Scholars@Duke
Elizabeth J. Marsh

Elizabeth J. Marsh

Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience
Psychology & Neuroscience
emarsh@psych.duke.edu
Box 90086, Durham, NC 27708-0086
228 Reuben-Cooke Building, Durham, NC 27708

Selected Publications

Aesthetic experience is supported by spontaneous autobiographical memory recollection.

Journal Article Memory & cognition · November 2025 What mental representations and processes support moving aesthetic reactions to abstract art? We argue that the elicitation of autobiographical memories enables viewers to appreciate abstract art through the process of personal meaning-making. In three stu ... Full text Cite

Imagine this: Memories of fiction are used in mental simulations in the absence of lived experience.

Journal Article Memory & cognition · October 2025 Memories of events from fictional sources (e.g., scenes from movies or novels) share many properties with memories of lived experiences (Yang et al., Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 151 (5), 1089,  2022). Here we test whether memories of ficti ... Full text Cite

Preserved memory for decisions across adulthood.

Journal Article Neuropsychology, development, and cognition. Section B, Aging, neuropsychology and cognition · May 2025 Remembering our decisions is crucial - it allows us to learn from past mistakes and construct future behavior. However, it is unclear if age-related memory declines impact the memorability of older adults' decisions. Here, we compared younger and older adu ... Full text Cite

Pictures Are Not Always Worth a Thousand Words: Nonprobative Pictures Did Not Increase the Effectiveness of Misinformation Corrections

Journal Article Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition · January 1, 2025 Much research has focused on the language used for debunking false beliefs: communications should lead with facts, label misinformation as false, and reinforce true information. Pictures are used in debunking messages, but it remains unclear whether they m ... Full text Open Access Cite

The Role of Structure-Seeking in Moral Punishment

Journal Article Social Justice Research · December 1, 2023 Four studies (total N = 1586) test the notion that people are motivated to punish moral rule violators because punishment offers a way to obtain structure and order in the world. First, in a correlational study, increased need for structure was associated ... Full text Cite

Heuristic decision-making across adulthood.

Journal Article Psychology and aging · September 2023 In general, research on aging and decision-making has grown in recent years. Yet, little work has investigated how reliance on classic heuristics may differ across adulthood. For example, younger adults rely on the availability of information from memory w ... Full text Cite

Understanding why searching the internet inflates confidence in explanatory ability

Journal Article Applied Cognitive Psychology · July 1, 2023 People rely on the internet for easy access to information, setting up potential confusion about the boundaries between an individual's knowledge and the information they find online. Across four experiments, we replicated and extended past work showing th ... Full text Cite

Belief in COVID-19 misinformation: Hopeful claims are rated as truer

Journal Article Applied Cognitive Psychology · March 1, 2023 Misinformation surrounding COVID-19 spread rapidly and widely, posing a significant threat to public health. Here, we examined whether some types of misinformation are more believable than others, to the extent that they offer people hope in uncertain time ... Full text Cite

Prior exposure increases judged truth even during periods of mind wandering.

Journal Article Psychonomic bulletin & review · October 2022 Much of our day is spent mind-wandering-periods of inattention characterized by a lack of awareness of external stimuli and information. Whether we are paying attention or not, information surrounds us constantly-some true and some false. The proliferation ... Full text Cite

Asymmetry in belief revision

Journal Article Applied Cognitive Psychology · September 1, 2022 Information can change: science advances, newspapers retract claims, and reccomendations shift. Successfully navigating the world requires updating and changing beliefs, a process that is sensitive to a person's motivation to change their beliefs as well a ... Full text Cite

Predicting others' knowledge in younger and older adulthood.

Journal Article Psychonomic bulletin & review · June 2022 Our beliefs about aging affect how we interact with others. For example, people know that episodic memory declines with age, and as a result, older adults' memories are less likely to be trusted. However, not all aspects of remembering decline with age; se ... Full text Cite

Transfer of category learning to impoverished contexts.

Journal Article Psychonomic bulletin & review · June 2022 Learning often happens in ideal conditions, but then must be applied in less-than-ideal conditions - such as when a learner studies clearly illustrated examples of rocks in a book but then must identify them in a muddy field. Here we examine whether the be ... Full text Cite

A comparison of memories of fiction and autobiographical memories.

