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What makes a thought feel intrusive? One possibility is that traumatic experiences are the primary cause of intrusive thoughts and memories. Another possibility is that experiences of intrusiveness arise from the features involved with re-experiencing. We investigated several features that may lead a thought to feel intrusive: task-congruence, repetition, and affective content. In Experiment 1, participants listened to popular song clips expected to become stuck in one's head. In Experiment 2, participants were cued to recall their own autobiographical memories. We found that both songs and autobiographical memories replaying mentally felt more intrusive when they were incongruent with the current task, cued repeatedly, and had negative emotional content. Additionally, even liked songs and positive autobiographical memories were evaluated as highly intrusive under some conditions. Based on these findings, we argue that intrusiveness is not limited to traumatic thoughts, but rather is a context-dependent evaluation influenced by a variety of features., Competing Interests: Declaration of Competing Interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (Copyright © 2023 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Research on eyewitness identification often involves exposing participants to a simulated crime and later testing memory using a lineup. We conducted a systematic review showing that pre-event instructions, instructions given before event exposure, are rarely reported and those that are reported vary in the extent to which they warn participants about the nature of the event or tasks. At odds with the experience of actual witnesses, some studies use pre-event instructions explicitly warning participants of the upcoming crime and lineup task. Both the basic and applied literature provide reason to believe that pre-event instructions may affect eyewitness identification performance. In the current experiment, we tested the impact of pre-event instructions on lineup identification decisions and confidence. Participants received non-specific pre-event instructions (i.e., "watch this video") or eyewitness pre-event instructions (i.e., "watch this crime video, you'll complete a lineup later") and completed a culprit-absent or -present lineup. We found no support for the hypothesis that participants who receive eyewitness pre-event instructions have higher discriminability than participants who receive non-specific pre-event instructions. Additionally, confidence-accuracy calibration was not significantly different between conditions. However, participants in the eyewitness condition were more likely to see the event as a crime and to make an identification than participants in the non-specific condition. Implications for conducting and interpreting eyewitness identification research and the basic research on instructions and attention are discussed., (© 2023. The Author(s).)

People experience difficulties tracking the source of their memories following collaborative remembering. This results in a variety of source monitoring errors. Researchers have typically focused on one of these errors - instances of adopting information from external sources as one's own memories. They have failed to investigate the frequency of other possible source monitoring errors. Because of this, it is impossible to say whether observed instances of mistakenly adopting external information represent a true bias in remembering or whether these errors simply reflect one of many memory errors that have an equal likelihood of occurring. In two studies, we teased apart these two possibilities. Members of dyads individually studied pictures with some items appearing in both participants' pictures and some unique to each one's pictures. Participants then collaboratively recalled what items were present. After the collaborative recall, participants completed individual source monitoring tests. We found that participants displayed biases in their source monitoring errors for information discussed during collaborative remembering. They were more likely to adopt information from partners as their own memories than attribute their contributions to their partners. They also more often believed their memories (rather than their partner's) were shared, representing a false consensus. Importantly, these biases only occurred following collaborative remembering and not when individuals received comparable information in a non-social setting. These results illuminate the importance of investigating the relative, and not just absolute, frequency of source monitoring errors and provide insight into how collaborative remembering changes individual memories over time., (Copyright © 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

How is it possible to drive home and have no awareness of the trip? We documented a new form of inattentional blindness in which people fail to become aware of obstacles that had guided their behavior. In our first study, we found that people talking on cell phones while walking waited longer to avoid an obstacle and were less likely to be aware that they had avoided an obstacle than other individual walkers. In our second study, cell phone talkers and texters were less likely to show awareness of money on a tree over the pathway they were traversing. Nonetheless, they managed to avoid walking into the money tree. Perceptual information may be processed in two distinct pathways - one guiding behavior and the other leading to awareness. We observed that people can appropriately use information to guide behavior without awareness.

We investigated consistency of relationship memories. College undergraduates described five events (first meeting, first date, first fight, most embarrassing event, and favourite memory) from their current relationship or, if not currently dating, most recent relationship. Three months later, they were asked to describe the same events again. We scored the consistency of these narratives at three levels of analysis: event, basic information and propositions. The participants demonstrated low consistency in their descriptions, particularly at more detailed levels of analysis. Consistency depended somewhat on the events being recalled, with participants being more consistent for commonly retrieved relationship memories such as first dates. We also found that those individuals who continued in a relationship were less consistent than those describing a previous relationship. These still dating couples had increased opportunities to narrate event stories together and to update knowledge about the relationship through new episodes. In this fashion, updating of experiences may have led to more inconsistencies in recall over time. When considered with research on flashbulb memories, our findings indicate that updating and revisions may be general features of autobiographical memory.

