0.20]) suggesting that subjects were more likely to believe claims that were presented with citations than without. We discuss this citation effect and how it is similar and different to related research suggesting that nonprobative photos can increase judgments of truth.
This article advances a continuing line of inquiry into an innovative teacher-support program intended to help in-service history teachers develop professional teaching knowledge for inquiry-based history instruction. Two prior iterations informed our design and use of professional development materials; they also informed the implementation schedule of experiences our materials intended to support. We asked: Can interactive and collaborative professional development encounters promote in-service history teachers' professional teaching knowledge? Following the thirteen-month study, no participant fully adopted the wise-practice pedagogy we advocated: problem-based historical inquiry. Findings do suggest, however, interactive experiences and sustained collaboration may help teachers raise their aspirational goals for planning powerful instruction. Throughout the study, teachers' collaboratively planned lessons became increasingly informed by our support program, and several participants' practice moved closer to our wise-practice model. Findings also suggest revisions to professional development materials and schedules to promote teachers' professional teaching knowledge.
The paper aims to demonstrate the importance of behavioural issues in environmental modelling. These issues can relate both to the modeler and to the modelling process including the social interaction in the modelling team. The origins of behavioural effects can be in the cognitive and motivational biases or in the social systems created as well as in the visual and verbal communication strategies used. The possible occurrence of these phenomena in the context of environmental modelling is discussed and suggestions for research topics are provided.
As pictorial-based social media (e.g., Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat, Tumblr) continue to encourage and sustain contemporary culture, the future success of America's democratic experiment may increasingly depend on its citizens’ ability to critique visual information and take informed action. Promoting critical, historical analysis of visual information in social studies classrooms can support students’ civic competence by developing their ability to identify, understand, and evaluate the powerful visual messages inundating their daily lives. Here, I share a wise-practice approach informed by current research into the educative potential of using historical photographs within a reflective inquiry approach to promote students’ civic competence.
B. W. A. Whittlesea and L. D. Williams (1998, 2000) proposed the discrepancy-attribution hypothesis to explain the source of feelings of familiarity. By that hypothesis, people chronically evaluate the coherence of their processing. When the quality of processing is perceived as being discrepant from that which could be expected, people engage in an attributional process; the feeling of familiarity occurs when perceived discrepancy is attributed to prior experience. In the present article, the authors provide convergent evidence for that hypothesis and show that it can also explain feelings of familiarity for nonlinguistic stimuli. They demonstrate that the perception of discrepancy is not automatic but instead depends critically on the attitude that people adopt toward their processing, given the task and context. The connection between the discrepancy-attribution hypothesis and the "revelation effect" is also explored (e.g., D. L. Westerman & R. L. Greene, 1996).
The sleeper effect in persuasion is a delayed increase in the impact of a message that is accompanied by a discounting cue. Despite a long history, the sleeper effect has been notoriously difficult to obtain or to replicate, with the exception of a pair of studies by Gruder et al. (1978). We conducted a series of 16 computer-controlled experiments and a replication of the Gruder et al. study to demonstrate that a sleeper effect can be obtained reliably when subjects (a) note the important arguments in a message, (b) receive a discounting cue after the message, and (c) rate the trustworthiness of the message communicator immediately after receiving the discounting cue. These operations are sufficiently different from those used in earlier studies to justify a new differential decay interpretation of the sleeper effect, in place of the dissociation hypothesis favored by most previous sleeper effect researchers. According to the differential decay interpretation, a sleeper effect occurs when message and discounting cue have opposite and near-equal immediate impacts that are not well-integrated in memory. The effect occurs, then, if the impact of the discounting cue decays faster than that of the message.
Research conducted primarily during the 1970s and 1980s supported the assertion that carefully constructed text illustrations generally enhance learners' performance on a variety of text-dependent cognitive outcomes. Research conducted throughout the 1990s still strongly supports that assertion. The more recent research has extended pictures-in-text conclusions to alternative media and technological formats and has begun to explore more systematically the “whys,” “whens,” and “for whoms” of picture facilitation, in addition to the “whethers” and “how muchs.” Consideration is given here to both more and less conventional types of textbook illustration, with several “tenets for teachers” provided in relation to each type.