Journal Article Journal of experimental psychology. General · May 2022 People consume, remember, and discuss not only memories of lived experiences, but also events from works of fiction, such as books, movies, and TV shows. We argue that these memories of fiction represent an important category of event memory, best u ... Full text Cite

The cognitive processes underlying false beliefs

Journal Article Journal of Consumer Psychology · April 1, 2022 Why do consumers sometimes fall for spurious claims—for example, brain training games that prevent cognitive decline, toning sneakers that sculpt one's body, flower essence that cures depression—and how can consumers protect themselves in the modern world ... Full text Cite

Individual Differences in Structure Building: Impacts on Comprehension and Learning, Theoretical Underpinnings, and Support for Less Able Structure Builders.

Journal Article Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · March 2022 In this article, we highlight an underappreciated individual difference: structure building. Structure building is integral to many everyday activities and involves creating coherent mental representations of conversations, texts, pictorial stories, and ot ... Full text Cite

Reforming the Seven Sins of Memory to Emphasize Interactions and Adaptiveness

Journal Article Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition · January 1, 2022 Memory errors can take many forms: forgetting an ice cream container in the back of a hot car, recalling an accident in a way that absolves one of culpability, or believing that election misinformation is true, among many others. Much research seeks to und ... Full text Cite

Populist Beliefs: Byproducts of an Adaptive System?

Chapter · January 1, 2022 Why do many people believe that gun deaths are at an all-time high? This chapter explores the cognitive factors that support the acceptance of this and other incorrect beliefs. It highlights how people use heuristics to judge truth, relying on cues such as ... Full text Cite

Externalizing autobiographical memories in the digital age.

Journal Article Trends in cognitive sciences · December 2021 People externalize their autobiographical memories by creating representations that exist outside of their minds. Externalizations often serve personal and social functions, consistent with theorized functions of autobiographical memory. With new digital t ... Full text Cite

A Comparison of Memories of Fiction and Autobiographical Memories

Journal Article · July 14, 2021 People consume, remember, and discuss not only memories of lived experiences, but also events from works of fiction, such as books, movies, and television shows. We argue that these memories of fiction represent an important category of event memory, be ... Full text Cite

Truncating Bar Graphs Persistently Misleads Viewers

Journal Article Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition · June 1, 2021 Data visualizations and graphs are increasingly common in both scientific and mass media settings. While graphs are useful tools for communicating patterns in data, they also have the potential to mislead viewers. In five studies, we provide empirical evid ... Full text Cite

Internal states and interoception along a spectrum of eating disorder symptomology.

Journal Article Physiol Behav · March 1, 2021 OBJECTIVE: Recent studies on atypical interoceptive capabilities have focused on clinical populations, including anorexia nervosa[1,2]. The present exploratory study aims to characterize the influence of disordered eating symptomology on interoceptive capa ... Full text Link to item Cite

Cultural Identity Changes the Accessibility of Knowledge

Journal Article Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition · March 1, 2021 Culture plays a significant role in determining what people believe and claim to know. Here, we argue that, in addition to shaping what people come to know, culture influences the accessibility of that knowledge. In five studies, we examined how activating ... Full text Cite

Cheaters claim they knew the answers all along.

Journal Article Psychonomic bulletin & review · February 2021 Cheating has become commonplace in academia and beyond. Yet, almost everyone views themselves favorably, believing that they are honest, trustworthy, and of high integrity. We investigate one possible explanation for this apparent discrepancy between peopl ... Full text Cite

Two routes to the same place: learning from quick closed-book essays versus open-book essays

Journal Article Journal of Cognitive Psychology · January 1, 2021 Knowing when and how to most effectively use writing as a learning tool requires understanding the cognitive processes driving learning. Writing is a generative activity that often requires students to elaborate upon and organise information. Here we exami ... Full text Open Access Cite

Benefits of testing memory: Best practices and boundary conditions

Chapter · January 1, 2021 The idea of a memory test or of a test of academic achievement is often circumscribed. Tests within the classroom are recognized as important for the assignment of grades, and tests given for academic assessment or achievement have increasingly come to det ... Full text Cite

Meal skipping and cognition along a spectrum of restrictive eating.

Journal Article Eat Behav · December 2020 OBJECTIVE: Inadequate nutrition adversely impacts brain development and cognitive functioning (Pollitt et al., 1983). Studies examining the acute impact of eating regular meals on cognition have reported inconsistent findings, necessitating the exploration ... Full text Link to item Cite

Structure-seeking as a psychological antecedent of beliefs about morality.

