LSU Office of Applied Cognition

Word Clouds of our blog

2011-05-21T19:40:00.004-05:00

This was created using our blog text using tagxedo.com.

This is a Wordle created using our blog text using wordle.net.

OAC Research Described in Recent Article

2011-05-17T12:27:00.001-05:00

A very nice article describing our research recently appeared in The Psychology Times. The Times is an eNewspaper for "those in the practice, science, and teaching of psychology in Louisiana." The Editor of the Times is Julie Nelson, a graduate of LSU's Ph.D. program and a practicing psychologist. The article can be found here (Volume 2, Number 9; begins on first page).

American Psychology-Law Society Conference 2011

2011-03-29T17:29:00.000-05:00

Earlier this month, Audra Cook, Tanya Karam and I attended the American Psychology-Law Society Conference in Miami, Florida. Audra is an undergraduate student working in our lab through the ASPIRE program. We presented two posters on new research lines from our lab.

Emotion, Retrieval and Attention: Effects on Memory Accuracy

Tanya Karam and Sean Lane

We examined how the impact of emotion on long-term memory is influenced by an intervening retrieval. Participants studied emotional and neutral pictures, followed by an initial recognition test for 2/3 of the items that was taken under full or divided attention. The final test took place 48-hours later. Items originally tested under full attention were better remembered than items tested under divided attention. Emotional pictures were remembered better than neutral pictures after 48 hours, but only if they had not been previously tested. However, an initial test diminished this advantage; memory was enhanced more for neutral pictures than for emotional pictures. Exp. 2 showed that the same pattern was obtained when stimuli were repeated at encoding. Implications for eyewitness memory are discussed.

Tanya energetically explains her research.

The Lasting Effects of Lying: Being Untruthful Affects Subsequent Memory Accuracy

Audra Cook, Kathleen Vieira & Sean Lane

We investigated the effects of lying versus telling the truth on memory. Participants viewed a series of pictures of simple objects and later lied or told the truth about the appearance of items. Pictures were described once, were described repeatedly, or were not rehearsed at all during this lying/truth task. Forty-eight hours later, participants were tested on their memory for the pictures. Results indicate that although lying did not impact participants’ later descriptions of items or their accuracy in an old/new recognition task, lying did impair source memory relative to telling the truth. More specifically, participants were significantly less likely to remember lying about an item than they were to remember telling the truth about an item. Also, repetition improved memory for having lied or told the truth.

Audra Cook and myself before she dazzled visitors to the poster

The experiment on the impact of lying on memory is the first of a series of studies developed by Kathleen Vieira and myself. The goal of these studies is to better understand how lying might affect a person's memory for the truth. This work has both theoretical and applied implications (e.g., forensic interviews and interrogations.

Please email us (slane at lsu dot edu) if you would like more information about any of these presentations.

Psychonomics 2010

2010-11-30T11:44:00.002-06:00

Last week, we were at the annual Psychonomic Society conference in St. Louis, MO. The first of three OAC presentations was a talk given at the International Association of Metacognition pre-conference.

Nudging Memory Back on Target: Test Feedback Improves Subsequent Source Monitoring Accuracy

Sean Lane, Stephanie Groft, Kathleen Vieira, Leslie Butler, & Tanya Karam

One reason that people make memory errors is because they inappropriately weight features of their memory that are potentially diagnostic of its source. In previous research (Lane et al., 2007), we found that providing feedback on a subset of test items substantially increases the accuracy of source monitoring decisions on subsequent test items. This suggests that enhanced knowledge of the types of memorial evidence that discriminate between different item classes can help people to more accurately guide retrieval and post-retrieval processes. In this talk, we discuss a number of experiments from our laboratory that have followed up on these initial findings. Among other things, these studies have revealed that these effects are robust (e.g., found with different stimuli and across delay), that learning from feedback does not require extensive working memory resources, and that preventing elaborative processing following feedback administration does not affect its efficacy. Furthermore, participants appear largely unaware of how feedback affects their performance, and feedback improves performance even when participants insist it had no effect. We discuss the theoretical implications of these findings, and note their relevance for previous disagreements in the field regarding the role of implicit vs. explicit processes in metacognition.