Two experiments assessed the effect of intervening items on the accuracy of 94 undergraduates' recognition memory for pictures and sentences. Ss were presented a sequence of 24 pictures and sentences, later followed by the presentation of 24 intervening items. Each intervening item corresponded to, but was in the opposite modality from, one of the original items. These intervening items were either semantically relevant or irrelevant to the corresponding originals. Ss then received a same-different recognition test that included original and changed items. Despite the difference in modality, the presence of a semantically relevant intervening item depressed the obtained values of |d and the probability of a hit, relative to the effects of an irrelevant intervening item. Results are discussed in terms of support for the integration property of constructive memory. The interpretation is that Ss semantically integrated the original items with the relevant intervening items and made subsequent recognition responses on the basis of the integrated memory. (20 ref)
Two experiments were conducted with 35 university students and community residents to examine the relationship between semantic priming and the word-repetition effect in lexical decisions. Although it might be expected that these phenomena are caused by the operation of similar memory processes, given current models of word recognition, the relationship between them has not been empirically investigated. In the present study, the persistance of both effects was observed, and it was found that while facilitation due to semantic priming persisted for only a short time, the word repetition effect was quite strong and long-lasting. (French abstract) (29 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Critically reviews 4 categories of applications of signal detection theory (SDT) in the study of memorial processes: (a) to scale memory strength, (b) in criterial interpretations of data that seem to indicate forgetting, (c) to determine the form of trace storage and to settle the question of all-or-none learning, and (d) extensions of SDT to scale memory-based discriminability in finer analyses of retention. The techniques that SDT offers the student of memory are explained, their limitations and past misapplications are discussed, their advantages in various situations are enumerated, and future applications are suggested. (47 ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
In 3 experiments, students read expository passages concerning how scientific devices work, which contained either no illustrations (control), static illustrations of the device with labels for each part (parts), static illustrations of the device with labels for each major action (steps), or dynamic illustrations showing the "off" and "on" states of the device along with labels for each part and each major action (parts-and-steps). Results indicated that the parts-and-steps (but not the other) illustrations consistently improved performance on recall of conceptual (but not nonconceptual) information and creative problem solving (but not verbatim retention), and these results were obtained mainly for the low prior-knowledge (rather than the high prior-knowledge) students. The cognitive conditions for effective illustrations in scientific text include appropriate text, tests, illustrations, and learners. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Previous research has shown that repeated statements are rated as more true than new ones. In Exp I, 98 undergraduates rated sentences for truth on 2 occasions, 3 wks apart. Results indicate that the repetition effect depends on Ss' detection of the fact that a statement is repeated: statements that are judged to be repeated are rated as truer than statements judged to be new, regardless of the actual status of the statements. Exp II with 64 undergraduates showed that repeated statements increment in credibility even if Ss were informed that they were repeated. It was further determined that statements that contradicted early ones were rated as relatively true if misclassified as repetitions but that statements judged to be changed were rated as relatively false: Ss were predisposed to believe statements that seemed to reaffirm existing knowledge and to disbelieve statements that contradicted existing knowledge. (15 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Reports 4 experiments concerning the effect of repetition on rated truth (the illusory-truth effect). Statements were paired with differentially credible sources (true vs false). Old trues would be rated true on 2 bases, source recollection and statement familiarity. Old falses, however, would be rated false if sources were recollected, leaving the unintentional influence of familiarity as their only basis for being rated true. Even so, falses were rated truer than new statements unless sources were especially memorable. Estimates showed the contributions of the 2 influences to be independent; the intentional influence of recollection was reduced if control was impaired, but the unintentional influence of familiarity remained constant. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Nonfamous names presented once in an experiment are mistakenly judged as famous 24 hr later. On an immediate test, no such false fame occurs. This phenomenon parallels the sleeper effect found in studies of persuasion. People may escape the unconscious effects of misleading information by recollecting its source, raising the criterion level of familiarity required for judgments of fame, or by changing from familiarity to a more analytic basis for judgment. These strategies place constraints on the likelihood of sleeper effects. We discuss these results as the unconscious use of the past as a tool vs its conscious use as an object of reflection. Conscious recollection of the source of information does not always occur spontaneously when information is used as a tool in judgment. Rather, conscious recollection is a separate act. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
When people evaluate claims, they often rely on what comedian Stephen Colbert calls "truthiness," or subjective feelings of truth. In four experiments, we examined the impact of nonprobative information on truthiness. In Experiments 1A and 1B, people saw familiar and unfamiliar celebrity names and, for each, quickly responded "true" or "false" to the (between-subjects) claim "This famous person is alive" or "This famous person is dead." Within subjects, some of the names appeared with a photo of the celebrity engaged in his or her profession, whereas other names appeared alone. For unfamiliar celebrity names, photos increased the likelihood that the subjects would judge the claim to be true. Moreover, the same photos inflated the subjective truth of both the "alive" and "dead" claims, suggesting that photos did not produce an "alive bias" but rather a "truth bias." Experiment 2 showed that photos and verbal information similarly inflated truthiness, suggesting that the effect is not peculiar to photographs per se. Experiment 3 demonstrated that nonprobative photos can also enhance the truthiness of general knowledge claims (e.g., Giraffes are the only mammals that cannot jump). These effects add to a growing literature on how nonprobative information can inflate subjective feelings of truth.