Journal Article Journal of experimental psychology. General · October 2020 People differ in their beliefs about the objectivity of moral claims. We investigated a possible psychological antecedent that might be associated with people's beliefs about the objectivity of moral claims. More specifically, we examined the relationship ... Full text Cite

Regaining access to marginal knowledge in a classroom setting

Journal Article Applied Cognitive Psychology · September 1, 2020 Students learn large amounts of information, but not all of it is remembered after courses end – meaning that valuable class time is often spent reviewing background material. Crucially, laboratory research suggests different strategies will be effective w ... Full text Cite

An initial accuracy focus prevents illusory truth.

Journal Article Cognition · January 2020 News stories, advertising campaigns, and political propaganda often repeat misleading claims, increasing their persuasive power. Repeated statements feel easier to process, and thus truer, than new ones. Surprisingly, this illusory truth effect occurs even ... Full text Open Access Cite

Judging Truth.

Journal Article Annual review of psychology · January 2020 Deceptive claims surround us, embedded in fake news, advertisements, political propaganda, and rumors. How do people know what to believe? Truth judgments reflect inferences drawn from three types of information: base rates, feelings, and consistency with ... Full text Cite

Remembering possible times: Memory for details of past, future, and counterfactual simulations.

Journal Article Psychology of Consciousness Theory Research and Practice · January 1, 2020 People’s capacity to mentally simulate future events (episodic future thinking) as well as what could have occurred in the past but did not (episodic counterfactual thinking) critically depends on their capacity to retrieve episodic memories. All 3 mental ... Full text Cite

False beliefs: Byproducts of an adaptive knowledge base?

Chapter · January 1, 2020 Pizzagate. The Bowling Green Massacre. Pope Francis endorsing Donald Trump for president. How should we combat such “fake news” stories, which often go viral? As cognitive scientists, we view this problem through the lens of what we know about the construc ... Full text Cite

Truncating Bar Graphs Persistently Misleads Viewers

Journal Article · September 18, 2019 In press: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jarmac.2020.10.002 Data visualizations and graphs are increasingly common in both scientific and mass media settings. While graphs are useful tools for communicating patterns in data, they also have the potential to m ... Full text Cite

Retrieval-Based Learning in Children

Journal Article Current Directions in Psychological Science · April 1, 2019 Testing oneself with flash cards, using a clicker to respond to a teacher’s questions, and teaching another student are all effective ways to learn information. These learning strategies work, in part, because they require the retrieval of information from ... Full text Cite

When the Unlikely Becomes Likely: Qualifying Language Does Not Influence Later Truth Judgments

Journal Article Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition · March 1, 2019 Judgments and decisions are frequently made under uncertainty. People often express and interpret this uncertainty with epistemic qualifiers (e.g., likely, improbable). We investigate the extent to which qualifiers influence truth judgments over time. In f ... Full text Cite

The Digital Expansion of the Mind: Implications of Internet Usage for Memory and Cognition

Journal Article Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition · March 1, 2019 The internet is rapidly changing what information is available as well as how we find it and share it with others. Here we examine how this “digital expansion of the mind” changes cognition. We begin by identifying ten properties of the internet that likel ... Full text Cite

Cognition in the Internet Age: What are the Important Questions?

Journal Article Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition · March 1, 2019 Full text Cite

Correcting Student Errors and Misconceptions

Chapter · February 7, 2019 This Handbook reviews a wealth of research in cognitive and educational psychology that investigates how to enhance learning and instruction to aid students struggling to learn and to advise teachers on how best to support student learning. ... Link to item Cite

Neural basis of goal-driven changes in knowledge activation.

Journal Article The European journal of neuroscience · December 2018 Depending on a person's goals, different aspects of stored knowledge are accessed. Decades of behavioral work document the flexible use of knowledge, but little neuroimaging work speaks to these questions. We used representational similarity analysis to in ... Full text Cite

Knowledge supports memory retrieval through familiarity, not recollection.

Journal Article Neuropsychologia · May 2018 Semantic memory, or general knowledge of the world, guides learning and supports the formation and retrieval of new episodic memories. Behavioral evidence suggests that this knowledge effect is supported by recollection-a more controlled form of memory ret ... Full text Cite

Retrieving and applying knowledge to different examples promotes transfer of learning.

