Making sense of memory.
The current work explores how people make recognition and belief judgments in the presence of obvious repetition primes. In two experiments, subjects received a 200-ms prime ("cheetah"), either before or after reading a trivia question ("What is the fastest animal?") but always before being presented with the target answer ("cheetah"). Results showed that repetition priming decreased "old" claims (Recognition--Experiment 1), while it increased truth claims (Belief--Experiment 2). Furthermore, repetition prime placement affected recognition but not belief. Combined, these results suggest that dissociations in memory performance are a natural outcome of task and processing demands and reflect the dynamic, flexible nature of memory.
Bernstein
Daniel M
DM
Department of Psychology, University of Washington, Seattle 98195-1525, USA. db6@u.washington.edu
D003469:Culture; D004192:Discrimination, Psychological; D006801:Humans; D007600:Judgment / Q000502:physiology*; D008568:Memory / Q000502:physiology*; D011336:Probability; D021641:Recognition, Psychology / Q000502:physiology*