Influences of temporal factors on memory conjunction errors

Abstract

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).

Hyper-binding across time: Age differences in the effect of temporal proximity on paired-associate learning.

“…Older adults consistently made more false alarms to near re-pairings than to far re-pairings, suggesting that rearranged pairs from close together in the study list were more likely to seem old to older adults. In contrast, younger adults' rate of false alarms was unaffected by temporal proximity within the study list, an effect that replicates previous work within that age group (e.g., Hannigan & Reinitz, 2000;Reinitz & Hannigan, 2001). Hit rate, on the other hand, did not vary across age group or re-pairing condition, suggesting that (a) older adults are just as good as younger adults at endorsing intact pairs as old, which is in line with previous work (e.g., Castel & Craik, 2003;Cohn et al, 2008) and (b) our near/far manipulation did not affect participants' ability to identify previously viewed pairs.…”

Arousal-enhanced location memory for pictures

“…In contrast, in working memory studies requiring rehearsal of multiple picture-location conjunctions immediately after seeing them in a sequence, participants were worse at remembering the locations if all four pictures were arousing than if they were non-arousing Mitchell et al, 2006). Rehearsing two items at the same time in working memory (Reinitz & Hannigan, 2004;Hannigan & Reinitz, 2000) or alternating attention between two different items (Reinitz & Hannigan, 2001) can dramatically increase conjunction errors over conditions in which the two items are seen in the same study list, but are not simultaneously rehearsed. The findings of impaired source memory for arousing items Mitchell et al, 2006) indicate that having multiple emotionally arousing elements in working memory simultaneously makes it even more difficult to maintain multiple bound representations of objects and their features, perhaps because the emotionally arousing elements demand focused attention during rehearsal.…”

Improving the quality of facial composites using a holistic cognitive interview.

“…Unfortunately, the rating data also suggest that relational information was not a better match with the target following the holistic interview. It is known that relational information is effortful to encode (Reinitz, Morrisey & Demb, 1994), is measurably worse after 24 hours (Hannigan & Reinitz, 2000), and would appear to be more of a recall than a recognition process. Being more recall-based, asking witnesses to explicitly describe the relational information, perhaps as part of the CI, may help to improve the constructed configuration.…”