With the increasing sophistication and ubiquity of the Internet, behavioral research is on the cusp of a revolution that will do for population sampling what the computer did for stimulus control and measurement. It remains a common assumption, however, that data from self-selected Web samples must involve a trade-off between participant numbers and data quality. Concerns about data quality are heightened for performance-based cognitive and perceptual measures, particularly those that are timed or that involve complex stimuli. In experiments run with uncompensated, anonymous participants whose motivation for participation is unknown, reduced conscientiousness or lack of focus could produce results that would be difficult to interpret due to decreased overall performance, increased variability of performance, or increased measurement noise. Here, we addressed the question of data quality across a range of cognitive and perceptual tests. For three key performance metrics-mean performance, performance variance, and internal reliability-the results from self-selected Web samples did not differ systematically from those obtained from traditionally recruited and/or lab-tested samples. These findings demonstrate that collecting data from uncompensated, anonymous, unsupervised, self-selected participants need not reduce data quality, even for demanding cognitive and perceptual experiments.
Signal detection theory (SDT) may be applied to any area of psychology in which two different types of stimuli must be discriminated.
We describe several of these areas and the advantages that can be realized through the application of SDT. Three of the most
popular tasks used to study discriminability are then discussed, together with the measures that SDT prescribes for quantifying
performance in these tasks. Mathematical formulae for the measures are presented, as are methods for calculating the measures
with lookup tables, computer software specifically developed for SDT applications, and general purpose computer software (including
spreadsheets and statistical analysis software).
A signal detection analysis assessed the extent to which forced confabulation results from a change in memory sensitivity (d
a
), as well as response criterion (β). After viewing a crime video, participants answered 14 answerable and 6 unanswerable questions. Those in the voluntary guess condition had a “don’t know” response option; those in the forced guess condition did not. One week later, the same questions were answered using a recognition memory test that included each participant’s initial responses. As was predicted, on both answerable and unanswerable questions, participants in the forced guess condition had significantly lower response criteria than did those who voluntarily guessed. Furthermore, on both answerable and unanswerable questions, d
a
scores were also significantly lower in the forced than in the voluntary guess condition. Thus, the forced confabulation effect is a real memory effect above and beyond the effects of response bias; forcing eyewitnesses to guess or speculate can actually change their memory.
Amazon's Mechanical Turk is an online labor market where requesters post jobs and workers choose which jobs to do for pay. The central purpose of this article is to demonstrate how to use this Web site for conducting behavioral research and to lower the barrier to entry for researchers who could benefit from this platform. We describe general techniques that apply to a variety of types of research and experiments across disciplines. We begin by discussing some of the advantages of doing experiments on Mechanical Turk, such as easy access to a large, stable, and diverse subject pool, the low cost of doing experiments, and faster iteration between developing theory and executing experiments. While other methods of conducting behavioral research may be comparable to or even better than Mechanical Turk on one or more of the axes outlined above, we will show that when taken as a whole Mechanical Turk can be a useful tool for many researchers. We will discuss how the behavior of workers compares with that of experts and laboratory subjects. Then we will illustrate the mechanics of putting a task on Mechanical Turk, including recruiting subjects, executing the task, and reviewing the work that was submitted. We also provide solutions to common problems that a researcher might face when executing their research on this platform, including techniques for conducting synchronous experiments, methods for ensuring high-quality work, how to keep data private, and how to maintain code security.
