The false memory effect produced by the Deese/Roediger & McDermott (DRM) paradigm is reportedly impervious to warnings to avoid false alarming to the critical lures (D. A. Gallo, H. L. Roediger III, & K. B. McDermott, 2001). This finding has been used as strong evidence against models that attribute the false alarms to a decision…

Research on shallow processing suggests that readers sometimes encode only a superficial representation of a text and fail to make use of all available information. Greene, McKoon, and Ratcliff (1992) extended this work to pronouns, finding evidence that readers sometimes fail to automatically identify referents even when these are unambiguous. In…

Two diverging hypotheses concerning the influence of surprising events on hindsight effects have been proposed: Although some authors believe that surprising events lead to a reversal of hindsight bias, others have proposed that surprise increases hindsight bias. Drawing on the separate-components view of the hindsight bias (which argues that…

Using 3 experiments, I examined false memory for encoding context by presenting Deese-Roediger-McDermott themes (Deese, 1959; Roediger & McDermott, 1995) in usual-looking fonts and by testing related, but unstudied, lure items in a font that was shown during encoding. In 2 of the experiments, testing lure items in the font used to study their…

Most modern research on the effects of feedback during learning has assumed that feedback is an error correction mechanism. Recent studies of feedback-timing effects have suggested that feedback might also strengthen initially correct responses. In an experiment involving cued recall of trivia facts, we directly tested several theories of…

Two studies investigated the possibility that assessment of confidence is biased by attempts to justify chosen answers. These attempts include selectively focusing on evidence supporting the chosen answer and disregarding contradictory evidence. Results suggest that confidence depends on the amount and strength of evidence supporting the answer…