The second was a poster presented during the Thursday night poster session:

Red Means Stop: The Effect of Color on Medical Diagnostic Accuracy

Jonathan Tall, Robert Mathews & Sean Lane

In prior research, we examined knowledge acquisition in a diagnostic task that involved learning the most effective drug treatments for patients. One consistent finding is that participants appear unaware of negative side effects and yet these negative side effects lower beliefs about the real efficacy of the drug on the primary measure. Two experiments examined how different methods of color coding of feedback in the task can facilitate participants accurate encoding and memory of effects. In Experiment 1, the use of color-coded feedback facilitated the accurate acquisition of drug side effects. In Experiment 2, the use of a full range color coding scheme outperformed a partial (“extremes colored only”) coding scheme. We discuss how color labels can facilitate learning.

Finally, we had a presentation during the last session on Sunday:

Only When It’s Tough: Feedback Improves Old/New Recognition

When Lures are Difficult to Discriminate

Kathleen Vieira, Leslie Butler, Sean Lane, Tanya Karam & Stephanie Groft

Although correct feedback about memory decisions on a subset of items improves subsequent accuracy on source-monitoring tests (e.g., Lane, et al., 2007), it typically has no effect or affects only response criterion on old/new recognition tests (Kantner & Lindsay, 2010). One possible explanation for these findings is that people typically rely heavily on familiarity when making old/new decisions, and it is difficult to adjust this unidimensional type of evidence. In contrast, feedback may help when people make more fine-grained decisions that allow for adjustment to the features they rely upon. In two experiments, we manipulated the similarity of lures to studied items. Participants studied a set of pictures, completed an old/new recognition test, received feedback, and completed a second test. In both experiments, feedback improved old/new discrimination between old items and highly similar lures, but only changed response criterion between old item and low similarity lures.

Please email us (slane at lsu dot edu) if you would like more information about any of these presentations.

Jon explains the intricacies of his experiment

Kathleen and Leslie analyze data. Dedication!

LSU DAY

2010-11-29T18:29:00.000-06:00

Saturday, November 13th was LSU Day - an opportunity for Baton Rouge area visitors to learn about research at the university (oh yeah....it was also homecoming). The Office of Applied Cognition presented demonstrations on eyewitness memory and memory errors, and talked with people about the implications of our research.

Tanya Karam and Leslie Butler talk memory

Serena Fisher and Stephanie Groft give a demonstration

Serena, Stephanie, Leslie, Tanya and Amanda in a relaxed moment

New Updated Office of Applied Cognition Web Site

2010-08-05T16:16:00.000-05:00

We are pleased to announce that our old web site has been revamped with a new look and updated content. In particular, we have updated information about the research being conducted in the lab, access to more recent publications, and information about all the lab members. You can find our site here.

I want to thank Kathleen Vieira, our project coordinator. She did a great job organizing the new content, keeping the project on track, and making it sure it was up to her high standards. I also want to thank Sameer Bhavanibhatla, who handled the technical aspects of updating and revising the site. We sincerely appreciate both of their efforts.

5. MEDICAL COGNITION - OAC Research Series

2010-07-27T09:56:00.001-05:00

We also have a long-standing interest in the cognitive processes underlying medical practice, and how these processes might be supported. In prior work, we collaborated on an NSF-funded grant with an interdisciplinary team of researchers that included Sonja Wiley-Patton and Andrea Houston from LSU’s Information Systems and Decision Sciences (ISDS) department. This research investigated how medical technology implementation affects the practices of nurses and doctors.

Our more recent work examines how people learn in a laboratory task that has many features in common with those faced by doctors treating patients. Given the complexity of the world we face, it is almost surprising people can learn how and in what ways their actions (e.g., prescribing a medication) affect others. In many situations, professionals have multiple options for action and multiple ways that they could measure the impact of their actions. Furthermore, there is often “noise” in such environments (e.g., the same action may have different effects at different times) and feedback can often be delayed or absent. For example, imagine that you are a family doctor and are responsible for the health of a number of patients. For any given patient, you could try different interventions (e.g., prescribe a medication or a surgical procedure) as a means of affecting their illness. Such interventions might positively affect some aspects of their well-being (e.g., blood pressure) and have a negative or no effect on others (e.g., insomnia). Furthermore, the effects of any intervention are likely not immediately obvious, assuming one gets adequate feedback at all. Despite the complexity and potential ambiguity, professionals who face similar situations are often quite confident that they acquire specific and accurate knowledge about the impact of their interventions as a result of experience (e.g., doctors treating patients; managers supervising employees).

