Browsing by Author "Gunter, Raymond W."
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- ItemOpen AccessHow eye movements affect unpleasant memories: support for a working memory account(2007) Gunter, Raymond W.; Bodner, GlenEye movement desensitization and reprocessing can reduce ratings of the vividness and emotionality of unpleasant memories-hence it is commonly used to treat posttraumatic stress disorder. The present experiments compared three accounts of how eye movements produce these benefits. Participants rated unpleasant autobiographical memories before and after eye movements or an eyes stationary control condition. In Experiment 1, eye movements produced benefits only when memories were held in mind during the movements, and eye movements increased arousal, contrary to an investigatory-reflex account. In Experiment 2, horizontal and vertical eye movements produced equivalent benefits, contrary to an interhemispheric-communication account. In Experiment 3, two other distractor tasks (auditory shadowing, drawing) produced benefits that were negatively correlated with working memory capacity. These findings support a workingmemory account of the eye movement benefit in which the central executive is taxed when a person performs a distractor task while attempting to hold a memory in mind.
- ItemOpen AccessUsing generation to improve memory accuracy in a false recognition pradigm(2004) Gunter, Raymond W.; Bodner, GlenUsing the Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm, recollection of distinctive information about cognitive operations was shown to improve recognition accuracy. Requiring participants to generate (vs. read) each list word by solving an anagram substantially decreased false recognition of non-presented critical lure words. In addition, correct recognition increased when generation occurred at both study and test--even if different anagram cues were presented at test-suggesting that reinstating cognitive operations at test can facilitate correct recognition. When participants generated half the lists and read the other half at study, false recognition decreased for both generated and read lists, relative to a group who read all list words at study. This finding suggests that generation induced participants to adopt a distinctiveness heuristic at test, whereby they took the absence of memory for generation as evidence for a word's nonoccurrence at study, and is less consistent with an impoverished relational encoding account that attributes false recognition to impaired encoding of relations between list words.