Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In the present study, two cognitive phenomena until now treated apart were compared to each other: hindsight bias and misinformation effect. Both phenomena result from the same basic retroactive-interference procedure focussing on how memory of originally encoded material is distorted by the encoding of subsequent, conflicting information. The results showed that subjects' recollections of the original information were similarly distorted under both conditions, that is, the amount of hindsight bias was as large as the misinformation effect. More fine-grained analyses, however, revealed important differences. With the additional results of a probability mixture model it was found that only hindsight subjects suffered from memory impairment and that, moreover, their recollections included genuine blends. The misinformation effect, on the other hand, turned out to be an artifact of averaging across two different sets of recollections. These results represent compelling data with respect to the ongoing discussion about the existence of genuine memory blends.