In this research, participants see “patients” suffering from the same disorder multiple times and receive information about their health on a number of parameters, for example, blood pressure (some experiments use a managerial version of this task). Their goal is to keep a key health measure in the “excellent” range while keeping other measures at least in the “acceptable” range (i.e., avoid negative side effects), and also to learn about the effects of different drugs. After a number of rounds with the patients, they are asked to prescribe the best drug for each patient and to indicate what they know about the effects of each drug. Across a number of studies, we have found similar findings. Although participants appear to be learning which drugs are relatively most effective overall, they lack specific knowledge about the impact of such drugs. Specifically, participants avoid prescribing a drug that has a positive effect on a key (primary) measure and a negative “side effect” on another (secondary) measure, yet when asked directly about the impact of the drug they respond by reducing their judgments of it's positive impact and indicate little knowledge of the negative side effect. Thus, participants appear unaware they are integrating across the effects of the drug on different health measures. These effects appear quite robust as they occur under situations where participants have the ability to choose which drug to prescribe (e.g., Mathews, Tall, Lane & Sun, under review), as well as situations where participants do not (and thus everyone gets to see the same information about each patient, e.g., Tall, Mathews, & Lane, 2009, Psychonomics Society). In addition to the goal of understanding the mechanisms underlying these effects, we are also exploring potential avenues for supporting good decision-making in this task. For example, we have examined the effects of providing decision strategy support (Tall, et al., 2009) and using color coding to emphasize the impact of drugs upon health measures (Tall, Mathews, & Lane, submitted). Although the former has beneficial effects under conditions where different patients have different reactions to specific drugs, the impact of color coding appears to be a particularly good general way to enhance attention to side effects.

4. EXPERIENCE-BASED (IMPLICIT) LEARNING - OAC Research Series

2010-07-27T09:40:00.001-05:00

Human beings appear to be quite flexible in the way they acquire knowledge about the world. For example, people go to school to deliberately study facts about various topics and also acquire knowledge directly from experience, such as when someone learns a route to a new restaurant without intending to do so (e.g., simply by being a passenger in a vehicle). A variety of behavioral and neuroscientific evidence has been used to argue that complex mental skills are learned and deployed through the use of two different and complementary types of processes (e.g., Reber, 1989; although the issue has also been debated). Although a variety of theoretical terms have been used to describe these two types of processes (most commonly explicit and implicit), we refer to these two categories as experience- and model-based processing (Sallas, Mathews, Lane & Sun, 2007). On this view, experience-based knowledge is acquired by abstracting over multiple encounters with members of a category, is often difficult to articulate, and important features of stimuli may be learned without the intention to do so. In contrast, model-based knowledge involves using a mental model or other explicit task representation to guide behavior, is easier to articulate, and is often more accurate, yet slower to access than experience-based knowledge (e.g., Domangue, Mathews, Sun, Roussel & Guidry, 2004). We use these terms rather than implicit/explicit because we argue that people can sometimes become explicitly aware of knowledge that they nevertheless learned in an experiential manner, and to allow for interactions between these two types of processing.

Interaction of Experience- and Model-Based Processing

Most prior research on implicit/explicit learning has tried to isolate a given process within a particular experimental task, under the assumption that individuals rely exclusively on one process rather than another during learning. Because of this, the question of whether and how these processes interact has largely been neglected. Recent work explored this issue using two different tasks. In the first (Sallas, et al., 2007), we used an artificial grammar task in which participants learn multi-consonant strings (artificial “words”) that follow a set of rules (grammar). In a series of experiments, we manipulated training conditions to emphasize different levels of knowledge acquisition, in accordance with predictions from different theories of artificial grammar learning (i.e., theories which are purely bottom-up vs. theories that allow for top-down and bottom-up interactions). Performance on separate production and grammar tests was most consistent with theories that allow for interaction between processes. Furthermore, our results suggested important training conditions for observing highly accurate and fluent grammar knowledge use. In other research (Lane, Mathews, Sallas, Prattini, & Sun, 2008), we utilized a dynamic system control task (Berry & Broadbent, 1984) that required participants to control a nuclear reactor by varying the number of pellets that were input. Although the task has a single input and output, participants rarely discover the formula underlying the system. However, they often learn to control the system before they can articulate how they are performing the task (i.e., it can be learned experientially). Even so, participants can improve performance when given task hints (model-based knowledge) before practice. This study was designed to examine how participants benefit from these instructions and potential impacts on the resulting representation. Our results showed that participants who were provided model-based knowledge improved their accuracy dramatically, even for states that were not explicitly given in task hints. However, results also revealed that learning in this manner can lead to “costs” such as slowed retrieval, and that this knowledge may not always transfer to new task situations as well as experientially-acquired knowledge (in contrast to prior theoretical claims). Our findings also questioned the theoretical assumption that people learn the dynamic control task by acquiring a highly specific “lookup” table representation.