Journal Article Journal of experimental psychology. Applied · December 2017 Introducing variability during learning often facilitates transfer to new contexts (i.e., generalization). The goal of the present study was to explore the concept of variability in an area of research where its effects have received little attention: lear ... Full text Cite

A Call to Think Broadly about Information Literacy

Journal Article Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition · December 1, 2017 Full text Cite

Family Matters: Measuring Impact Through One's Academic Descendants.

Journal Article Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · November 2017 Scientific contributions take many forms, not all of which result in fame or are captured in traditional metrics of success (e.g., h factor). My focus is on one of the most lasting and important contributions a scientist can make: training scientists who g ... Full text Cite

Competing cues: Older adults rely on knowledge in the face of fluency.

Journal Article Psychology and aging · June 2017 Consumers regularly encounter repeated false claims in political and marketing campaigns, but very little empirical work addresses their impact among older adults. Repeated statements feel easier to process, and thus more truthful, than new ones (i.e., ill ... Full text Cite

Understanding the cognitive processes involved in writing to learn.

Journal Article Journal of experimental psychology. Applied · June 2017 Writing is often used as a tool for learning. However, empirical support for the benefits of writing-to-learn is mixed, likely because the literature conflates diverse activities (e.g., summaries, term papers) under the single umbrella of writing-to-learn. ... Full text Cite

Expertise effects in the Moses illusion: detecting contradictions with stored knowledge.

Journal Article Memory (Hove, England) · February 2017 People frequently miss contradictions with stored knowledge; for example, readers often fail to notice any problem with a reference to the Atlantic as the largest ocean. Critically, such effects occur even though participants later demonstrate knowing the ... Full text Cite

Stories and movies can mislead

Chapter · October 4, 2016 Full text Cite

On Known Unknowns: Fluency and the Neural Mechanisms of Illusory Truth.

Journal Article Journal of cognitive neuroscience · May 2016 The "illusory truth" effect refers to the phenomenon whereby repetition of a statement increases its likelihood of being judged true. This phenomenon has important implications for how we come to believe oft-repeated information that may be misleading or u ... Full text Cite

Structure Building Predicts Grades in College Psychology and Biology

Journal Article Applied Cognitive Psychology · May 1, 2016 Knowing what skills underlie college success can allow students, teachers, and universities to identify and to help at-risk students. One skill that may underlie success across a variety of subject areas is structure building, the ability to create mental ... Full text Cite

Correcting false memories: Errors must be noticed and replaced.

Journal Article Memory & cognition · April 2016 Memory can be unreliable. For example, after reading The new baby stayed awake all night, people often misremember that the new baby cried all night (Brewer, 1977); similarly, after hearing bed, rest, and tired, people often falsely remember that sleep was ... Full text Cite

Believing that Humans Swallow Spiders in Their Sleep: False Beliefs as Side Effects of the Processes that Support Accurate Knowledge

Journal Article Psychology of Learning and Motivation Advances in Research and Theory · January 1, 2016 Humans can store, maintain, and retrieve an impressive amount of information—but the processes that support accurate knowledge can also lead to errors, such as the false belief that humans swallow eight spiders in their sleep each year. In this chapter, we ... Full text Cite

Knowledge does not protect against illusory truth.

Journal Article Journal of experimental psychology. General · October 2015 In daily life, we frequently encounter false claims in the form of consumer advertisements, political propaganda, and rumors. Repetition may be one way that insidious misconceptions, such as the belief that vitamin C prevents the common cold, enter our kno ... Full text Cite

Judging the familiarity of strangers: does the context matter?

Journal Article Psychonomic bulletin & review · August 2015 Context affects face recognition, with people more likely to recognize an acquaintance when that person is encountered in an expected and familiar place. However, we demonstrate that a familiar context can also incorrectly lead to feeling that a stranger i ... Full text Cite

Borrowing Personal Memories

Journal Article Applied Cognitive Psychology · May 1, 2015 The present investigation documents memory borrowing in college-age students, defined as the telling of others' autobiographical stories as if they are one's own. In both pilot and online surveys, most undergraduates admit to borrowing personal stories fro ... Full text Open Access Cite

Multiple-choice tests stabilize access to marginal knowledge.

Journal Article Memory & cognition · February 2015 Marginal knowledge refers to knowledge that is stored in memory, but is not accessible at a given moment. For example, one might struggle to remember who wrote The Call of the Wild, even if that knowledge is stored in memory. Knowing how best to stabilize ... Full text Cite

Learning misinformation from fictional sources: understanding the contributions of transportation and item-specific processing.

