Picture (im)perfect: Illusions of recognition memory produced by photographs at test

Trivially informative semantic context inflates people's confidence they can perform a highly complex skill

Some research suggests people are overconfident because of personality characteristics, lack of insight, or because overconfidence is beneficial in its own right. But other research fits with the possibility that fluent experience in the moment can rapidly drive overconfidence. For example, fluency can push people to become overconfident in their ability to throw a dart, know how rainbows form or predict the future value of a commodity. But surely there are limits to overconfidence. That is, even in the face of fluency manipulations known to increase feelings of confidence, reasonable people would reject the thought that they, for example, might be able to land a plane in an emergency. To address this question, we conducted two experiments comprising a total of 780 people. We asked some people (but not others) to watch a trivially informative video of a pilot landing a plane before they rated their confidence in their own ability to land a plane. We found watching the video inflated people's confidence that they could land a plane. Our findings extend prior work by suggesting that increased semantic context creates illusions not just of prior experience or understanding-but also of the ability to actually do something implausible.

Framing the past (and future): Effects of generic photos on autobiographical judgments

Do the images we see every day influence how we remember our lives? Research on this matter often concerns how entire memories of events can be created or shaped through the use of doctored photographs of personal (Wade et al., Psychonomic bulletin & review, 9 (3), 597-603, 2002) and public events (Sacchi et al., Applied Cognitive Psychology, 21 (8), 1005-1022, 2007). Although this paradigm has yielded insights into false memory production, it may underestimate the extent to which photographs can bias or distort memory in a subtler manner (i.e., without the use of doctored photographs or suggestion). In Experiments 1 (N = 95) and 2 (N = 186) of the present study, we examined whether the mere presence of generic images, typical of stock photography, could influence aspects of our memories. Given the parallel between autobiographical remembering and forecasting (Berntsen & Bohn, Memory & Cognition, 38(3), 265-278, 2010), we also examined (Experiment 3: N=204) how such images would influence future autobiographical judgments. Specifically, three experiments investigated whether photographs would bias autobiographical judgments for either quantitative (e.g., How many movies have you seen in the past year?) or affective (e.g., How enjoyable do you think your next date will be?) aspects of events in everyday life. We found that photographs reliably influenced judgments related to quantitative aspects of autobiographical events. Moreover, though less robustly, there was an indication that these photos could bias our affective construal of such events as well. Overall, we conclude that the mere presence of generic photographs may exert an influence on the way we think about our lives to an extent previously under-recognized.

Court Case Context and Fluency-Promoting Photos Inflate the Credibility of Forensic Science

Abstract. Faulty forensic science sometimes makes its way into the courtroom where jurors must evaluate its credibility. But at least two factors may inflate how credible jurors find claims about forensic science: the mere context of a court case and the cognitive fluency of the evidence. To investigate, we asked people to judge various claims about forensic science as true or false. In Experiment 1 ( N = 287), we manipulated court case context by either attributing the claims to an expert in court or not specifying their origin. In Experiment 2 ( N = 320), we manipulated courtroom setting orthogonal to source expertise. In both, we manipulated fluency via the presence of related but nonprobative photos. We found each factor increased people’s bias to judge forensic science claims true. Our findings suggest the justice system must improve the quality of forensic science upstream from the courtroom to ensure jurors’ credulity is warranted.

Evidence That "Voluntary" Versus "Involuntary" Retrieval Is a Fluency-Based Attribution

Our memories can come to mind either voluntarily—after we intended to retrieve them—or, involuntarily—without our intent. Studies often rely upon subjects themselves to classify their memories as voluntary or involuntary. But how well do subjects perform this task? There is reason to suspect that subjects sometimes base these classifications of intent on feelings of fluency—that is, ease of retrieval—leading them to misclassify their memories. In four experiments, we investigated the extent to which making an experience of voluntary retrieval feel fluent leads subjects to ascribe involuntary attributes to that retrieval. Our findings provide the first experimental demonstration that when subjects intentionally, yet fluently, bring a memory to mind, they may mistakenly judge that the retrieval occurred without intent.

Parallel effects of retrieval ease on attributions about the past and the future

The present study explored the role of task difficulty in judgments about the past and the future. Participants recalled events from childhood and imagined future events. The difficulty of the task was manipulated by asking participants to generate either four or twelve events. Participants then rated how well they could generally remember events from their childhood or how well planned their futures were. Consistent with past research (e.g., Winkielman, Schwarz, & Belli, 1998), participants in the difficult recall group rated their childhood memories as less complete than participants in the easy recall group. A parallel effect was found in participants' judgments of their futures. Participants who were asked to imagine twelve future events rated their future plans as less complete than those who imagined four events. Moreover, there was a negative correlation between the rated difficulty of the task and the degree to which participants found their memories and plans to be complete. We also examined the valence of the generated events. These results showed a strong positivity bias for both types of judgments, and the bias was particularly strong when thinking of future events. The results suggest that similar attributional processes mediate beliefs about the past and the future.