3. EYEWITNESS MEMORY - OAC Research Series

2010-07-26T15:05:00.000-05:00

Eyewitness Suggestibility

Following a crime, witnesses can be exposed to misleading postevent information during contact with other witnesses, while reading media accounts of the event, or during interactions with law enforcement personnel or attorneys. One concern is whether witnesses incorporate information from these sources into their accounts of what they perceived at the time of the crime (eyewitness suggestibility).   This concern is well-founded as research has consistently found that participants will report misleading postevent items as having been in the witnessed event (the misinformation effect; e.g., Loftus & Palmer, 1974; Loftus, Miller & Burns, 1978). When these errors occur on a source-monitoring test (an indication participants believe they actually saw the postevent items in the witnessed event), we call them source misattribution errors (e.g., Zaragoza & Lane, 1994).

Among other findings, our prior research in this area has revealed that source misattribution errors tend to increase as a function of 1) the extent to which postevent misinformation is reflectively and elaboratively processed (Zaragoza & Lane, 1994) and 2) the attentional resources available during encoding of the witnessed event, the encoding of misinformation, and at the time of retrieval (Lane, 2006; Zaragoza & Lane, 1998).   In more recently published work, we examined the impact of generating elaborated descriptions of misinformation (Lane & Zaragoza, 2007). The role of imagery in helping create false memories (including those resulting from suggestion) is well-documented, but one issue that has not been addressed by previous research is what role, if any, the act of generating a perceptually detailed representation might play in promoting false memory creation. We manipulated how participants processed postevent items by varying whether they were required to generate or read details describing the physical appearance of the items (or in one experiment, simply read an unelaborated item). Our results revealed that generation increased both source misattribution errors and accurate memory for the real source of the items (the postevent questionnaire). Generation also increased claims of having a (false) vivid recollection of the suggested items in the event. We argue that participants may be more likely to construct and encode a richer, more elaborate representation of what the item looked like when they generate a description than when the item is read in a narrative, presupposed in a question, or when perceptual details are simply described. False memories created by generated descriptions are thus likely to be misattributed to the witnessed event because they contain characteristics that would be expected of items that were actually witnessed. Other eyewitness suggestibility research is discussed in other sections of the research series (e.g., see MEMORY ERRORS post).

Eyewitness Identification

The issue of how we decide whether we have previously seen a person in a particular context is an important one with respect to the task of eyewitness identification. In this area, we are exploring issues similar to those we have examined in other memory paradigms. For example, in a series of experiments, we have examined the relationship between face identification and memory for associated details (Lane, Groft, Roussel, & Calamia, in preparation). Participants studied faces and associated details, and were later tested in a series of target-present and target-absent lineups (a multiple lineup paradigm). For each face they claimed to have seen, they were asked to recognize associated contextual details. Results revealed that accurate memory for some contextual details was associated with a higher likelihood of a correct lineup decision. Furthermore, there was evidence of feature importation for false identifications (i.e., claiming to have seen details associated with the real target).    Thus, the issue of item-context binding appears important when considering eyewitness identification.   In other experiments, we have attempted to understand participants’ identification or lineup rejection (“not present”) decisions in terms of strategies that have been intensively studied in the basic memory literature (e.g., the distinctiveness heuristic, recall-to-reject strategy). Overall, our results have shown that these strategies vary in effectiveness, and in some cases can be quite diagnostic of accuracy. Besides our empirical research, Chris Meissner and I have recently suggested that research in eyewitness identification may benefit from greater utilization of theories and methods of basic memory research (Lane & Meissner, 2008).