Journal Article Memory (Hove, England) · January 2015 People often pick up incorrect information about the world from movies, novels and other fictional sources. The question asked here is whether such sources are a particularly potent source of misinformation. On the one hand, story-reading involves transpor ... Full text Cite

Recent study, but not retrieval, of knowledge protects against learning errors.

Journal Article Memory & cognition · November 2014 Surprisingly, people incorporate errors into their knowledge bases even when they have the correct knowledge stored in memory (e.g., Fazio, Barber, Rajaram, Ornstein, & Marsh, 2013). We examined whether heightening the accessibility of correct knowledge wo ... Full text Cite

Delaying feedback promotes transfer of knowledge despite student preferences to receive feedback immediately

Journal Article Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition · July 1, 2014 Educators and researchers who study human learning often assume that feedback is most effective when given immediately. However, a growing body of research has challenged this assumption by demonstrating that delaying feedback can facilitate learning. Advo ... Full text Cite

Ageing and the Moses illusion: older adults fall for Moses but if asked directly, stick with Noah.

Journal Article Memory (Hove, England) · January 2014 Many people respond "two" to the question "How many animals of each kind did Moses take on the ark?", even though they know the reference should be to Noah. The Moses Illusion demonstrates a failure to apply stored knowledge (Erickson & Mattson, 1981). Of ... Full text Cite

Open online platforms advancing DSP education

Journal Article ICASSP IEEE International Conference on Acoustics Speech and Signal Processing Proceedings · October 18, 2013 Two open, online educational platforms, OpenStax Exercises and OpenStax Tutor, are working to revolutionize the way in which students learn concepts in diverse subject areas. Born and tested in the area of signal processing education, these tools bring to ... Full text Cite

Improving Students' Learning With Effective Learning Techniques: Promising Directions From Cognitive and Educational Psychology.

Journal Article Psychological science in the public interest : a journal of the American Psychological Society · January 2013 Many students are being left behind by an educational system that some people believe is in crisis. Improving educational outcomes will require efforts on many fronts, but a central premise of this monograph is that one part of a solution involves helping ... Full text Cite

Aging and the memorial consequences of catching contradictions with prior knowledge.

Journal Article Psychology and aging · December 2012 This experiment tested the possibility that older adults are less susceptible to semantic illusions because they are more likely to notice contradictions with stored knowledge. Older and young adults encoded stories containing factual inaccuracies; critica ... Full text Cite

Using Fictional Sources in the Classroom: Applications from Cognitive Psychology

Journal Article Educational Psychology Review · September 1, 2012 Fictional materials are commonly used in the classroom to teach course content. Both laboratory experiments and classroom demonstrations illustrate the benefits of using fiction to help students learn accurate information about the world. However, fictiona ... Full text Cite

Inferring facts from fiction: reading correct and incorrect information affects memory for related information.

Journal Article Memory (Hove, England) · July 2012 People can acquire both true and false knowledge about the world from fictional stories. The present study explored whether the benefits and costs of learning about the world from fictional stories extend beyond memory for directly stated pieces of informa ... Full text Cite

Positive and Negative Effects of Monitoring Popular Films for Historical Inaccuracies

Journal Article Applied Cognitive Psychology · July 1, 2012 Summary: History educators often use popular films in the classroom to teach critical thinking through an exercise that involves identifying historical inaccuracies in the films. We investigated how this exercise affects the acquisition of true and false h ... Full text Cite

Using popular films to enhance classroom learning: Mnemonic effects of monitoring misinformation

Journal Article Applied Cognitive Psychology · 2012 History educators often use popular films in the classroom to teach critical thinking through an exercise that involves identifying historical inaccuracies in the films. We investigated how this exercise affects the acquisition of true and false historical ... Cite

Memorial consequences of testing school-aged children.

Journal Article Memory (Hove, England) · January 2012 A large literature shows that retrieval practice is a powerful tool for enhancing learning and memory in undergraduates (Roediger & Karpicke, 2006a). Much less work has examined the memorial consequences of testing school-aged children. Our focus is on mul ... Full text Cite

Using verification feedback to correct errors made on a multiple-choice test.

