BASICS
fail to do so. The present research used an
implicit test that required meaningful or con-
ceptually driven processing. The test involved,
specifically, category member generation (e.g.,
"name the first five tools that come to mind").
In this research, viewing an event did increase
performance on the implicit test for subjects
who were not exposed to misinformation.
However, the finding of great interest was a
clear reduction in performance on this implicit
test for misled subjects who ultimately embraced
the misinformation option on the explicit
test.
Apart from the issue of whether postevent mis-
information impairs event memory, the other
heavily-debated issue in the memory distortion
literature is whether subjects genuinely believe
in their misinformation memories. If a memory
for some object, say a screwdriver, that came
about through the process of suggestion was sub-
jectively very real to the subject, this would be
important from both a theoretical and applied
perspective. Even if these misinformation mem-
ories were a small subset of all misinformation
responses, they would be interesting in their own
right, for they would tell us something about the
creation of new memories. We already know that
such memories can be held with great convic-
tion, and are acted upon as though they were
genuine experiences. When a memory is created
via postevent suggestion, the precise process may
be somewhat different from the creation of
KNOWING WHO'S NEW: FROM DEJA TO JAMAIS VU
J. DON READ
University of Lethbridge
Subjects in face recognition and person
identification research make two kinds of errors:
false positives and misses. In the first, a person
not previously seen is erroneously identified; in
the second, someone who was previously seen
is erroneously rejected. In four field studies of
person identification we found that the first of
these may be increased in frequency by simply
enhancing contextual knowledge of the target
person. Such enhancement made the identifica-
tion of someone, indeed anyone, more likely.
Enhancement of contextual information about a
target over a retention interval was accomplished
by engaging the subjects in either incidental or
647
memory in the usual way, that is from perceptual
experience. Nonetheless such creations appear
to be part of the human experience, and every
bit as worthy of our sustained interest.
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intentional rehearsal activities whereby they
thought about the target's personality and their
interactions with the target. Participants in these
field studies varied from members of the public
interviewed in their homes and students enrolled
in psychology courses, to retail store clerks. In
some cases, the frequency of false positive
responses made by subjects who were provided
additional contextual information about a target
was twice as high as in a control condition. An
explanation of this phenomenon appears to reside
in the availability heuristic: At the time of making
an identification decision subjects found con-
textual information about the readily available
648
and erroneously mistook their high levels of
contextual familiarity for perceptual or resem-
blance information. That is, they believed them-
selves better prepared to make an identification
decision and, as a result, did so.
In five laboratory studies, on the other hand,
multiple targets were sometimes the recipients
of "negative recognition"; that is, subjects were
more likely to reject those they had seen than
those they had not seen. This phenomenon
resulted when the recognition test presented non-
identifical appearances of targets that had been
originally presented in photos or video clips.
When the two appearances of a person were
highly similar to one another, there was, as
expected, a positive impact of prior exposure
upon recognition. When, however, there was
substantially less similarity between the two
appearances, prior exposure reduced the likeli-
hood of recognition to a point significantly below
the acceptance of previously unseen or distractor
persons. In this case it appears that some per-
ceptual knowledge was available but its integra-
tion with contextual knowledge was lacking.
Because so little contextual information could be
retrieved, subjects appear to have discounted the
sense of familiarity that arose from perceptual
J.D. Read
or resemblance information and assumed perhaps
that the target face or clip was familiar for some
reason other than specific prior exposure in the
experiment. As a result, subjects were biased
against those targets that had been previously
seen.
Understanding of these two types of errors
appears to hinge upon the relative strengths of
contextual and perceptual knowledge. In both
cases subjects appear to place too much reliance
upon the availability of contextual information
as a basis for assessing the relevance of the
familiarity that arose from perceptual knowledge.
When that assessment of familiarity was inflated,
false positives occurred. On the other hand, when
the assessment was discounted or devalued,
negative recognition was observed. It is sug-
gested that in circumstances where there is an
absence of specific and directed retrieval but is
accompanied by a subjective and undifferentiated
sense of familiarity, the phenomena of deja vu
and jamais vu may be experienced. The
experimental techniques used herein may pro-
vide a starting point for the investigation of these
two everyday experiences. Finally, the relevance
of these results to eyewitness identification and
to models of recognition memory are discussed.