No abstract

Three groups of informants--two in California, one in Atlanta--recalled their experiences of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake shortly after the event and again 11/2 years later. The Californians' recalls of their own earthquake experiences were virtually perfect. Even their recalls of hearing the news of an earthquake-related event were very good: much higher than Atlantan recalls of hearing about the quake itself. Atlantans who had relatives in the affected area remembered significantly more than those who did not. These data show that personal involvement in the quake led to greatly improved recall, but do not show why. Many Californian informants reported low levels of stress/arousal during the event; arousal ratings were not significantly correlated with recall. The authors suggest that repeated narrative rehearsals may have played an important role.

Surprisingly, Bartlett's (1932) famous repeated reproduction experiments, in which he found systematically increasing errors in recall from the same people tested over time, have never been successfully replicated. Several studies have attempted partial replications, which were unsuccessful, and their authors concluded that the original observations might not be replicable. We conducted a study modeled closely after Bartlett's procedures: Subjects studied "The War of the Ghosts," took an initial test 15 min later, and then took a delayed test after 1 week. A follow-up test was conducted 6 months later on as many subjects as could be obtained. We did replicate Bartlett's results, in that (1) subjects forgot the story over delays but (2) introduced rationalization and distortion into their accounts of the story, with increases in the proportion of material distorted as retention interval increased. Subjects also imported new propositions at long delays, further confirming Bartlett's empirical observations and conclusions. Bartlett's repeated reproduction results can be replicated.

Little work on the psychophysiology of blushing has been done since Darwin's 1872 observations. Facial vascular and temperature changes have been largely ignored in psychophysiology. We had 16 female and 16 male undergraduate volunteers watch a videotape intended to produce blushing (the individual's singing recorded the previous day), and a videotape not intended to produce blushing, but elicit physiological responses for comparison (a segment from Hitchcock's movie Psycho). Four people were present as a subject watched these video segments. Cheek and ear coloration, measured photoplethysmographically, cheek temperature, and finger skin conductance responses were significantly greater during stimulation intended to elicit blushing than during comparison stimulation. Gender interacted statistically with kind of stimulation only in cheek temperature. Only video segments of the subject's face that coincided with maximal cheek coloration during stimulation intended to produce blushing were judged reliably as blushing, and then more often in females than in males.

In this experiment, we examined the degree to which four implicit tests and two explicit tests, all involving auditory presentation, were sensitive to the perceptual characteristics of the stimuli presented during study. Presenting stimuli visually decreased priming in all the implicit memory tests, relative to auditory presentation. However, changing voice between study and test decreased priming only in the implicit memory tests requiring identification of words degraded by noise or by low-pass filtering, but not in those tests requiring generation from word portions (stems and fragments). Modality effects without voice effects were observed in cued recall, but the opposite pattern of results (voice effects without modality effects) was obtained in recognition. The primary new finding is the demonstration that auditory memory tests, both explicit and implicit, differ in their sensitivity to the perceptual information encoded during study.A primary concern in implicit memory research is the degree to which implicit memory tests are dependent on the perceptual characteristics of the information encoded during study. Perceptual or data-driven implicit memory tests tap into recent experiences incidentally (i.e., in the absence ofinstructions to recollect) by requiring subjects to identify stimuli that have undergone some form ofdegradation. Most research in this area has used implicit tests that employ verbal materials presented in a visual format. For example, subjects who have recently read the word window might be asked, in an ostensibly unrelated task, to complete a word stem (win_) or fragment (w_n_o_) with the first word to come to mind (word stem completion and word fragment completion) or to identify a word degraded by a mask (perceptual identification). In each case, priming is defined as subjects' identifying or completing previously studied words more often than nonstudied words.In general, visual implicit tests like those described above are sensitive to study-to-test changes in the perceptual characteristics of the studied words. For instance, Rajaram and Roediger (1993) found that four implicit memory tests (perceptual identification, word stem and fragment completion, and anagram solution) showed a decrement in priming following study-to-test changes in salient perceptual dimensions, such as modality of presentation (auditory study and visual test) and format (picture study and verbal test; see, also, Weldon, 1991).We thank Mark Yen for his help in conducting the experiments and Sandy Hale and Erik Bergman for recording the stimuli. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to M. Pi lotti, Department of Psychology, Washington University, One Brookings Drive, Campus Box 1125, St. Louis, MO 63130-4899 (e-mail: mpilotti@ artsci.wustl.edu).In the last several years, researchers have extended the study of implicit memory to the auditory domain. Thus, a number of auditory implicit tests have been developed that are analogous to visual implicit tests: auditory perceptual identification (Ch...