Journal Article Memory (Hove, England) · January 2012 A key educational challenge is how to correct students' errors and misconceptions so that they do not persist. Simply labelling an answer as correct or incorrect on a short-answer test (verification feedback) does not improve performance on later tests; er ... Full text Cite

Creating illusions of knowledge: Learning errors that contradict prior knowledge

Journal Article Journal of Experimental Psychology: General · 2012 Most people know that the Pacific is the largest ocean on Earth and that Edison invented the light bulb. Our question is whether this knowledge is stable, or if people will incorporate errors into their knowledge bases, even if they have the correct knowle ... Cite

Explanation feedback is better than correct answer feedback for promoting transfer of learning

Journal Article Journal of Educational Psychology · 2012 Among the many factors that influence the efficacy of feedback on learning, the information contained in the feedback message is arguably the most important. Surprisingly, prior research has produced little evidence to suggest that there is a benefit to in ... Cite

Understanding how prior knowledge influences memory in older adults

Journal Article Perspectives on Psychological Science · 2012 In aging, episodic memory function shows serious declines, whereas ability to use one’s general knowledge either improves or remains stable over the lifespan. Our focus is on the often overlooked but critical role of intact prior knowledge as a factor that ... Cite

Suggestibility from stories: Can production difficulties and source monitoring explain a developmental reversal?

Journal Article Journal of Cognition and Development · 2012 Children’s memories improve throughout childhood, and this improvement is often accompanied by a reduction in suggestibility. In this context, it is surprising that older children learn and reproduce more factual errors from stories than do younger childr ... Cite

The hypercorrection effect persists over a week, but high-confidence errors return.

Journal Article Psychonomic bulletin & review · December 2011 People's knowledge about the world often contains misconceptions that are well-learned and firmly believed. Although such misconceptions seem hard to correct, recent research has demonstrated that errors made with higher confidence are more likely to be co ... Full text Cite

Ironic effects of drawing attention to story errors.

Journal Article Memory (Hove, England) · February 2011 Readers learn errors embedded in fictional stories and use them to answer later general knowledge questions (Marsh, Meade, & Roediger, 2003). Suggestibility is robust and occurs even when story errors contradict well-known facts. The current study evaluate ... Full text Cite

Learning from fictional sources

Chapter · January 1, 2011 Full text Cite

Memory and the Moses illusion: failures to detect contradictions with stored knowledge yield negative memorial consequences.

Journal Article Memory (Hove, England) · August 2010 Although contradictions with stored knowledge are common in daily life, people often fail to notice them. For example, in the Moses illusion, participants fail to notice errors in questions such as "How many animals of each kind did Moses take on the Ark?" ... Full text Cite

Access to handouts of presentation slides during lecture: Consequences for learning

Journal Article Applied Cognitive Psychology · July 1, 2010 Teachers often lecture with presentation software such as Microsoft PowerPoint; however, little research has examined the effects of this new technology on learning. One issue that arises is whether or not to give students copies of the lecture slides, and ... Full text Cite

Memorial consequences of multiple-choice testing on immediate and delayed tests.

Journal Article Memory & cognition · June 2010 Multiple-choice testing has both positive and negative consequences for performance on later tests. Prior testing increases the number of questions answered correctly on a later test but also increases the likelihood that questions will be answered with lu ... Full text Cite

Correcting false memories.

Journal Article Psychological science · June 2010 Full text Cite

Receiving right/wrong feedback: consequences for learning.

Journal Article Memory (Hove, England) · April 2010 Prior work suggests that receiving feedback that one's response was correct or incorrect (right/wrong feedback) does not help learners, as compared to not receiving any feedback at all (Pashler, Cepeda, Wixted, & Rohrer, 2005). In three experiments we exam ... Full text Cite

Digging into Déjà Vu: Recent Research on Possible Mechanisms

Journal Article · January 1, 2010 The déjà vu experience has piqued the interest of philosophers and physicians for over 150 years, and has recently begun to connect to research on fundamental cognitive mechanisms. Following a brief description of the nature of this recognition anomaly, th ... Full text Cite

Creating illusions of past encounter through brief exposure.

Journal Article Psychological science · May 2009 Titchener (1928) suggested that briefly glancing at a scene could make it appear strangely familiar when it was fully processed moments later. The closest laboratory demonstration used words as stimuli, and showed that briefly glancing at a to-be-judged wo ... Full text Cite

Memorial consequences of answering SAT II questions.