Beliefs about Eyewitness Memory

In real-world cases, it is often jurors who must evaluate eyewitness testimony. One key factor affecting jurors’ decisions is the beliefs they hold about eyewitness memory, and there is substantial survey research that documents the beliefs of laypeople can often differ from those of experts. Although the results of survey studies can provide useful information about people’s explicit beliefs about eyewitness memory issues, one understudied question is whether such beliefs tell us what they might do when faced with a situation where these beliefs are potentially relevant.   This is a reasonable question, because psychological research has documented that people do not always act in accordance with their beliefs (attitude-behavior consistency), do not always apply what they have learned in one situation to another, and can learn and perform tasks correctly with little explicit knowledge of the features they are relying upon (implicit learning).   Participants in this research (Alonzo & Lane, 2010) evaluated the accuracy of eyewitnesses depicted in brief trial transcripts and answered survey questions to assess their beliefs regarding complementary eyewitness memory issues.   Although participants were sensitive to a number of factors in their evaluation of eyewitnesses, their performance on the transcripts did not correlate with the survey responses for most issues. These findings highlight the potential strengths and weaknesses of survey measures, and suggest the need for more diverse research investigating the understanding and use of knowledge about eyewitness memory by jurors.

2. EDUCATION, LEARNING and TEACHER EXPERTISE - OAC Research Series

2010-07-22T13:37:00.010-05:00

We have been interested in the application of cognitive science to education for many years. Previous work included a project developing a computer-based tutor for teaching basic mathematics to highway workers (Mathews, 1999), one evaluating the effectiveness of a handheld microscope (Scope-on-a-Rope) for teaching science concepts to elementary school children, and another looking at the study habits of ADHD and non-ADHD college students (Advokat, Lane, & Luo, in press). However, our most recent research in this area is much broader in its theoretical scope and implications. We are a part of a multi-disciplinary team that was recently awarded a National Science Foundation grant. Our specific research project investigates the components of teacher expertise and explores a possible avenue for increasing teacher expertise in the context of a masters-level teacher program at LSU.

Expertise has been defined as the ability to consistently produce outstanding performance in a domain (e.g., Ericsson, 2009). Furthermore, research has repeatedly documented that the amount of a person’s “experience” in a domain is not a reliable predictor of his or her level of performance (e.g., Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1993; Krampe & Charness, 2006). In other words, one does not simply get better the longer one has been in a profession. Instead, achieving expertise depends on the amount of deliberate practice one has performed (e.g., Ericsson, Charness, Feltovich, & Hoffman, 2006; Ericsson, Krampe & Tesch-Romer, 1993). Deliberate practice has been defined as systematic, effortful activity with the goal of improving performance on a focused skill, with immediate, detailed feedback, often from a coach or teacher. Despite the importance of these attributes, they are often missing from the environment of many professionals, including teachers (e.g., Dunn & Shriner, 1999). One aspect of our research involves helping middle- and high-school mathematics teachers gain expertise more efficiently by teaching them how to guide their own deliberate practice. The training involves sections on 1) effectively setting and pursuing goals, 2) principles of learning, 3) collaborative teamwork skills, and 4) components of deliberate practice. Although the content of the training is derived from the research in psychology and cognitive science, the focus is on translating this information in ways that can support teaching practice. Furthermore, the training provides support for planning and decision-making, including how to anticipate and handle obstacles to applying deliberate practice in their classrooms. Initial results are encouraging, but our long-term focus is on relating the amount and type of a teacher's deliberate practice to their classroom performance. Another aspect of our research investigates the components of teacher expertise. We are exploring this issue in two different ways. First, we are conducting a series of in-depth interviews on the practices of expert and experienced but non-expert teachers. Second, we are using an individual differences approach. Specifically, we are obtaining laboratory and survey-based measures of basic cognition, knowledge, motivational beliefs, social cognition, and personality on a set of teachers, and relating these to measures of teaching performance. The goal of these studies is to reveal a deeper understanding of the features of teacher expertise, and we will attempt to use these insights to develop a theoretical model and (ultimately) to influence how teachers are trained.

New Series on OAC Research - 1. MEMORY ERRORS

2010-07-21T15:20:00.005-05:00

The OAC blog has been largely dormant for the past year. We've been busy in the lab, but have not been good correspondents. It is our intention to change that. For one thing, we will soon be unveiling an updated website. We are also beginning a series of posts describing the breadth of research that we do at the Office of Applied Cognition. Today, we briefly discuss research we have conducted that can be characterized under the heading "Memory Errors." This research is motivated by the source monitoring framework of Marcia Johnson and colleagues, and our primary interest involves investigating the processes underlying memory decisions.