Collaborative inhibition is the finding that collaborative groups recall less information than nominal groups (the combined output of an equal number of individuals). The retrieval strategy disruption explanation of collaborative inhibition argues that individuals' idiosyncratic retrieval strategies are disrupted by hearing the contributions of others. In a series of studies, we investigated the role of retrieval interference and other cognitive explanations of collaborative inhibition. We asked collaborative and nominal dyads to recall lists of categorised words. We found that collaborative inhibition results from retrieval strategy disruption and from other factors. Collaborative dyads displayed more limited exploration than nominal dyads: They sampled from fewer categories and, thus, recalled fewer words. Collaborative dyads have different goals than nominal dyads, particularly limiting errors which may also reduce correct recall. We also found that the time period of recall contributes to collaborative inhibition because collaborative dyads recall fewer words early in the retrieval period but more words later than nominal dyads. In addition, we found instances of collaborative advantages such that collaborative dyads made fewer errors and demonstrated more recall organisation than nominal dyads.

In a series of experiments, we investigated the effect of pun humor on memory. In all experiments, the participants were exposed to knock-knock jokes in either the original form retaining the pun or in a modified form that removed the pun. In Experiment 1, the authors found that pun humor improved both recall and recognition memory following incidental encoding. In Experiment 2, they found evidence that rehearsal is not the cause of the humor effect on memory. In Experiments 3 and 4, the authors found that the constraints imposed by puns and incongruity may account for the humor effects observed. Puns constrain and limit the information that can fit in the final line of a joke and thus make recall easier.

Why have some researchers found reports of flashbulb memories to be stable, while others have observed inconsistencies? Paradoxically, it appears that relatively long delays between event and initial documentation have produced greater consistency of participants' reports. To investigate this directly, we collected the initial documentation of hearing about O.J. Simpson's acquittal either five hours or one week after the acquittal was read. Observed consistency of memories varied as a function of documentation time; following an eight-week retention, the delayed reports were more consistent. The delayed group also reported fewer propositions in their initial documentation. We proposed a consolidation model to explain these results: during the days immediately following a newsworthy event, the narrative structure of these memories changes in that some details are forgotten. After this consolidation period, the memories may solidify. Thus, it may have been easier for the delayed group to provide consistent memories at the two intervals.

Memory for fear onset events was examined in 43 dog-fearful and 48 blood/injection-fearful participants. Half of each fear type was administered the Phobia Origins Questionnaire (POQ), and half the Phobia Origins Structured Interview (POSI). Written accounts of recalled onset experiences were sent to participants' parents for verification. More participants assessed by the POQ reported a phobia onset event (93%) than did those assessed by the POSI (54%). A majority in both methods recalled conditioning-like experiences. The POQ resulted in more reports of vicarious and informational onset reports than did the POSI. Parents confirmed more onset event reports obtained by the POSI (81%) than those obtained by the POQ, (50%). In addition, in 21% of cases where a child recalled an event, a parent reported an onset event that predated the one provided by the child. Results are discussed in terms of memory mechanisms operative in autobiographical memories.

Memory is always constructive. People create the past based on the information that remains in memory, their general knowledge, and the social demands of the retrieval situation. Thus, memories will often contain some small errors and occasionally some large errors. In this article, we describe several different types of memory errors and consider how these errors may influence therapy.

We investigated if college students will create false childhood memories, the role of self-knowledge in memory creation, and if there are reliable individual differences related to memory creation. Based on information obtained from parents, we asked college students about several true childhood experiences. We also asked each student about one false event and presented the false event as if it was based on parent information. We asked the students to describe all events in two interviews separated by one day. When participants could not recall an event (whether true or false), we encouraged them to think about related self-knowledge and to try to imagine the event. In an unrelated experimental session, the students were administered four cognitive/personality scales: the Creative Imagination Scale (CIS), the Tellegen Absorption Scale (TAS), the Dissociative Experiences Scale (DES), and the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale (SDS). We found that approximately 25% of the students created false childhood memories. Participants who made connections to related self-knowledge in the first interview were more likely to create false memories. We also found that the CIS and the DES were positively related to memory creation. Factors that decrease one's ability to engage in reality monitoring are related to the acceptance of false events and the creation of false memories.

Seventy-six undergraduates were given the titles and first lines of Beatles' songs and asked to recall the songs. Seven hundred and four different undergraduates were cued with one line from each of 25 Beatles' songs and asked to recall the title. The probability of recalling a line was best predicted by the number of times a line was repeated in the song and how early the line first appeared in the song. The probability of cuing to the title was best predicted by whether the line shared words with the title. Although the subjects recalled only 21% of the lines, there were very few errors in recall, and the errors rarely violated the rhythmic, poetic, or thematic constraints of the songs. Acting together, these constraints can account for the near verbatim recall observed. Fourteen subjects, who transcribed one song, made fewer and different errors than the subjects who had recalled the song, indicating that the errors in recall were not primarily the result of errors in encoding.