Charles J. Brainerd - US grants

Children's spontaneous false memories have been the subject of considerable heat and little light recently. This research is testing several hypotheses about false memories for doctor visits that are accompanied by trauma to answer questions that bear on the accuracy of children's witness testimony. Prior research by these investigators has produced a theoretical framework (fuzzy-trace theory) that makes counterintuitive predictions about such important issues as: age variability in spontaneous memory falsifications, age variability in the effects of delay on memory falsification, the persistence of false memories over time, the tendency of mere memory testes to falsify the contents of memory, and the features of experienced events that are most prone to memory falsification. Three experiments will use a false-recognition procedure and will consist of four sessions. Participants will be 180 children between the ages of 23 and 8. Children's experiences to urgent-care clinics will be the focus of subsequent memory interviews to occur 1-3 days after the child sees the physician. Subsequent interviews occur at 6 month and 1 year intervals. Memory interviews will query events that the child did and those that her or she did not experience. False-recognition effect will be used to index spontaneous memory falsification. Differences in spontaneous memory falsification are being tracked as a function of several variables that have forensic relevance: frequency of experience with events, amount of prior interviewing, whether inferences have been made about events, whether inconsistent version of evens have been experienced. These data will resolve tow uncertainties in current scientific knowledge about children's false memories. These are that mere memory tests can create false memories that are stable over time and whether spontaneous false memory increase with age or delay between exposure to events and memory tests. %%% Children's spontaneous false memories have been the subject of considerable heat and little light recently. This research is testing several hypotheses about false memories for doctor visits that are accompanied by trauma to answer questions that bear on the accuracy of children's witness testimony. Prior research by these investigators has produced a theoretical framework (fuzzy-trace theory) that makes counterintuitive predictions about such important issues as: age variability in spontaneous memory falsifications, age variability in the effects of delay on memory falsification, the persistence of false memories over time, the tendency of mere memory testes to falsify the contents of memory, and the features of experienced events that are most prone to memory falsification. Three experiments will use a false-recognition procedure and will consist of four sessions. Participants will be 180 children between the ages of 23 and 8. Children's experiences to urgent-care clinics will be the focus of subsequent memory interviews to occur 1-3 days after the child sees the physician. Subsequent interviews occur at 6 month and 1 year intervals. Memory interviews will query events that the child did and those that her or she did not experience. False-recognition effect will be used to index spontaneous memory falsification. Differences in spontaneous memory falsification are being tracked as a function of several variables that have forensic relevance: frequency of experience with events, amount of prior interviewing, whether inferences have been made about events, whether inconsistent version of evens have been experienced. These data will resolve tow uncertainties in current scientific knowledge about children's false memories. These are that mere memory tests can create false memories that are stable over time and whether spontaneous false memory increase with age or delay between exposure to events and memory tests.

Three million new cases of sexually transmitted diseases (STD) are identified in adolescents every year. The proposed research applies recent advances in cognitive-behavioral theory to increase the effectiveness and durability of multicomponent interventions that promote risk reduction and avoidance in adolescents. In Phase I, we investigate adolescents' psychological representations of decision options (i.e. abstinence vs. risk taking), risk estimates of problem behaviors, and relevant beliefs and attitudes. Specifically, 200 adolescents will be surveyed, presented with realistic sexual decision-making scenarios, and questioned in-depth concerning their perceptions of important risks and consequences (e.g., the cumulative risk of contracting a STD). Hispanics will be oversampled to provide sufficient statistical power to evaluate ethnic differences. In Phase II, 800 adolescents will be randomly assigned to one of three groups: a standard multicomponent intervention (Reducing the Risk), a gist-based enhancement of the standard intervention, or a control group receiving an unrelated intervention. The enhanced intervention will be based on cognitive behavioral theory (e.g., Reyna and Ellis, 1994), as well as on differences identified in Phase 1 between adolescents engaging versus not engaging in risky behaviors. Pre- and post-intervention surveys will assess such outcomes as self-reports of risky behaviors and STD treatment, with follow-up surveys at 3, 6, and 12 months. Multivariate analyses of variance (followed by univariate tests) controlling for background and baseline characteristics, will be used to compare differences among standard, enhanced, and control groups. Logistic regression will be used for categorical outcome measures, such as initiation of intercourse. Thus, the proposed research will provide evidence concerning sexual decision processes in Hispanic and non-Hispanic adolescents, and evaluate a theory-based intervention that focuses on specific behaviors and addresses both social (e.g., refusal skills) and cognitive- developmental factors using a randomized assignment design. We will also compare our survey data to results of a statewide evaluation of abstinence-only programs using the same survey instrument. By emphasizing gist representations, which are well preserved over long time periods and are key memories used in decision making, the enhanced intervention should produce larger and more sustained effects on risk reduction and avoidance.