Source Memory

How can we discriminate between memories that are an accurate portrayal of a prior experience and those that are not? This problem is a central one in understanding the memory system from a theoretical perspective and one that has applied value. According to the Source Monitoring Framework (Johnson, et al., 1993), source judgments involve weighing the type and amount of featural information in a retrieved memory trace according to certain decision processes. These decisions can be based on a comparison of these retrieved features to features expected of a given source (heuristic processes), or more systematic processes can be used to attempt to retrieve supporting information or to evaluate the consistency or plausibility of the memory. Finally, the decision criteria (the type and amount of evidence) for assigning source can vary according to task instructions, one’s goals, or other aspects of the task context. This theoretical approach motivates our research in the area of memory, and most research discussed in the sections below utilize tests that require participants to indicate the source of their memories.

Improving Memory Decisions

This line of research was motivated by the repeated finding in the false memory literature that although false memories are often vividly remembered, they are usually less vivid and detailed on average than accurate memories (e.g., Lane & Zaragoza, 1995). For us, this brought up the question of how people set the criteria for their source decisions and whether the accuracy of such decisions could be improved by selecting more diagnostic features. In a series of studies (Lane, Roussel, Villa & Morita, 2007; Lane, Roussel, Villa, Starns & Alonzo, 2008; Starns, Lane, Alonzo & Roussel, 2007), we examined the ability of participants to avoid false memories at the time of retrieval by manipulating whether they received task information (i.e., warnings of various types) prior to the test or received feedback about their decisions during the test. We see such provided task information as a form of metamnemonic knowledge which has the potential to change participants’ expectations about the upcoming or ongoing retrieval task. If the information allows participants to more accurately assess the parameters of the task (e.g., which features are most diagnostic), then they may be able to translate that knowledge into a more effective retrieval strategy. Our findings across these studies confirmed this hypothesis. This work also revealed several additional findings of interest. First, we found that retrieval warnings appear to improve recognition in the DRM (Roediger & McDermott, 1995) paradigm via a distributional shift rather than a change in decision criteria (Starns, et al., 2007). Under the assumption that the amount of evidence retrieved from memory will differ when different types of evidence are considered, we argued that warnings may lead participants to focus more on item-specific features in memory and less on relational information (e.g., semantic features). Finally, we found that feedback about source judgments on an initial training test reduced source errors on the final test relative to a no-feedback control condition. Thus, our results suggest that participants can make on-line adjustments in the types of evidence used to make source judgments.

Two findings from our initial research on the impact of feedback at test were particularly striking: 1) source misattribution errors to postevent information were reduced dramatically and 2) participants did not seem to know how or even if the feedback has helpful (in contrast of previous research using retrieval warnings). We have now conducted a number of studies following up on these findings. As one example, we have begun to investigate how people learn from feedback. One possibility is that feedback changes decisions through a resource-intensive process that involves identifying and maintaining corrections to decision criteria after making an error. Another possibility is that participants learn to change their criteria in a less resource-intensive, relatively implicit process. To address this question, we (Groft & Lane, under review) had high and low working memory capacity (WMC) participants view an eyewitness event and complete a postevent questionnaire that included misinformation. Half of each group received feedback on the training source memory test. Performance on the subsequent no-feedback assessment test revealed that high and low WMC participants benefited equally from feedback. These findings suggest that feedback may improve source memory accuracy without requiring substantial executive resources (e.g., through incremental reinforcement learning; see Han & Dobbins, 2009). Overall, our research has found that feedback effects can be found under a number of conditions, including 1) different source-monitoring paradigms, 2) tests delayed up to 48 hours after encoding, 3) encoding conditions that greatly increase the overlap between sources (divided attention at encoding), and 4) even old-new recognition tests that involve a difficult discrimination between item classes.

Impact of Intervening Retrieval on Memory

Memories are, by their very nature, dynamic. Once encoded, a memory representation can be shaped by many factors, including the very act of remembering. Although retrieving a memory may strengthen it and increase the likelihood of later retrieval, the manner in which it is retrieved can have a profound influence on what is subsequently remembered about the original experience. In earlier work on this topic, we (Lane, Mather, Villa & Morita, 2001) examined the impact of recalling an eyewitness event at different levels of detail on participants’ ability to remember the source of items on a subsequent test. Following the postevent questionnaire, participants were asked to think back to the original event and review it in very specific detail or review just the main points (a summary). Detailed review participants recalled more event and postevent details than summary review participants. Thus, they recalled more information overall. However, on the subsequent source test (conditions that should encourage close scrutiny of memories), detailed review participants were more likely to report having seen misleading items in the original event, even for items not mentioned in their review. A subsequent experiment ruled out the possibility that this effect was induced by a criterion shift. We argued that the detailed review participants may have been more likely to form an image of the suggested item and/or associate the item with contextual details from the events in the video. This process would make the characteristics of these suggested items more “event-like” and consequently more likely to be attributed to the video during the source test.