Journal Article Journal of experimental psychology. Applied · March 2009 Many thousands of students take standardized tests every year. In the current research, we asked whether answering standardized test questions affects students' later test performance. Prior research has shown both positive and negative effects of multiple ... Full text Cite

Surprising feedback improves later memory.

Journal Article Psychonomic bulletin & review · February 2009 The hypercorrection effect is the finding that high-confidence errors are more likely to be corrected after feedback than are low-confidence errors (Butterfield & Metcalfe, 2001). In two experiments, we explored the idea that the hypercorrection effect res ... Full text Cite

Benefits of testing memory: Best practices and boundary conditions

Chapter · January 1, 2009 The idea of a memory test or of a test of academic achievement is often circumscribed. Tests within the classroom are recognized as important for the assignment of grades, and tests given for academic assessment or achievement have increasingly come to det ... Full text Cite

Fact learning: how information accuracy, delay, and repeated testing change retention and retrieval experience.

Journal Article Memory (Hove, England) · November 2008 Previous classroom studies have shown that the phenomenology of studied facts changes over time. However, pedagogical needs preclude both the study of errors and the separation of the effects that delay and repeated testing have on retention and retrieval ... Full text Cite

Evoking false beliefs about autobiographical experience.

Journal Article Psychonomic bulletin & review · February 2008 In two experiments, we demonstrate that laboratory procedures can evoke false beliefs about autobiographical experience. After shallowly processing photographs ofreal-world locations, participants returned 1 week (Experiments 1 and 2) or 3 weeks (Experimen ... Full text Cite

Older, not younger, children learn more false facts from stories.

Journal Article Cognition · February 2008 Early school-aged children listened to stories that contained correct and incorrect facts. All ages answered more questions correctly after having heard the correct fact in the story. Only the older children, however, produced story errors on a later gener ... Full text Cite

Slowing presentation speed increases illusions of knowledge.

Journal Article Psychonomic bulletin & review · February 2008 Prior research on false memories has shown that suggestibility is often reduced when the presentation rate is slowed enough to allow monitoring. We examined whether slowing presentation speed would reduce factual errors learned from fictional stories. Woul ... Full text Cite

Slowing presentation speed increases illusions of knowledge

Journal Article Psychonomic Bulletin & Review · 2008 Prior research on false memories shows that suggestibility is often reduced when the presentation rate is slowed enough to allow monitoring. We examined whether slowing presentation speed would reduce factual errors learned from fictional stories. Would su ... Cite

Test-induced priming of false memories.

Journal Article Psychonomic bulletin & review · June 2007 Of interest was whether prior testing of related words primes false memories in the Deese/Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm. After studying lists of related words, subjects made old-new judgments about zero, three, or six related items before being tested ... Full text Cite

The memorial consequences of multiple-choice testing.

Journal Article Psychonomic bulletin & review · April 2007 The present article addresses whether multiple-choice tests may change knowledge even as they attempt to measure it. Overall, taking a multiple-choice test boosts performance on later tests, as compared with non-tested control conditions. This benefit is n ... Full text Cite

Retelling is not the same as recalling: Implications for memory

Journal Article Current Directions in Psychological Science · February 1, 2007 In contrast to laboratory free recall (which emphasizes detailed and accurate remembering), conversational retellings depend upon the speaker's goals, the audience, and the social context more generally. Because memories are frequently retrieved in social ... Full text Cite

False memories

Chapter · January 1, 2007 A complete understanding of human memory requires us to comprehend memory’s failures as well as its successes. In addition to being inherently interesting, memory errors provide insight into how memory functions for successful, accurate retrieval. This cha ... Full text Cite

When additional multiple-choice lures aid versus hinder later memory

Journal Article Applied Cognitive Psychology · November 1, 2006 Three experiments were conducted to investigate whether increasing the number of lures on a multiple-choice test helps, hinders or has no effect on later memory. All three patterns have been reported in the literature. In Experiment 1, the stimuli were unr ... Full text Cite

When does generation enhance memory for location?

Journal Article Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition · September 2006 Generation is thought to enhance both item-specific and relational processing of generated targets as compared with read words (M. A. McDaniel & P. J. Waddill, 1990). Generation facilitates encoding of the cue-target relation and sometimes boosts encoding ... Full text Cite

Learning errors from fiction: difficulties in reducing reliance on fictional stories.

