Source Monitoring and Response Bias in Human Memory

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I propose two lines of research aimed at breakthrough discoveries concerning basic mechanisms of human memory. 1. I will continue my decades-long study of source monitoring, the hypothesized mechanisms by which thoughts and images are attributed to particular sources (e.g., memory vs. inference; memory of a witnessed event vs. of suggestions). Three sub-lines will advance this program of research in fundamentally new and innovative directions: (1a) In a set of co-witness memory studies, we will employ a ground-breaking technology that uses polarized filters to enable two people to sit side by side watching the same back-projection screen and see different versions of a video. This creates rich conditions for co-witness contamination when the two witnesses are invited to talk together about the video event, enabling us to study the conditions that modulate the likelihood that one witness will incorporate portions of another's report into their own memories of the event. (1b) In a series of studies my students and I will explore “suggested invisibility,” through which subjects are led to report that they had NOT seen particular witnessed details that they had in fact seen. (1c) In a third sub-line of research on source monitoring, I will extend prior work with Maryanne Garry (Victoria U of Wellington, NZ) testing the idea that accompanying claims with non-probative photos can nudge people toward believing the claims (“truthiness”); the new line of proposed studies tests the hypothesis that photos can have parallel effects on subjects' predictions for the future. 2. The second proposed major line of research aims to contribute to theoretical accounts of response bias in recognition memory. Subjects tested on recognition can exhibit liberal bias (i.e., more often err by saying "Yes" when they should say "No") or conservative bias (more often err by saying "No" when they should say "Yes") or no bias (make the two kinds of errors equally often). Bias greatly affects behaviour (e.g., if a soldier erroneously recognizes a civilian as a combatant a tragedy may ensue). (2a) I will follow up my recent discovery, with then-student Justin Kantner (now Assist. Prof. at Cal State Northridge) that there are stable individual differences in response bias: Some people tend to be liberal, others conservative, others neutral. I aim to uncover the mechanisms that underlie this individual difference. (2b) I also aim to illuminate the mechanisms that underlie effects of stimulus materials on response bias. With word lists, response bias on average tends to be neutral (even though some individual subjects are conservative and others are liberal). But we recently discovered that with certain kinds of materials (e.g., scans of paintings) bias is strikingly conservative. There is very little prior research on how and why bias differs across individuals and materials and this work will greatly contribute to models of response bias.