Abstract
The role of decision making in biasing recall of prose was examined. Both making a decision subsequent to reading and encountering an experimenter-provided decision resulted in recall biased in the direction of the decision. Conditions in which subjects made their own decisions, however, resulted in greater levels of decision-congruent recall than did conditions in which the experimenters furnished decisions to subjects. In addition, the level of recall of incongruent information in the subject-made decisions conditions was as high as the level of congruent information observed in the experimenter-provided decisions conditions. A memory-restructuring model, suggested by Dellarosa and Bourne (1984), accounts for the results if it is true that greater elaboration of both decision-congruent and decision-incongruent information during subject-made decisions occurs.
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References
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Timme, V., Corkill, A. & Glover, J.A. Decisions following reading and bias in recall. Bull. Psychon. Soc. 25, 77–78 (1987). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03330288
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03330288