The illusion of truth is traditionally described as the increase in perceived validity of statements when they are repeated (Hasher, Goldstein, & Toppino, 1977). However, subsequent work has demonstrated that the effect can arise due to the increased familiarity or fluency afforded by repetition and not necessarily to repetition per se. We examine the case of information retrieved from memory. Recently experienced information is expected to be subsequently reexperienced as more fluent and familiar than novel information (Jacoby, 1983; Jacoby & Dallas, 1981). Therefore, the possibility exists that information retrieved from memory, because it is subjectively re-experienced at retrieval, would be more fluent or familiar than when it was first learned and would thus lead to an increase in perceived validity. Using a method to indirectly poll the perceived truth of factual statements, our experiment demonstrated that information retrieved from memory does indeed give rise to an illusion of truth. The effect was larger than when statements were explicitly repeated twice and was of comparable size to when statements were repeated 4 times. We conclude that memory retrieval is a powerful method for increasing the perceived validity of statements (and subsequent illusion of truth) and that the illusion of truth is a robust effect that can be observed even without directly polling the factual statements in question.
The duration of long-term semantic priming is typically described in minutes. Woltz and Was (2007) found that priming effects following processing in working memory were relatively long-lasting, reporting there was no decrease in priming effects following 32 intervening Stroop-like trials. These findings were interpreted as an increased availability of long-term memory elements, in part due to memory for prior operations, and as not being solely explicable by spreading-of-activation accounts of priming. The present study was designed to test the persistence of these effects following a 24-h delay. In the present study, priming effects were found to be present following a minimum of a 24-h delay between processing of information in working memory and measures of increased availability of long-term memory elements. The results are discussed, in the context of long-term semantic priming, as being the result of persistent memory for prior cognitive operations.
A hallmark of the experience of perceptual fluency is the sense that a familiar stimulus seems to pop out from its background, such as when one notices the face of a friend in a crowd of strangers. This experience suggests that fluency-based illusions of recognition memory may be more powerful when there are only a few fluent stimuli presented in a recognition context. The results of the present study were consistent with this prediction. The magnitude of fluency-based illusions of recognition memory was inversely related to the percentage of fluent stimuli on a recognition test. Furthermore, standard fluency manipulations did not impact recognition responses in between-participants designs. The results suggest that illusions of recognition memory may be more powerful when fluency is encountered in a context in which the surrounding stimuli are less fluent.
A total of 1,242 subjects, in five experiments plus a pilot study, saw a series of slides depicting a single auto-pedestrian accident. The purpose of these experiments was to investigate how information supplied after an event influences a witness's memory for that event. Subjects were exposed to either consistent, misleading, or irrelevant information after the accident event. Misleading information produced less accurate responding on both a yes-no and a two-alternative forced-choice recognition test. Further, misleading information had a larger impact if introduced just prior to a final test rather than immediately after the initial event. The effects of misleading information cannot be accounted for by a simple demand-characteristics explanation. Overall, the results suggest that information to which a witness is exposed after an event, whether that information is consistent or misleading, is integrated into the witness's memory of the event.
Reports experiments designed to explore the relationship between the more aware autobiographical form of memory that is measured by a recognition memory test and the less aware form of memory that is expressed in perceptual learning. Ss were 247 undergraduates. Variables such as the level of processing of words during study influenced recognition memory, but not subsequent perceptual recognition. In contrast, variables such as the number and the spacing of repetitions produced parallel effects on perceptual recognition and recognition memory. It is suggested that there are 2 bases for recognition memory. If an item is readily perceived so that it seems to "jump out" from the page, the S is likely to judge that it has been seen in the experimental situation. The 2nd basis for recognition memory involves elaboration of a word's study context and depends on such factors as level of processing during study--factors not important for perceptual recognition of isolated words. Effects of study on perceptual recognition appear to be totally due to memory for physical or graphemic information. Results are also relevant to theories of perceptual learning. Effects of study on perceptual recognition partly depend on the same variables as do effects on more standard memory tests. (59 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved).
Semantic priming is traditionally viewed as an effect that rapidly decays. A new view of long-term word priming in attractor neural networks is proposed. The model predicts long-term semantic priming under certain conditions. That is, the task must engage semantic-level processing to a sufficient degree. The predictions were confirmed in computer simulations and in 3 experiments. Experiment 1 showed that when target words are each preceded by multiple semantically related primes, there is long-lag priming on a semantic-decision task but not on a lexical-decision task. Experiment 2 replicated the long-term semantic priming effect for semantic decisions with only one prime per target. Experiment 3 demonstrated semantic priming with much longer word lists at lags of 0, 4, and 8 items. These are the first experiments to demonstrate a semantic priming effect spanning many intervening items and lasting much longer than a few seconds.
