This research attempts to account for the finding that faces that have been judged with reference to traits such as honesty or friendliness are better remembered than faces judged with respect to a physical feature. Four experiments are reported in which the orienting task engaged in by the subjects was controlled. The first two experiments support an elaboration hypothesis that it is the amount rather than the type of information encoded that accounts for the observed effect. Experiments 3 and 4 provide evidence that elaborative encoding is effective because the likelihood of a distinctive feature being encoded increases with the degree of elaboration. The role of distinctiveness is emphasized.' An abbreviated description of this study has been reported elsewhere (Winograd, 1978).

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.

Three hundred thirty-eight informants who were between 1 and 7 years of age in 1963 were asked about their personal memories surrounding the assassination of President Kennedy and six other significant public events. The probability and degree of elaboration of recall showed a gradual growth function with increasing age at the time of the event for the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy but not for the other events. Self-reports of amount of rehearsal showed a low correlation with recall. Recall was high for the resignation of President Nixon in 1974, suggesting that surprise is not necessary for the formation of enduring memories of significant events. Methodological advantages and disadvantages of studying early memories for public events are discussed.

Adult age differences in recognition memory for pictures of faces were assessed under different instructional conditions. The experiment was designed to test Eysenck's "processing-deficit" account of age differences in memory by varying the subject's encoding of the faces. Although older subjects recognized fewer faces, the elaborative orienting task facilitated recognition memory equally in two different adult age groups (18-25 years vs. 50-80 years). The processing-deficit hypothesis was not supported by this finding.

Forty‐two individuals studied sixteen word lists, each of which converged on a common list associate that was not studied. Ten measures of individual differences in cognition and personality were also administered. The tendency to intrude words in recall and to falsely recognize distractor words in a recognition memory test were significantly correlated with reports of dissociative experiences and vivid mental imagery. It is argued that the memory errors, as well as the reports of dissociative experiences, reflect difficulties in source monitoring, in particular, in the discrimination of events that originate externally from those that originate internally. Copyright © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.