Influence of Decision Process on Memory Encoding
David E. Falco, Mike DeKay · OSF Preprints (OSF Preprints) · 2018
The aim of this project is to better understand how decision making influences memory. Previous research has shown that the act of choosing between two options can cause participants to misremember characteristics of the options in a way that favors their chosen alternative (Lind et al., 2017; full references available upon request), but the mechanisms underlying such biases remain unclear. Although most research has focused on post-decision processes (e.g., Mather et al., 2000), recent results indicate that memory errors also result from pre-decision biases in information encoding (DeKay et al., 2014). Our study will attempt to replicate and extend DeKay et al.’s (2014) results regarding the distortion of facts. Those authors used a single choice context (a choice between apartments), mostly qualitative information (e.g., utility costs that were “slightly above average”), and a forced-choice recognition task. In this study, we will use two choice contexts (apartments and cars), mostly quantitative information (e.g., highway fuel efficiency), and two different cued recall tasks designed to assess gist memory and verbatim memory. Our primary prediction is that there will be significant effects of the pre-decision variables even when we control for choice, thus extending DeKay et al.’s (2014) results to memory for quantitative information and to two different memory tasks.