We have continued to explore similar issues in more recent work carried out in collaboration with Linda Henkel (Lane, Henkel, Roussel, & Groft, in preparation). In this research, participants saw or imagined seeing pictures of common objects that shared physical (i.e., similar looking objects), conceptual (i.e., objects from the same category), or no similarity, and subsequently tried to recall the items three times. The critical manipulation concerned the recall task. Our studies were motivated by a previous finding that participants who repeatedly recalled items without respect to source (i.e., free recall) were significantly more likely to falsely claim that they had seen the imagined items presented as pictures on a subsequent source test than were participants who had earlier indicated the source of each item as they recalled it (Henkel, 2004; Exp. 3). We had two major questions. First, what factors are involved in reducing the negative impact of repeated retrieval on subsequent source misattributions? To rule out the possibility that source recall only helps later source monitoring because participants are simply remembering their previous responses at recall, we compared free recall participants to participants who recalled only items from a single source (only the picture or only the imagined items). In Experiment 1, both source-constrained recall conditions committed fewer source misattributions on the final test than the free recall condition. Second, we sought to understand the effect of specificity of recall on the features of misattributed memories (errors). To address this question, we borrowed techniques used to study “feature importation” (e.g., Lyle & Johnson, 2006). One of the reasons people appear to distinctly “remember” false memories is because those memories can be accompanied by details from items that were actually perceived. In research on this topic, feature importation is seen to the degree to which participants attribute to false memories features (e.g., location) that are true of a related perceived item. In Experiments 2 & 3, we manipulated the location of the pictures on the screen, and at test, asked participants to identify the location of any item they claimed to have seen as a picture. We used this procedure to try to identify why source-constrained recall reduces errors. For example, source-constrained recall might reduce errors because it reduces feature importation (and thus errors are less compelling) or because it strengthens features that are diagnostic of source without affecting the level of importation. Our results are most consistent with the latter, as although source-constrained recall reduces errors, the errors that are committed are attributed to a congruent location at the same level as errors committed after free recall.

Check back soon, as future posts will discuss our research in eyewitness memory, implicit learning, education, learning and teacher expertise, and medical cognition. If you have questions about the research we have talked about, be sure to let us know!

New OAC Member - 2010

2010-07-16T12:12:00.003-05:00

Serena Fisher graduated from the University of South Florida with a BA in Psychology. She continued her studies at USF, working with Dr. Douglas Nelson while studying human memory and the influence of pre-existing knowledge on the recall and recognition of recently experienced information. This work led to two papers that appeared in Memory & Cognition. After completing her MA in Cognitive Psychology in 2004, she took some time away from academia to work in industry. She returned to school in 2010 to join the Psychology PhD program at Louisiana State University.

I am interested in how to apply cognitive principles such as learning, memory, feedback, and motivation to training programs. My goal is to help develop training programs (for schools or businesses) that utilize empirically validated methods of learning and that enhance the development of expertise. Currently, I work on an NSF funded project examining expertise and deliberate practice in secondary education math and science teachers.

Time in the High Sierras

2009-07-30T12:30:00.011-05:00

This is not a typical post for this blog, but I suppose it is a good summer topic. I want to dispel the ugly graduate student rumor that I NEVER take a vacation. I recently got back from a week in California. My brothers and I spent some time hiking and kayaking in the high sierras, using a campsite at Shaver Lake as a home base. The top photo is from a hike we did from Edison Lake to Devil's Bathtub (elev. approx 9300 ft). The bottom photo is from another hike we did on the Dinkey Lakes trail. The photo is of Mystery Lake, the first of four lakes you pass on the hike. I nicknamed it Bonsai Lake for many small pine trees in the area that look like bonsai trees. I really enjoyed the scenery, the exercise, the camaraderie (don't tell my brothers) and the opportunity to "recharge my batteries."

Meet the Veterans

2009-05-20T16:13:00.013-05:00

Stephanie Groft (left) graduated as a University Medalist from Louisiana State University with a B.S. in psychology in 2006. She completed a M.A. in Cognitive/Developmental Psychology under the direction of Dr. Lane in 2008. She is beginning her fourth year in the doctoral program. Her research interests are in the areas of source monitoring and eyewitness memory. Specific projects include individual differences in the ability to monitor the source of memory, the role of feature importation in false memory, and factors affecting eyewitness identification. She has also done work examining judge's beliefs about jurors' knowledge of factors that affect eyewitness memory accuracy.

