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Media coverage of the 2003 Iraq War frequently contained corrections and retractions of earlier information. For example, claims that Iraqi forces executed coalition prisoners of war after they surrendered were retracted the day after the claims were made. Similarly, tentative initial reports about the discovery of weapons of mass destruction were all later disconfirmed. We investigated the effects of these retractions and disconfirmations on people's memory for and beliefs about war-related events in two coalition countries (Australia and the United States) and one country that opposed the war (Germany). Participants were queried about (a) true events, (b) events initially presented as fact but subsequently retracted, and (c) fictional events. Participants in the United States did not show sensitivity to the correction of misinformation, whereas participants in Australia and Germany discounted corrected misinformation. Our results are consistent with previous findings in that the differences between samples reflect greater suspicion about the motives underlying the war among people in Australia and Germany than among people in the United States
Binding and inhibition in working memory : individual and age differences in short-term recognition
(2005)
Two studies investigated the relationship between working memory capacity (WMC), adult age, and the resolution of conflict between familiarity and recollection in short-term recognition tasks. Experiment 1 showed a specific deficit of young adults with low WMC in rejecting intrusion probes (i.e., highly familiar probes) in a modified Sternberg task, which was similar to the deficit found in old adults in a parallel experiment (K. Oberauer, 2001). Experiment 2 generalized these results to 3 recognition paradigms (modified Sternberg, local recognition, and n back tasks). Old adults showed disproportional performance deficits on intrusion probes only in terms of reaction times, whereas young adults with low WMC showed them only in terms of errors. The generality of the effect across paradigms is more compatible with a deficit in content-context bindings subserving recollection than with a deficit in inhibition of irrelevant information in working memory. Structural equation models showed that WMC is related to the efficiency of recollection but not of familiarity. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2005 APA, all rights reserved)
Two experiments investigated whether young and old adults can temporarily remove information from a capacity- limited central component of working memory (WM) into another component, the activated part of long-term memory (LTM). Experiment I used a modified Sternberg recognition task (S. Sternberg, 1969); Experiment 2 used an arithmetic memory- updating task. In both paradigms, participants memorized 2 lists, one of which was cued as temporarily irrelevant. Removal of the irrelevant list from capacity-limited WM was indexed by the disappearance of list-length effects of that list on latencies for concurrent processing tasks. Young adults could oursource the irrelevant list within 2-3 s and retrieve it back into the central part of WM later. Old adults showed the same flexibility in the arithmetic updating task but seemed somewhat less able or inclined to temporarily move information into the activated part of LTM in the modified Sternberg task
Effects of directionality in deductive reasoning : II. Premise integration and conclusion evaluation
(2005)
Previous research (Oberauer & Wilhelm, 2000) has shown an inherent directionality between the two terms linked in premises of typical deductive reasoning tasks. With three experiments we investigated the effect of inherent directionality on the time to integrate two premises and for the derivation of a conclusion. We varied figure (i.e., order of terms in the premises) and direction of inference (i.e., order of terms in the conclusion) in deduction tasks from various domains (propositional reasoning, syllogisms, spatial, temporal, and linear order reasoning). Effects of figure on premise reading times varied with the directionality of the relations. Effects of direction of inference reflected the same directionality for a subset of relations. We propose that two factors are jointly responsible for a large part of observed directionality effects in premise integration: the inherent directionality of relational statements and a general advantage for a given-new order of terms in the second premise. Difficulty of deriving a conclusion is affected by the directionality or relations if and only if the relation is semantically asymmetric, so that the directionality must be preserved in the integrated mental model
On the basis of a mete-analysis of pairwise correlations between working memory tasks and cognitive ability measures, P. L. Ackerman. M. E. Beier, and M. O. Boyle (2005) claimed that working memory capacity (WMC) shares less than 25% of its variance with general intelligence (,;) and with reasoning ability. In this comment, the authors argue that this is an underestimation because of several methodological shortcomings and biases. A reanalysis of the data reported in Ackerman et al. using the correct statistical procedures demonstrates that g and WMC are very highly correlated. On a conceptual level. the authors point out that WMC should be regarded as an explanatory construct for intellectual abilities. Theories of working memory do not claim that WMC is isomorphic with intelligence factors but that it is a very strong predictor of reasoning ability and also predicts general fluid intelligence and g.
