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Participants viewed slides depicting ordinary routines (e.g., going grocery shopping) and later received a recognition test. In Experiment 1, there was higher recognition confidence to high-schema-relevant than to low-schema-relevant items. In Experiment 2, participants viewed slide sequences that sometimes contained a cause (e.g., woman taking orange from bottom of pile) but not an effect scene (oranges on floor), or an effect but not a cause scene. Participants mistook new cause scenes as old when they viewed the effect; false alarms to cause scenes and high-schema-relevant items increased with retention interval. Experiment 3 showed that the backward inference effect was accompanied by false explicit recollection, whereas false alarms to schema-high foils were based on familiarity. This suggests that the 2 types of inferential errors are produced by different underlying mechanisms.

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Subjects studied faces in a full-or a divided-attention condition and then received a recognition test that included old faces, new faces constructed by combining facial features from previously studied faces ("conjunction faces"), and partly or completely new faces. Full-but not dividedattention subjects responded "old" more often to old than to conjunction faces; all subjects responded "old" to these faces more often than to partially or completely new faces. Thus it is less attentionally demanding to encode facial features than it is to encode their interrelations. Dividing attention had identical effects on an incidental and an intentional learning group. Experiment 3 demonstrated that dividing attention primarily affected explicit recollection rather than stimulus familiarity.

Subjects studied pairs of compound words; pair members were presented simultaneously (one above the other) for 2 sec or sequentially (one immediately following the other) for 1 sec each, and 6-sec interstimulus intervals separated the end of presentation of one pair and the start of that of another. A subsequent recognition test included within-pair and between-pair conjunction foils (recombinations of stimulus parts from the same study pair and from separate pairs, respectively). Previous experiments using faces as stimuli have demonstrated that when faces are presented simultaneously there are many more false alarms to within-pair than to between-pair conjunction items, and when faces are presented sequentially there is an equal number of false alarms in those two conditions. However, Experiment 1 showed that for compound word stimuli there were equally high false alarm rates to both types of foils in both study conditions relative to completely new test items. Experiment 2 showed that when rehearsal of compound words was prevented, the pattern of conjunction errors was very similar to the one typically obtained for faces. In Experiment 3, subjects falsely recalled conjunctions of withinpair compound words but not conjunctions of between-pair words in the simultaneous-study condition; no conjunctions were recalled in the sequential-study condition. The results support the idea that working memory processing is necessary for binding stimulus parts together in episodic memory.

The purpose in this study was to distinguish among possible mechanisms by which focused attention facilitates visual perceptual processing in a cued discrimination task, In two experiments, subjects verified the presence of an X in masked, briefly presented, four-letter arrays. On most trials, subjects were precued to the location of the stimulus array (valid-cue condition); however, sometimes a nonstimulus location was cued (invalid-cue condition). The exposure duration of the stimulus array was varied. In Experiment 1, there was a large effect of cue condition on hit probability, but no effect of cue condition on false alarm probability. In Experiment 2, there was a large effect of cue condition on d', In both experiments, the stimulus duration needed to reach any given performance level was greater by a constant factor for stimuli in the invalid-cue than it was in the valid-cue condition. This suggests that visual information is acquired (or utilized) more rapidly from attended than from unattended locations.Many variables affect the processes responsible for the acquisition of visual perceptual information from briefly presented stimuli. These include not only perceptual variables such as stimulus luminance (Loftus, 1985) and masking (Loftus, Johnson, & Shimamura, 1985) but also highlevel cognitive variables. As an instance of the latter, Reinitz, Wright, and Loftus (1989) have demonstrated that semantic priming directly affects the acquisition of perceptual information from pictures. This article addresses the role of another cognitive variable in the acquisition of perceptual information from briefly presented visual stimuli; specifically, focused visual attention.In many experiments, it has been demonstrated that performance is better for attended visual stimuli than it is for unattended visual stimuli across a wide variety of tasks. In such experiments, a brief cue prior to the presentation of the stimulus array serves as a signal for subjects to expect a target stimulus in a specific spatial location. Researchers using this procedure have demonstrated better performance for validly than for invalidly cued stimuli across a number of tasks, including simple detection (e.g., Bashinski & Bacharach, 1980;Posner, Snyder, & Davidson, 1980), identification (e.g., C. W. Eriksen & Hoffman, 1972;van der Heijden, Wolters, Groep, & Hagenaar, 1987), and discrimination (e.g., Downing, 1988), as well as across the two dependent measures of Many thanks to Geoff Loftus for his numerous comments and suggestions. Bob Dale, Charles Eriksen, Jeff Miller, Tram Neill, and an anonymous reviewer also provided many helpful comments on an earlier version of the manuscript. I am grateful to Dorothy Taylor for running the subjects and for her many helpful comments. The research was supported by a faculty development grant from Southeastern Louisiana University to Mark T. Reinitz; Experiment I was presented at the 1988 Psychonomic Society meeting in Chicago. Correspondence may be addressed to Mark T. Reinitz, Department of Psychology...

Subjects viewed a series of faces presented two at a time for 16 seconds. Following either a 15-minute (Experiment 1) or 24-hour (Experiment 2) retention interval they received a recognition test that included old faces as well as faces constructed by recombining features from simultaneously presented study faces (simultaneous-conjunction condition), faces from successive pairs (near-conjunction condition), and faces that were two pairs apart (farconjunction condition). In Experiment 1, false alarm rates decreased as the temporal distance between the relevant study faces increased. In Experiment 2, the false alarm rate in the simultaneous-conjunction condition was equal to the hit rate for old faces, and the false alarm rates for the other conditions was much lower. There was no eect of serial position during the study phase on the likelihood that parts of a face would later be miscombined to produce a recognition error in either experiment. The results suggest that witnesses to a crime are more likely to miscombine features of a to-be-remembered stimulus with those of another stimulus that was simultaneously present at the crime scene than with those of a stimulus encountered either earlier or later, especially when the test is delayed. Copyright # 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Many recent articles have reported that when people are asked to recollect prior events they sometimes make`memory conjunction errors'; that is, they sometimes miscombine parts of separate experiences, thereby remembering a composite that does not accurately correspond to any single, previously experienced event. As a simple example, subjects who are presented the words HANDSTAND and SHOTGUN during the study phase of a recognition experiment will often subsequently claim that the word HANDGUN has been presented (Reinitz and Demb, 1994; Reinitz et al., 1996). Similar miscombinations occur across syllables of non-words (Reinitz et al., 1992), across sentences (i.e. the subject of one sentence can be misremembered with the object of another sentence; Reinitz et al., 1992), and across faces, i.e. facial features that had occurred across dierent study faces may be later remembered as having occurred within a single face (Reinitz et al., 1992, 1994). Subjects will even sometimes remember landmarks in dierent cities as having occurred together when the recognition test includes electronically altered images that contain both landmarks (Albert et al., in press). Finally, memory conjunction errors are not restricted to a single type of memory test, but rather have been demonstrated in both recall and recognition (Reinitz et al., 1992).

Attitudes about feminism, gender equality, and gender differences were assessed for male and female students enrolled in three women's studies courses and four control courses at the beginning and end of an academic semester. Compared to control students, women's studies students agreed more with feminist and equality items, and disagreed more with gender difference items, at the beginning of the term. Nonetheless, belief in gender differences decreased among men, but not women, enrolled in women's studies courses. Additionally, women's studies courses produced increased feminist attitudes among women, but decreased feminist attitudes among the small sample of men in the study.