This project continues the researchers' program of research on children's false memories. That program of research is theory-driven, and to date, it has produced a number of new findings about false memories that were originally predicted on theoretical grounds. This project consists of three large-scale developmental experiments. The experiments focus on two cognitive operations that are believed to be key controlling factors in children's false-memory reports: recollection rejection and phantom recollection. The existence of both operations is predicted by the researchers' theoretical account of false memory (i.e., fuzzy-trace theory), and evidence of the use of both operations by adults has been reported in previous experiments. Recollection rejection is an operation that suppresses the reporting of false events that are consistent with the gist of children's experience. Suppression is accomplished via the detection of mismatches between false-but-gist-consistent events and verbatim traces of actual events. For instance, after hearing a narrative containing the statement "The bird is inside the cage" and "The cage is under the table," children could reject the unpresented statement "The bird is under the table" by retrieving verbatim traces of either presented sentence and noticing that the words "bird" and "table" do not appear together in the sentence. Phantom recollection, on the other hand, is an operation that supports the reporting of false events that are consistent with the gist of children's experience by generating illusory vivid phenomenologies for those events. Fuzzy-trace theory posits that gist memories sometimes cause false events to be accompanied by illusory vivid phenomenologies that are difficult to distinguish from the vivid phenomenologies that accompany true events. These phantom recollections cause things that were not experienced to be remembered as physical "occurrences" (e.g, they are seen in the mind's eye or heard in the mind's ear). Fuzzy-trace theory predicts that phantom recollection can occur when two conditions are met: (a) Experienced events repeatedly cue some familiar meaning, so that gist memories of that meaning are very strong, and (b) the false events that provoke phantom recollection are especially good retrieval cues for strong gist memories.

The experiments implement a new paradigm, conjoint recognition. This paradigm provides a reliable behavioral method of measuring recollection rejection and phantom recollection in children. Children respond to memory tests under three types of instructions (accept only experienced events, accept only nonexperienced events that are consistent with the gist of experience, and accept experienced events + nonexperienced events that are consistent with the gist of experience). Recollection rejection and phantom recollection are identified with distinct patterns of responses across these different types of instructions. A mathematical model that is defined over the paradigm corrects raw response patterns for the influence of extraneous variables, which allows researchers to separate and quantify the effects of recollection rejection and phantom recollection. Implementation of this paradigm generates detailed findings on how recollection rejection and phantom recollection affect false-memory reports, on how these operations change with age, and on how they react to forensically-significant task variables. In Experiment 1, the effects of recollection rejection and phantom recollection on spontaneous false memories of narratives are studied in younger children (4- and 5-year-olds), older children (10- and 11-year-olds), and adults. Experiment 1 also determines how the two operations react to five forensically-significant task variables (repetition of events, recency of events, order of memory tests, timing of memory tests, and repetition of memory tests). Fuzzy-trace theory makes predictions about each of these variable's effects on recollection rejection and phantom recollection. In Experiment 2, the effects of recollection rejection and phantom recollection on implanted false memories of narratives are studied at the same three age levels by interpolating a memory-suggestion procedure following narrative presentation. Experiment 2 includes the same five task variables as Experiment 1. The aim of Experiment 3 is to determine how well the results of Experiments 1 and 2 generalize to more naturalistic eyewitness situations. The narrative false-memory procedure is replaced by a standardized quasi-forensic task involving a misdemeanor theft. The effects of recollection rejection and phantom recollection on both spontaneous and implanted false memories are assessed with this eyewitness procedure. The same three age levels are studied, and the design includes three of the five task variables that figure in Experiments 1 and 2 (repetition of events, timing of memory tests, and repetition of memory tests).

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This application addresses the broad Challenge Area: 15 Translational Science and the specific Challenge area Topic: 15-RR-101* Applied Translational Technology Development Memory declines, especially in recall, are hallmarks of healthy aging and conversion to cognitive impairment. Our goal is to use highly sensitive mathematical modeling techniques to improve the ability of clinical recall tests to predict future cognitive impairment and to diagnose current impairment. Our research will focus on one of the most widely used clinical tests of such declines, the Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test (RAVLT). Our specific aims are to apply mathematical models to RAVLT data in order to: (a) substantially improve the ability of the RAVLT and similar clinical recall tests to predict future impairment and to diagnose current impairment;(b) separate different clinically important components of memory from one another in accordance with current theories of the memory processes that underlie performance on the RAVLT and similar tests;(c) identify the components of memory that differentiate cognitive changes that are associated with normal aging from changes that are associated with conversion to impairment;and (d) provide separate scores for different memory components of RAVLT data, which can be used to better predict behavioral and biological markers of future impairment and to identify current impairment. The research will consist of 2 phases, spanning 2 years. Both phases will rely on mathematical modeling tools and software that we have already developed. Our preliminary studies have shown that RAVLT-type tests are inherently noisy measures of impairment because 3 different memory processes are responsible for performance, but only 1 of them (gist-based reconstruction) is responsible for conversion to impairment. Therefore, in both phases of research, we will investigate how predictive and diagnostic power are improved when our modeling tools are used to remove this noise. Noise will be removed by computing separate scores for the reconstruction component of performance and for the other 2 components (direct access of verbatim traces and meta-cognitive confidence). During Phase I, this question will be investigated using a very large sample of subjects who participated in the Aging, Demographics, and Memory Study (ADAMS) portion of NIA's Healthy Retirement Study. The first phase will establish whether noise-free scores greatly improve our ability to separate groups of subjects that differ on biological markers of impairment (e.g., the ApoE genotype), behavioral markers of impairment (e.g., neuropsychological tests), and clinical diagnoses of impairment. During Phase II, this question will be investigated in a longitudinal study of 200 adults (aged 70 and above) who will be administered a neuropsychological test battery, and who will also be administered 3 versions of the RAVLT, spaced at 6-month intervals. The second phase will establish whether noise-free scores greatly improve our ability to differentiate individual people who differ in biological markers of impairment, behavioral markers of impairment, and clinical diagnoses of impairment. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: This research will apply state-of-the-art mathematical models to clinical tests of memory to dramatically improve such tests'ability to predict future cognitive impairment in older adults and to diagnose current impairment. Findings will be used to develop low-burden tools that remove the noise for such tests and provide scores for the component memory process that are associated with conversion to impairment.