Journal Article Memory & cognition · July 2006 Readers rely on fiction as a source of information, even when fiction contradicts relatively well-known facts about the world (Marsh, Meade, and Roediger, 2003). Of interest was whether readers could monitor fiction for errors, in order to reduce suggestib ... Full text Cite

The positive and negative consequences of multiple-choice testing.

Journal Article Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition · September 2005 Multiple-choice tests are commonly used in educational settings but with unknown effects on students' knowledge. The authors examined the consequences of taking a multiple-choice test on a later general knowledge test in which students were warned not to g ... Full text Cite

How eyewitnesses talk about events: Implications for memory

Journal Article Applied Cognitive Psychology · July 1, 2005 Eyewitnesses to traumatic events typically talk about them, and they may do so for different reasons. Of interest was whether qualitatively different retellings would lead to differences in later memory. All participants watched a violent film scene; one t ... Full text Cite

Learning facts from fiction: effects of healthy aging and early-stage dementia of the Alzheimer type.

Journal Article Neuropsychology · January 2005 Healthy younger and older adults and individuals with very mild or mild dementia of the Alzheimer type (DAT) listened to and read fictional stories containing correct and incorrect facts about the world. Of interest was their use of this story information ... Full text Cite

Story stimuli for creating false beliefs about the world.

Journal Article Behavior research methods, instruments, & computers : a journal of the Psychonomic Society, Inc · November 2004 Fiction is not always accurate, and this has consequences for readers. In laboratory studies, the reading of short stories led participants to produce story errors as facts on a later test of general knowledge (Marsh, Meade, & Roediger, 2003). The present ... Full text Cite

The role of rehearsal and generation in false memory creation.

Journal Article Memory (Hove, England) · November 2004 The current research investigated one possible mechanism underlying false memories in the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm. In the DRM paradigm, participants who study lists of related words (e.g., "table, sitting, bench ...") frequently report deta ... Full text Cite

Spinning the stories of our lives

Journal Article Applied Cognitive Psychology · July 1, 2004 The way people talk about past events can affect the way they remember them (Tversky & Marsh, 2000). The current research explores how people naturally talk about events from their own lives. Participants recorded what, when, and how they told others about ... Full text Cite

The cognitive, emotional, and social impacts of the September 11 attacks: group differences in memory for the reception context and the determinants of flashbulb memory.

Journal Article The Journal of general psychology · July 2004 The authors examined group differences in memories for hearing the news of and reactions to the September 11 attacks in 2001. They measured memory for reception context (immediate memory for the circumstances in which people first heard the news) and 11 pr ... Full text Cite

Part-set cuing effects in younger and older adults.

Journal Article Psychology and aging · March 2004 In 3 experiments, the authors examined part-set cuing effects in younger and older adults. Participants heard lists of category exemplars and later recalled them. Recall was uncued or cued with a subset of studied items. In Experiment 1, participants were ... Full text Cite

Telling a story or telling it straight: The effects of entertaining versus accurate retellings on memory

Journal Article Applied Cognitive Psychology · March 1, 2004 People retell events for different reasons. Sometimes they try to be accurate, other times entertaining. What characterizes retellings from different perspectives? How does retelling perspective affect later recall of events? In the current research, parti ... Full text Cite

Does test-induced priming play a role in the creation of false memories?

Journal Article Memory (Hove, England) · January 2004 We investigated the role of test-induced priming in creating false memories in the Deese/Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm, in which subjects study lists of related words (bed, rest, awake) and then falsely recall or recognise a related word (sleep) on a l ... Full text Cite

Learning facts from fiction

Journal Article Journal of Memory and Language · January 1, 2003 People's knowledge about the world comes from many sources, including fictional ones such as movies and novels. In three experiments, we investigated how people learn and integrate information from fictional sources with their general world knowledge. Subj ... Full text Cite

Demonstrations of a generation effect in context memory.

Journal Article Memory & cognition · September 2001 Generation often leads to increased memorability within a laboratory context (see, e.g., Slamecka & Graf, 1978). Of interest in the present study is whether the benefits of generation extend beyond item memory to context memory. To investigate this questio ... Full text Cite

Biased retellings of events yield biased memories.

Journal Article Cognitive psychology · February 2000 When people retell events, they take different perspectives for different audiences and purposes. In four experiments, we examined the effects of this postevent reorganization of events on memory for the original events. In each experiment, participants re ... Full text Cite

Applied Aspects of Source Monitoring

Journal Article Cognitive Technology · 1999 Cite