Tanya Karam (center) graduated from University of Waterloo with a B.A. in psychology in 2004. She completed a M.A. in Cognitive and Social Processes under the direction of Dr. Kerri Pickel at Ball State University in 2007. She is beginning her third year in the Cognitive/Developmental Ph D. program at Louisiana State University working with Dr. Lane. She has broad interests in basic memory processes including source memory, as well as issues involved in eyewitness memory (including eyewitness identification and suggestibility). Her recent focus concerns how emotion impacts the binding between different aspects of an event in memory.

Jon Tall (right) graduated from Northwestern State University in 2003 with a B.S. in Psychology. He received his M.A. in Philosophy of Science from LSU in 2006, and a M.A. in Psychology from LSU in 2009. He is now currently working towards a Ph.D. in Cognitive/Developmental Psychology and is beginning his fourth year working with Dr. Mathews. He is primarily interested in studying complex/dynamic decision making. In particular, he is interested in how processing, strategy, and task representation influence knowledge acquired in complex environments. While his earlier research examined knowledge resulting from active participation in the task environment, his more recent research focuses on learning from more passive exposure to task information.

New Additions to the OAC

2009-05-19T11:55:00.019-05:00

This fall we welcome three new graduate students to the Office of Applied Cognition!

Kathleen Vieira (left) graduated from the University of Florida in 2009 with a B.S. in psychology. During her undergraduate career, she worked in the labs of Lise Abrams, Ira Fischler, and Amanda Woodward (University of Maryland). She is entering the Cognitive/Developmental Ph.D. program and will be working with Dr. Lane. She is interested in both basic and real-world applications of memory research. More specifically, she plans to pursue her interests in eyewitness memory and memory suggestibility.

Leslie Butler (center) received her B.A. in psychology from the University of Central Florida in 2005, and subsequently worked as a research associate at the Naval Air Warfare Center, Training Systems Division in Orlando, FL. In the summer of 2009 Leslie will graduate from Florida Atlantic University with her M.A. in Psychology. She is entering the Cognitive/Developmental Ph.D. program and will be working with Dr. Lane. Leslie's primary research interest is on how emotion can affect memory. More specifically, her research has focused on how binding errors can occur for memories of emotional events. Her goal is to continue conducting research in emotion and memory and apply it to issues relevant to the legal system.

Patrick Lingenfelter (right) graduated with honors from Nicholls State University with a B.A. in Psychology in 2004. He worked for three years as a Behavioral Shaping Specialist and Individual Program Coordinator for Peltier-Lawless Developmental Center prior to beginning graduate work at Louisiana State University in 2006. He obtained his M.A. in Biological Psychology in 2009, and is currently in the Cognitive/Developmental Ph.D. program working with Dr. Mathews. His prior research has focused on decision-making under ambiguity and risk, particularly among those with potential addiction to technology, specifically video games. He is interested in the influence and impact of technology, both positive and negative, on cognitive ability, decision-making, and executive function.

LSU Office of Applied Cognition - A quick introduction

2009-01-05T15:50:00.022-06:00

Cognition involves the ability to perceive, attend, remember, and make decisions about the world around us. The Office of Applied Cognition at LSU is a home for researchers who want to understand how cognitive processes are deployed in complex real-world events. To understand why this is important, you have realize that researchers tend to focus exclusively in laboratory or applied settings. We take a different approach. Like "pure" basic scientists, we agree on the importance of theoretically-driven research. However, we believe that considering the complexity of real-world cognition can inform our understanding of basic mechanisms (e.g., how theories “scale up” from simple to complex tasks) while providing needed applications. As a result, our work is conducted in both in vivo (naturalistic) and in vitro (laboratory) settings (see Dunbar & Blanchette, 2001). Put another way, we take the knowledge, theories, and methodologies of Cognitive Science and attempt to apply them in ways that improve performance in real-world settings (e.g., in education, medicine, or everyday problem solving). We also seek to take what we learn from studying cognition in these settings to learn more about basic mechanisms of cognition and other determinants of behavior.

The OAC was founded in 2004 by Robert Mathews and Sean Lane. The OAC is housed in the Department of Psychology, but includes affiliated faculty from a wide variety of disciplines. In the days and weeks ahead, we will be providing more information about the people involved in the OAC and descriptions of research projects, articles and presentations. In the meantime, you can find more information about us at our web site.