Abstract
Repeated experience of events promotes schema formation. Later activation of the schema facilitates recall of the general structure of the events, whereas attribution of details to instances requires systematic decision-making based on detail characteristics. For repeated events, source monitoring may be less effective due to the similarity and interference of details across instances and consequently result in source attribution errors. To date, researchers have examined aggregated misattributions across instances and have found that misattributions are more frequent in the middle than in the boundary instances. In this study, we investigated the trajectories of misattributions using data from six studies (N = 633), where participants recalled repeated interactive marketing-themed events (Study 1), mock-crime filmed events (Study 2), stories (Study 3), and categorized word lists (Studies 4-6). The patterns confirmed the expected primacy and recency effects, showing fewer misattributions from and to the boundary instances relative to the middle instances. In addition, the patterns indicated proximity effects: Confusions more frequently occurred across adjacent instances and gradually decreased for instances that were further apart from the source. Our findings suggest that detail characteristics that form the basis of source attribution decisions provide information about the relative position of instances in repeated events, where the boundary instances serve as anchors, and where confusion relatively easily occurs across neighbouring instances. In line with context-based models of memory, our findings indicate that a higher-level organization of repeated events that emerges at encoding guides retrieval and source monitoring decisions.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 188-202 |
Number of pages | 15 |
Journal | Memory & Cognition |
Volume | 51 |
Issue number | 1 |
Early online date | 7 Apr 2022 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 1 Jan 2023 |
Bibliographical note
Study 1 was supported by the Society for Applied Research in Memory and Cognition Student Caucus Research Grant, Study 3 was supported by the International Centre for Research in Forensic Psychology Travel Grant, and Studies 1, 3, 4, 5, and 6 were supported by the University of Portsmouth postgraduate bursary to Eva Rubínová. Study 2 was supported by the Centre of Research and Evidence on Security Threats, (ESRC Award: ES/N009614/1) and the University of Portsmouth as a postgraduate bursary to Feni Kontogianni.Data Availability Statement
Data availabilityData for all studies along with a code-book, coding function scripts and the data analysis scripts are available as Online Supplemental Materials at Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/9gsy4/). Statistical analyses accompanying observations described in the manuscript are also available there.
Supplementary Information
The online version contains supplementary material available at https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-022-01300-7.
Keywords
- source monitoring
- misattribution
- repeated events