Numerous studies have demonstrated that exposure to misinformation about a witnessed event can lead to false memories in both children and adults. The present study extends this finding by identifying forced confabulation as another potent suggestive influence. Participants from 3 age groups (1st grade, 3rd/4th grade, and college age) viewed a clip from a movie and were "forced" to answer questions about events that clearly never happened in the video they had seen. Despite evidence that participants would not have answered these questions had they not been coerced into doing so, 1 week later participants in all age groups came to have false memories for the details they had knowingly fabricated earlier. The results also showed that children were more prone to this memory error than were adults.
Signal detection theory (SDT) may be applied to any area of psychology in which two different types of stimuli must be discriminated. We describe several of these areas and the advantages that can be realized through the application of SDT. Three of the most popular tasks used to study discriminability are then discussed, together with the measures that SDT prescribes for quantifying performance in these tasks. Mathematical formulae for the measures are presented, as are methods for calculating the measures with lookup tables, computer software specifically developed for SDT applications, and general purpose computer software (including spreadsheets and statistical analysis software).
Repeated statements receive higher truth ratings than new statements. Given that repetition leads to greater experienced processing fluency, the author proposes that fluency is used in truth judgments according to its ecological validity. Thus, the truth effect occurs because people learn that fluency and truth tend to be positively correlated. Three experiments tested this notion. Experiment 1 replicated the truth effect by directly manipulating processing fluency; Experiment 2 reversed the effect by manipulating the correlation between fluency and truth in a learning phase. Experiment 3 generalized this reversal by showing a transfer of a negative correlation between perceptual fluency (due to color contrast) and truth to truth judgments when fluency is due to prior exposure (i.e., repetition).
In 2 experiments, the authors investigated available but unattended information following working memory task demands. The experimental task presented a memory set containing exemplars from 2 conceptual categories. Following instructions to focus attention on only 1 category, priming of both categories was assessed with category comparisons of exemplar pairs. Priming was greatest for the focused category and for exemplars from the memory set (direct priming). Priming also extended to new exemplars of both categories (indirect priming) and showed little decline over more than 1 min of intervening processes. Finally, changing between category exemplars and features across memory set and comparison phases eliminated the indirect priming. These results support a persistent, operation-specific, procedural account of available but unattended conceptual information in working memory.
The editors of this volume asked all us contributors to say something nice about the honouree. Okay: he writes long, convoluted articles packed with experiments (probably some kind of compensation for his shortness); he does have a nice ‘conference’ voice (resulting from liberal application of scotch to his tonsils); and he may be nearly as smart as he thinks he is. Best I can do.
Numerous studies have demonstrated that exposure to misinformation about a witnessed event can lead to false memories in both children and adults. The present study extends this finding by identifying forced confabulation as another potent suggestive influence. Participants from 3 age groups; (Ist grade, 3rd/4th grade, and college age) viewed a clip from a movie and were "forced'' to answer questions about events that clearly never happened in the video they had seen. Despite evidence that participants would not have answered these questions had they not been coerced into doing so, 1 week later participants in all age groups came to have false memories for the derails they had knowingly fabricated earlier. The results also showed that children were more prone to this memory error than were adults.
In three experiments, students read expository passages concerning how scientific devices work, which contained either no illustrations (control), static illustrations of the device with labels for each part (parts), static illustrations of the device with labels for each major action (steps), or dynamic illustrations showing the "off" and "on" states of the device along with labels for each part and each major action (parts-and-steps). Results indicated that the parts-and-steps (but not the other) illustrations consistently improved performance on recall of conceptual (but not nonconceptiual) information and creative problem solving (but not verbatim retention), and these results were obtained mainly for the low prior-knowledge (rather than the high prior-knowledge) students. The cognitive conditions for effective illustrations in scientific text include appropriate text, tests, illustrations, and learners.
We propose that confidence in potential answers to general knowledge questions is based, in part, on the ease with which those answers come to mind. Consistent with this hypothesis, prior exposure to correct and to related but incorrect answers to general knowledge questions increased the speed, frequency, and confidence with which subjects gave those answers on a subsequent test of general knowledge. Similar effects were obtained even when subjects were warned that the list included incorrect answers (Experiment 2). The results of Experiment 3 indicated that the effects do not rely on deliberate search of memory for the list: Subjects who read a list with correct answers to half of the questions on a subsequent test gained full benefit of exposure to correct answers relative to subjects who read a list with correct answers to all of the questions, yet showed no cost on questions for which answers were not in the list relative to subjects who read a list of unrelated fillers. Finally, Experiments 4a and 4b demonstrated that prior exposure to incorrect answers can give rise to illusions of knowing even when subjects know that all of the answers on the study list were incorrect. In those studies, subjects were correctly informed that all of the answers on the list were incorrect, yet those who had studied the list with divided attention nonetheless tended to give the studied incorrect answers as responses to the knowledge questions. We discuss these findings in terms of Jacoby, Kelley. and Dywans (1989) attributional approach to subjective experience.
