A demonstration and comparison of two types of inference-based memory errors.

Abstract

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.

Migration of objects and inferences across episodes

“…Recently, Hannigan and Reinitz (2001) showed that backward causal inferences sometimes cause participants to mistakenly "remember" scenes representative of those inferences. In that study, participants viewed episodes (e.g., going grocery shopping, attending a lecture) in which either a cause slide or an effect slide was presented.…”

“…The sourcemonitoring framework is again useful in accounting for this result. Hannigan and Reinitz (2001) argued that the participants remembered the results of their inferences but failed to remember that the information had been internally generated. Instead, they interpreted the information as arising from externallywitnessed events(a type of sourcemonitoring failure referred to as reality-monitoringerrors by Johnson, 1991).…”

“…In a recent study by Hannigan and Reinitz (2001), participants viewed slide sequences (called action sequences) depicting typical episodes (e.g., going to a supermarket, going to a restaurant) during the study phase of a recognitionexperiment. Each action sequence included a causal staging slide intended to induce the participants to make an inference; for instance, in the supermarket sequence, some participants saw a slide of a woman picking up oranges from the supermarket floor.…”

Three Turtles in Danger: Spontaneous Construction of Causally Relevant Spatial Situation Models.

“…This use of prior knowledge in comprehension is central to Sanford and Garrod's (1998) scenario-mapping model (see also Schmalhofer, McDaniel, & Keefe, 2002). However, the knowledge on which the detection of causal relevance is based does not have to be of a full scenario, script, or schema (Hannigan & Reinitz, 2001). Glenberg and Robertson's (1999) indexical hypothesis explains the detection of causal relevance on the basis of more elementary knowledge for at least concrete events.…”

The Popular Policeman and Other Cases : Psychological Perspectives on Legal Evidence

“…This interpretation was based on their knowledge of the physical world, in particular that part of their knowledge that is concerned with the way in which a force is transmitted from one physical object (officer Abrams) to another (Van Eck), the causal field of their intuitive theory of mechanics (tenet iii). 1 But the witnesses probably regarded this interpretation as a straightforward observation, as something they had actually seen and on which they only needed to report as faithfully as possible.Also, the police and the prosecution probably took their reports as factual evidence.How this can come about was aptly demonstrated by a recent experiment by Hannigan and Reinitz (2001). They showed subjects a series of slides of a woman shopping in a supermarket and at one point picking up an orange off the floor.…”