Cognitive control constrains retrieval processing and so restricts what comes to mind as input to the attribution system. We review evidence that older adults, patients with Alzheimer's disease, and people with traumatic brain injury exert less cognitive control during retrieval, and so are susceptible to memory misattributions in the form of dramatic levels of false remembering.

Several recent studies have demonstrated context-based, high-confidence misperceptions in hearing, referred to as false hearing. These studies have unanimously found that older adults are more susceptible to false hearing than are younger adults, which the authors have attributed to an age-related decline in the ability to inhibit the activation of a contextually predicted response. However, no published work has investigated this activation-based account of false hearing. In the present study, younger and older adults listened to sentences in which the semantic (...) context provided by the sentence was either unpredictive, highly predictive and valid, or highly predictive and misleading with relation to a sentence-final word in noise. Participants were tasked with clicking on one of four images to indicate which image depicted the sentence-final word in noise. We used eye-tracking to investigate how activation, as revealed in patterns of fixations, of different response options changed in real-time over the course of sentences. We found that both younger and older adults exhibited anticipatory activation of the target word when highly predictive contextual cues were available. When these contextual cues were misleading, younger adults were able to suppress the activation of the contextually predicted word to a greater extent than older adults. These findings are interpreted as evidence for an activation-based model of speech perception and for the role of inhibitory control in false hearing. (shrink)

The integrative memory model formalizes a new conceptualization of memory in which interactions between representations and cognitive operations within large-scale cerebral networks generate subjective memory feelings. Such interactions allow to explain the complexity of memory expressions, such as the existence of multiples sources for familiarity and recollection feelings and the fact that expectations determine how one recognizes previously encountered information.

The process-dissociation procedure was developed to separate the controlled and automatic contributions of memory. It has spawned the development of a host of new measurement approaches and has been applied across a broad range of fields in the behavioral sciences, ranging from studies of memory and perception to neuroscience and social psychology. Although it has not been without its shortcomings or critics, its growing influence attests to its utility. In the present article, we briefly review the factors motivating its development, (...) describe some of the early applications of the general method, and review the literature examining its underlying assumptions and boundary conditions. We then highlight some of the specific issues that the methods have been applied to and discuss some of the more recent applications of the procedure, along with future directions. (shrink)