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Article
The Role of Structure-Seeking in Moral Punishment
Four studies (total N = 1586) test the notion that people are motivated to punish moral rule violators because punishment offers a way to obtain structure and order in the world. First, in a correlational study, ...
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Article
Prior exposure increases judged truth even during periods of mind wandering
Much of our day is spent mind-wandering—periods of inattention characterized by a lack of awareness of external stimuli and information. Whether we are paying attention or not, information surrounds us constan...
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Article
Predicting others’ knowledge in younger and older adulthood
Our beliefs about aging affect how we interact with others. For example, people know that episodic memory declines with age, and as a result, older adults’ memories are less likely to be trusted. However, not ...
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Article
Transfer of category learning to impoverished contexts
Learning often happens in ideal conditions, but then must be applied in less-than-ideal conditions – such as when a learner studies clearly illustrated examples of rocks in a book but then must identify them i...
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Article
Cheaters claim they knew the answers all along
Cheating has become commonplace in academia and beyond. Yet, almost everyone views themselves favorably, believing that they are honest, trustworthy, and of high integrity. We investigate one possible explanat...
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Article
Correcting false memories: Errors must be noticed and replaced
Memory can be unreliable. For example, after reading The new baby stayed awake all night, people often misremember that the new baby cried all night (Brewer, 1977); similarly, after hearing bed, rest, and tired, ...
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Article
Judging the familiarity of strangers: does the context matter?
Context affects face recognition, with people more likely to recognize an acquaintance when that person is encountered in an expected and familiar place. However, we demonstrate that a familiar context can als...
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Article
Multiple-choice tests stabilize access to marginal knowledge
Marginal knowledge refers to knowledge that is stored in memory, but is not accessible at a given moment. For example, one might struggle to remember who wrote The Call of the Wild, even if that knowledge is stor...
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Article
Recent study, but not retrieval, of knowledge protects against learning errors
Surprisingly, people incorporate errors into their knowledge bases even when they have the correct knowledge stored in memory (e.g., Fazio, Barber, Rajaram, Ornstein, & Marsh, 2013). We examined whether heighteni...
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Article
Integrating Cognitive Science and Technology Improves Learning in a STEM Classroom
The most effective educational interventions often face significant barriers to widespread implementation because they are highly specific, resource intense, and/or comprehensive. We argue for an alternative a...
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Article
Using Fictional Sources in the Classroom: Applications from Cognitive Psychology
Fictional materials are commonly used in the classroom to teach course content. Both laboratory experiments and classroom demonstrations illustrate the benefits of using fiction to help students learn accurate...
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Article
The hypercorrection effect persists over a week, but high-confidence errors return
People’s knowledge about the world often contains misconceptions that are well-learned and firmly believed. Although such misconceptions seem hard to correct, recent research has demonstrated that errors made ...
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Article
Memorial consequences of multiple-choice testing on immediate and delayed tests
Multiple-choice testing has both positive and negative consequences for performance on later tests. Prior testing increases the number of questions answered correctly on a later test but also increases the lik...
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Article
Surprising feedback improves later memory
The hypercorrection effect is the finding that high-confidence errors are more likely to be corrected after feedback than are low-confidence errors (Butterfield & Metcalfe, 2001). In two experiments, we explor...
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Article
Slowing presentation speed increases illusions of knowledge
Prior research on false memories has shown that suggestibility is often reduced when the presentation rate is slowed enough to allow monitoring. We examined whether slowing presentation speed would reduce fact...
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Article
Evoking false beliefs about autobiographical experience
In two experiments, we demonstrate that laboratory procedures can evoke false beliefs about autobiographical experience. After shallowly processing photographs of real-world locations, participants returned 1 ...
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Article
Test-induced priming of false memories
Of interest was whether prior testing of related words primes false memories in the Deese/Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm. After studying lists of related words, subjects made old-new judgments about zero, t...
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Article
The memorial consequences of multiple-choice testing
The present article addresses whether multiple-choice tests may change knowledge even as they attempt to measure it. Overall, taking a multiple-choice test boosts performance on later tests, as compared with n...
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Article
Learning errors from fiction: Difficulties in reducing reliance on fictional stories
Readers rely on fiction as a source of information, even when fiction contradicts relatively wellknown facts about the world (Marsh, Meade, & Roediger, 2003). Of interest was whether readers could monitor fict...
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Article
Story stimuli for creating false beliefs about the world
Fiction is not always accurate, and this has consequences for readers. In laboratory studies, the reading of short stories led participants to produce story errors as facts on a later test of general knowledge...