In a new test of the process of forgetting, the authors found that subjects, at the time of exposure, discounted material from “untrustworthy” sources. In time, however, the subjects tended to disassociate the content and the source with the result that the original scepticism faded and the “untrustworthy” material was accepted. Lies, in fact, seemed to be remembered better than truths.
PICTURES OF OBJECTS WERE RECALLED SIGNIFICANTLY BETTER THAN THEIR NAMES ON THE 1ST 2 OF 4 FREE RECALL TRIALS. RECALL FOR THE 2 MODES DID NOT DIFFER IN INTERTRIAL ORGANIZATION BUT STRIKING DIFFERENCES OCCURRED AS A FUNCTION OF INPUT SERIAL ORDER. PICTURE SUPERIORITY OCCURRED FOR TERMINAL INPUT ITEMS ON TRIAL 1, AND BOTH TERMINAL AND EARLY ITEMS ON TRIAL 2. FINDINGS ARE DISCUSSED IN TERMS OF VERBAL AND NONVERBAL (CONCRETE) MEMORY CODES. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
In three experiments with difficult stimuli, it was found that the addition of a representative picture to a news item improves recall of that item. Second, as predicted by dual-coding theory (DCT), concrete news items were recalled better than abstract news items (Experiments 2 and 3). Furthermore, concrete news items benefited more from the addition of a news picture than did abstract news items (Experiment 3). In Experiment 4, it was found that news concreteness was strongly correlated with various picture attributes, including visual-verbal overlap, which might in part explain the differential gain in recall from the addition of pictures to concrete and abstract news. The results are explained using Paivio's DCT.
Amazon's Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is a relatively new website that contains the major elements required to conduct research: an integrated participant compensation system; a large participant pool; and a streamlined process of study design, participant recruitment, and data collection. In this article, we describe and evaluate the potential contributions of MTurk to psychology and other social sciences. Findings indicate that (a) MTurk participants are slightly more demographically diverse than are standard Internet samples and are significantly more diverse than typical American college samples; (b) participation is affected by compensation rate and task length, but participants can still be recruited rapidly and inexpensively; (c) realistic compensation rates do not affect data quality; and (d) the data obtained are at least as reliable as those obtained via traditional methods. Overall, MTurk can be used to obtain high-quality data inexpensively and rapidly.
© The Author(s) 2011.
The Ss looked through a series of about 600 stimuli selected at random from an initially larger population. They were then tested for their ability to recognize these “old” stimuli in pairs in which the alternative was always a “new” stimulus selected at random from the stimuli remaining in the original population. Depending upon whether this original population consisted solely of words, sentences, or pictures, median Ss were able correctly to recognize the “old” stimulus in 90, 88, or 98% of the test pairs, respectively. Estimated lower bounds on the informational capacity of human memory considerably exceed previously published estimates.
Normative data were collected on 300 general-information questions from a wide variety of topics, including history, sports, art, geography, literature, and entertainment. Male and female undergraduates at two different universities made a one-word response to each question either in a response booklet or at a computer console. The reported data include the following for each question: (a) probability of recall for all 270 undergraduates, for males versus females, and for University of Washington subjects versus University of California, Irvine, subjects, (b) latency of correct recall, (c) latency of errors, and (d) feeling-of-knowing ratings for nonrecalled items. Correlations among these dependent variables, along with measures of reliability, are also reported.
The present paper presents a series of studies showing that relevant contextual knowledge is a prerequisite for comprehending prose passages. Four studies are reported, each demonstrating increased comprehension ratings and recall scores when Ss were supplied with appropriate information before they heard test passages. Supplying Ss with the same information subsequent to the passages produced much lower comprehension ratings and recall scores. Various explanations of the results are considered, and the role of topics in activating cognitive contexts is discussed.
