There is overwhelming evidence that multiple systems mediate human learning. If so, then a problem of fundamental importance is to determine how control is passed back and forth among these systems. Although more research is needed, existing evidence suggests that system switching does occur, but is much less common than existing models assume, and that the bias toward strategies mediated by declarative memory is stronger than previously assumed. These shortcomings are addressed by testing a variety of different alternative models of system switching against several empirical benchmarks. The models all assumed separate explicit-rule and procedural/exemplar-similarity categorization systems. The only models that passed all benchmark tests incorporated a switch cost and switched systems when explicit-system accuracy dropped below a criterion value and procedural system accuracy was simultaneously reasonably high. This research suggests a new class of system-switching models, which could be incorporated into any existing multiple-systems model (e.g., COVIS or ATRIUM), and that is much more consistent with existing data than current models.
Research suggests that age-related episodic memory decline is characterized by a reduced ability to form detailed associations. In two experiments, we test this claim using a sensitive, indirect memory test and additionally examine how associative encoding is influenced by encoding duration. In Experiment 1, young and older adult participants studied scene–object pairs for varying durations before completing a speeded congruency judgment task involving intact, recombined, and new pairs. Recombined pairs varied based on detail-specific, perceptual (related pairs), or conceptual (unrelated pairs) features. Participants in both age groups were generally slower to respond to recombined than intact pairs on the congruency judgment task. Critically, both groups formed detail-specific associations, as evidenced by slower response times to related compared to intact pairs – though this effect emerged only at longer encoding durations for older adults. In Experiment 2, using a similar paradigm, we replicated the response time effects in older adults using a single encoding duration and additionally observed poorer memory for recombined pairs relative to young adults on a traditional recognition (direct) memory task. Our findings indicate that older adults can form detailed associations, as demonstrated by faster response times to intact compared to recombined pairs, and can access those associations when retrieval demands are minimized in indirect memory tests.
Decades of research report robust gender differences in autobiographical memory: women's memories are described as longer, more emotional, vivid, relational, and coherent than men's. Such findings are typically interpreted as evidence of two stable kinds of mnemonic minds. This theoretical review argues for a reframing. Drawing on feminist and sociocultural theory, it recasts autobiographical remembering as a form of gendered narrative performance enacted for an audience rather than a fixed property of the rememberer. Four dominant explanatory frameworks (biological, social-cultural developmental, affect-intensity, and cognitive-style accounts) are evaluated against criteria of explanatory scope, contextual sensitivity, parsimony, and compatibility with evidence on gender identity and cultural variation. Across developmental, adult, and neuroimaging literatures, the same empirical patterns arere-read as culturally available narrative positions that shift with elicitation format, audience, cue, and self-construal. The review further argues that methodology is not a neutral instrument but is itself implicated in producing gender effects: frequency differences largely disappear when audience and instructional cues are removed, coding schemes function as culturally trained gender detectors, samples are overwhelmingly WEIRD, and psychological gender identity predicts memory variance more robustly than binary sex. A production account is advanced in which feminine- and masculine-typed remembering are accomplished, not merely reflected, in each act of narration. Implications for theory and a production-oriented research agenda, including identity measurement and gender-diverse, non-WEIRD sampling are outlined.
Previous research shows that remembering repeated events differs from remembering single events, yet little research has examined suggestibility in adults’ memory for repeated events. In the present experiment, we investigated the effects of eyewitness misinformation and the role of a warning against misinformation in a repeated-event scenario. We examined how different types of misinformation – entirely new items versus items present in non-target instances – influence reporting. Three hundred and nine participants watched four surveillance-mission videos that shared a general story structure but differed in key details. Participants were later exposed to pieces of misinformation in a video narrative of someone else reporting the first mission. Reporting was measured using free recall, cued recall, and recognition. We replicated the standard misinformation effect in the repeated-event context. We found that the warning reduced misinformation reporting, but the effect was present only in the recognition task. Based on the source-monitoring framework, we expected it would be easier to resist external (entirely new) misinformation than misinformation consistent with what was present in non-target instances, and this was also true. The warning’s lack of efficacy may be accounted for in two ways. First, the inherent difficulty of attributing details to specific instances of repeated events may have overshadowed the potential effects of the warning. Second, ours was a general warning; it might not have been strong enough to restore an adequate understanding of a memory task distorted by misinformation.
This study is concerned with the impact of plausibility on predictive sentence processing and memory for sentence content. Previous research provides inconsistent findings on how implausible input affects processing difficulty and memory performance. In a self-paced reading task and a subsequent word recognition memory task, we tried to disentangle the effects of prediction error magnitude and integrability with the situation model by contrasting unpredictable but plausible and semantically anomalous (implausible) input. To encourage deep processing of differences in plausibility, we incorporated a plausibility judgment in the self-paced reading task. Unlike comparable studies, we found longer reading times and better recognition memory for unpredictable but plausible than for implausible input. Our results suggest that when thorough relational processing is encouraged by the experimental task, unpredictable but plausible input entails slower processing and deeper memory encoding than implausible input. At the same time, knowing that anomalous sentences will occur in the task may have enabled participants to quickly discard the implausible input as uninformative, which led to quicker but also shallower processing. We suggest that prediction error caused by implausible input can be largely explained away top-down by high-level expectations even though it is not possible to predict the more specific semantic and lexical features of this input.
