This article pursues the possibility that perceivers are sensitive to implicit dynamic information even when they are not able to observe real-time change. Recent empirical results in the domains of handwriting recognition and picture perception are discussed in support of the hypothesis that perception involves acquiring information about transitions, whether the stimuli are static or dynamic. It is then argued that dynamic information has a special status in mental representation as well as in perception. In particular I propose that some mental representations may be dynamic, in that a temporal dimension is necessary to the representation. Recent evidence that mental representations may exhibit a form of momentum is discussed in support of this claim. There has been a growing appreciation of the impressive ability that the human mind has for perceiving events that take place over time. J. J. Gibson (1979), Johansson (1975), and others have noted that we are particularly receptive to information contained in patterns of change in the environment, as opposed to static information (such as that contained in a snapshot). In this article I will first propose that people perceive dynamic information even when the stimuli being inspected (such as snapshots) are not changing in real time. I will then propose that the importance of dynamic information to perception has implications for mental representation. In particular I will argue that mental representations may sometimes contain a temporal dimension and may thus themselves he dynamic. Perceiving Transitions I pr~ose that in oerception, acquiring information about transitions between states is as important as acquiring information about the states themselves. I believe that the proclivity oeople show for picking up transitional information extends to situations in which the stimuli are static. A more precise proposition can be stated as follows: When the perceptual system cannot directly perceive change over time it will seek out implicit Sections of this article are based on portions of a dissertation I submitted

In the present research, the authors examined contextual variations in automatic attitudes. Using 2 measures of automatic attitudes, the authors demonstrated that evaluative responses differ qualitatively as perceivers focus on different aspects of a target’s social group membership (e.g., race or gender). Contextual variations in automatic attitudes were obtained when the manipulation involved overt categorization (Experiments 1–3) as well as more subtle contextual cues, such as category distinctiveness (Experiments 4–5). Furthermore, participants were shown to be unable to predict such contextual influences on automatic attitudes (Experiment 3). Taken together, these experiments support the idea of automatic attitudes being continuous, online constructions that are inherently flexible and contextually appropriate, despite being outside conscious control.

We know that misinformation presented in interrogating questions or in advertising produces blendings, that even imagining a possible episode might produce blending as well, however, we do not know whether reasoning and problem solving can produce the same effect. On the other hand, models of analogy-making assume "perfect memory" for old episodes. The AMBR model of analogical problem solving has mechanisms for interaction between memory and reasoning which explain partial memory and memory distortions and has predicted blending effects which are due to the reasoning process. Such predictions have no parallel in any other model we know of. There has been no experimental support for these predictions so far. The current paper describes an experiment explicitly designed to test these predictions. It consists of three sessions: 1) solving three problems, 2) solving two more target problems by analogy with some of the problems in the first session, and 3) reproduction of the three problems in the first session. The results demonstrate that the degree of blending in the recalled stories depends on the target problem solved in the second session.

The field of children's testimony is in turmoil, but a resolution to seemingly intractable debates now appears attainable. In this review, we place the current disagreement in historical context and describe psychological and legal views of child witnesses held by scholars since the turn of the 20th century. Although there has been consistent interest in children's suggestibility over the past century, the past 15 years have been the most active in terms of the number of published studies and novel theorizing about the causal mechanisms that underpin the observed findings. A synthesis of this research posits three "families " of factors—cognitive, social, and biological—that must be considered if one is to understand seemingly contradictory interpretations of the findings. We conclude that there are reliable age differences in suggestibility but that even very young children are capable of recalling much that is forensically relevant. Findings are discussed in terms of the role of expert witnesses. Since the turn of the century, psycholegal scholars have examined the suggestibility of children's testimony in an effort to determine whether they would be credible witnesses. A major issue in this research concerns the degree to which heightened

It has been suggested that face recognition is primarily based on configural information, with featural information playing little or no role. We investigated this idea by comparing the prototype effect for face prototypes that emphasized either featural or configural processing. In Experiment 1, participants showed a tendency to commit false alarms in response to nonstudied prototypes, and this tendency was equivalent for featural and configural prototypes. Experiment 2 replicated this finding, and provided support for the assumption that the two types of prototypes differed in terms of featural and configural processing: Face inversion eliminated the prototype effect for configural prototypes but not for featural prototypes. These results suggest that both featural and configural processing make important contributions to face recognition, and that their effects are dissociable.

This paper presents a series of simulation experiments related to the interaction of memory and analogy-making in the AMBR model. This interaction makes it possible to demonstrate blending between superficially dissimilar episodes as a result of the established analogical mapping between them and of superficially and structurally dissimilar episodes as a result of a double analogy with a third episode. Both simulation experiments model the blending effect of analogy-making. The conditions for the emergence of such blending are explored on the basis of a proposed specific analogy-like retrieval mechanism.

Three experiments are reported that investigate the effect of decision-making on memory. In Experiment 1, subjects were found to recall, followiny a delay, more facts that supported decisions they had made concerning three texts than facts that contradicted their decisions. Recognition of' both types o facts was equivalent, however. The same results were obtained even when recall of both types o facts was equated prior to decision-making (Experiment 2) and when decisional processing was eliminated by simply informin the subject of the correct decision for each text (Experiment 3). On the basis of these results, we concluded that (1) decisions, whether internally generated or externally provided, produce a re-organization of memory traces, (2) this re-organization produces differential accessibility of supporting and contradictory facts, and (3) this differential accessibility produces biased memory performance that can be removed by the use of strong retrieval cues. A model of memory re-organization following decision-making is proposed to account for these results. Decisions and Memory: Differential Accessibility of Consistent and Contradictory Evidence In the course of making a decision, many facts are usually evaluated and compared. Having reached a decision, how well do people remember the facts which led them to it? Intuitively, it would seem that because those facts were deeply processed, they should enjQy rich mem6ry traces., and hence be easily accessible. Memory for decision-relevant facts should therefore be quite good.

P. A. Higham and J. R. Vokey (2000, Experiments 1 & 3) demonstrated that a slight increase in the display duration of a briefly presented word prior to displaying it in the clear for a recognition response increased the bias to respond "old". In the current research, 3 experiments investigated the phenomenology associated with this illusion of memory using the standard remember-know procedure and a new, independent-scales methodology. Contrary to expectations based on the fluency heuristic, which predicts effects of display duration on subjective familiarity only, the results indicated that the illusion was reported as both familiarity and recollection. Furthermore, manipulations of prime duration induced reports of false recollection in all experiments. The results--in particular, the implications of illusory recollection--are discussed in terms of dual-process, fuzzy trace, two-criteria signal-detection models and attribution models of recognition memory.

Recent work by Hupbach et al. (2007, 2009) suggests that episodic memory for a previously studied list can be updated to include new items, if participants are reminded of the earlier list just prior to learning a new list. The key finding from the Hupbach studies was an asymmetric pattern of intrusions, whereby participants intruded numerous items from the second list when trying to recall the first list, but not vice-versa. Hupbach et al. explain this pattern in terms of a cellular reconsolidation process, whereby the first-list memory is rendered labile by the reminder, and the labile memory is then updated to include items from the second list. Here we show that the Temporal Context Model (TCM) of memory, which lacks a cellular reconsolidation process, can account for the asymmetric intrusion effect using well-established principles of contextual reinstatement and item-context binding.

Human memory reconsolidation can be explained