We report two experiments testing a central prediction of the probabilistic account of reasoning provided by Oaksford and Chater (2001): Acceptance of standard conditional inferences, card choices in the Wason selection task, and quantifiers chosen for conclusions from syllogisms should vary as a function of the frequency of the concepts involved. Frequency was manipulated by a probability-learning phase preceding the reasoning tasks to simulate natural sampling. The effects predicted by Oaksford and Chater (2001) were not obtained with any of the three paradigms
The article presents a mathematical model of short-term recognition based on dual-process models and the three- component theory of working memory [Oberauer, K. (2002). Access to information in working memory: Exploring the focus of attention. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 28, 411-421]. Familiarity arises from activated representations in long-term memory, ignoring their relations; recollection retrieves bindings in the capacity- limited component of working memory. In three experiments participants encoded two short lists of nonwords for immediate recognition, one of which was then cued as irrelevant. Probes from the irrelevant list were rejected more slowly than new probes; this was also found with probes recombining letters of irrelevant nonwords, suggesting that familiarity arises from individual letters independent of their relations. When asked to accept probes whose letters were all in the relevant list, regardless of their conjunction, participants accepted probes preserving the original conjunctions faster than recombinations, showing that recollection accessed feature bindings automatically. The model fit the data best when familiarity depended only on matching letters, whereas recollection used binding information.
The article reports an experiment testing whether the Hebb repetition effectthe gradual improvement of immediate serial recall when the same list is repeated several timesdepends on overt recall of the repeated lists. Previous reports which suggest that recall is critical confound the recall manipulation with retention interval. The present experiment orthogonally varies retention interval (0 or 9 s) and whether the list is to be recalled after the retention interval. Hebb repetition learning is assessed in a final test phase. A repetition effect was obtained in all four experimental conditions; it was larger for recalled than non-recalled lists, whereas retention interval had no effect. The results show that encoding is sufficient to generate cumulative long-term learning, which is strengthened by recall. Rehearsal, if it takes place in the retention interval at all, does not have the same effect on long-term learning as overt recall.
Three experiments investigated proactive interference and proactive facilitation in a memory-updating paradigm. Participants remembered several letters or spatial patterns, distinguished by their spatial positions, and updated them by new stimuli up to 20 times per trial. Self-paced updating times were shorter when an item previously remembered and then replaced reappeared in the same location than when it reappeared in a different location. This effect demonstrates residual memory for no-longer-relevant bindings of items to locations. The effect increased with the number of items to be remembered. With one exception, updating times did not increase, and recall of final values did not decrease, over successive updating steps, thus providing little evidence for proactive interference building up cumulatively.
We asked 149 high-school students who were pretested for their working memory capacity (WMC) to read spatial descriptions relating to five objects and to evaluate conclusions asserting an unmentioned relationship between two of the objects. Unambiguous descriptions were compatible with a single spatial arrangement, whereas ambiguous descriptions permitted two arrangements; a subset of the ambiguous descriptions still determined the relation asserted in the conclusion, whereas another subset did not. Two groups of participants received different instructions: The deduction group should accept conclusions only if they followed with logical necessity from the description, whereas the comprehension group should accept a conclusion if it agreed with their representation of the arrangement. Self-paced reading times increased on sentences that introduced an ambiguity, replicating previous findings in deductive reasoning experiments. This effect was also found in the comprehension group, casting doubt on the interpretation that people consider multiple possible arrangements online. Responses to conclusions could be modelled by a multinomial processing model with four parameters: the probability of constructing a correct mental model, the probability of detecting an ambiguity, and two guessing parameters. Participants with high and with low WMC differed mainly in the probability of successfully constructing a mental model