This paper explores a judgmental heuristic in which a person evaluates the frequency of classes or the probability of events by availability, i.e., by the ease with which relevant instances come to mind. In general, availability is correlated with ecological frequency, but it is also affected by other factors. Consequently, the reliance on the availability heuristic leads to systematic biases. Such biases are demonstrated in the judged frequency of classes of words, of combinatorial outcomes, and of repeated events. The phenomenon of illusory correlation is explained as an availability bias. The effects of the availability of incidents and scenarios on subjective probability are discussed.
What is the effect on memory when seemingly innocuous photos accompany false reports of the news? We asked people to read news headlines of world events, some of which were false. Half the headlines appeared with photographs that were tangentially related to the event; others were presented without photographs. People saw each headline only once, and indicated whether they remembered the event, knew about it, or neither. Photos led people to immediately and confidently remember false news events. Drawing on the Source Monitoring Framework (Johnson, Hashtroudi, & Lindsay, 1993), we suggest that people often relied on familiarity and other heuristic processes when making their judgments and thus experienced effects of the photos as evidence of memory for the headlines.
The sleeper effect in persuasion is a delayed increase in the impact of a message that is accompanied by a discounting cue. Despite a long history, the sleeper effect has been notoriously difficult to obtain or to replicate, with the exception of a pair of studies by Gruder et al. (1978). We conducted a series of 16 computer-controlled experiments and a replication of the Gruder et al. study to demonstrate that a sleeper effect can be obtained reliably when subjects (a) note the important arguments in a message, (b) receive a discounting cue after the message, and (c) rate the trustworthiness of the message communicator immediately after receiving the discounting cue. These operations are sufficiently different from those used in earlier studies to justify a new differential decay interpretation of the sleeper effect, in place of the dissociation hypothesis favored by most previous sleeper effect researchers. According to the differential decay interpretation, a sleeper effect occurs when message and discounting cue have opposite and near-equal immediate impacts that are not well-integrated in memory. The effect occurs, then, if the impact of the discounting cue decays faster than that of the message.
This study examined life-span developmental differences in spontaneous integration of semantically relevant material presented in pictures and sentences. 45 third graders, 45 sixth graders, 45 high school students, and 30 adults over 60 were presented a sequence of 24 pictures and sentences, followed by 24 intervening items. Each intervening item corresponded to, but was in the opposite modality from, one of the original items and was either semantically relevant or irrelevant to the corresponding original. In a "same-different" recognition test, data suggested that the sixth-grade and high school subjects semantically integrated original items with relevant intervening items that were in the opposite modality and made subsequent recognition responses on the basis of the integrated memory. Third graders and older adults, however, showed no evidence of spontaneous, cross-modality semantic integration. Further, increasing the temporal delay between presenting the to-be-integrated items, from 5 min to 1 day, decreased overall response sensitivity but did not alter the patterns of integration results. The findings are discussed in terms of age differences in the spontaneous use of strategies for effective memory processing, with the extreme age groups processing more formal characteristics of the stimuli in memory, and the middle 2 groups processing deeper, more semantic information.
B. W. A. Whittlesea and L. D. Williams (1998, 2000) proposed the discrepancy-attribution hypothesis to explain the source of feelings of familiarity. By that hypothesis, people chronically evaluate the coherence of their processing. When the quality of processing is perceived as being discrepant from that which could be expected, people engage in an attributional process; the feeling of familiarity occurs when perceived discrepancy is attributed to prior experience. In the present article, the authors provide convergent evidence for that hypothesis and show that it can also explain feelings of familiarity for nonlinguistic stimuli. They demonstrate that the perception of discrepancy is not automatic but instead depends critically on the attitude that people adopt toward their processing, given the task and context. The connection between the discrepancy-attribution hypothesis and the "revelation effect" is also explored (e.g., D. L. Westerman & R. L. Greene, 1996).
Individuals who saw pictures for 1 to 3 s in the laboratory were tested 17 years later by mail. Identification rates were significantly higher for fragments from these previously exposed targets than for novel fragments, whereas the same stimuli evoked no differences in control groups that had not been previously exposed to the pictures. Priming--the memorial advantage conferred by prior perceptual experience--was stable over the years (r= .51). Priming was dissociated from episodic memory, in that it was present even in subjects who reported no conscious recollection of their participation in the original laboratory session. These findings suggest that the perceptual representation system is an invulnerable memory system functioning below conscious awareness.
Remembering under the influence of unconscious expectations
- D L Westerman
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