This research project will examine college students' memories for meeting their college roommates and investigate whether accuracy and distortion of these memories are related to accuracy and distortion in a variety of laboratory memory tasks. Within 24 hours of arriving on campus, the participants will complete a questionnaire that asks them to describe the details of meeting their roommate. Six months later their memory for the event will be tested again and accuracy will be determined by comparing the results to the original account. Over the course of the academic year, the participants will return for additional testing sessions where they will complete different laboratory experiments including tasks that look at eyewitness memory, the impact of imagining on memory for both autobiographical and laboratory events, misinformation effects, and memory intrusions in recall of word-lists. Comparing autobiographical memory for life events to performance on laboratory memory tasks provides an opportunity to investigate the ecological validity of the laboratory tasks. This research design makes it possible to determine whether performance on laboratory memory tasks predicts memory performance in real life.
The participants will also complete eleven different questionnaires that assess both personality and cognitive factors that previous research has suggested might be related to memory performance. This will provide a more comprehensive picture of individual differences in memory accuracy and distortion. In most past research investigating individual differences in memory performance, a handful of personality and cognitive measures have been investigated as possible predictors of memory performance on a single task. In the present study, it should be possible to look at similarities and differences among a number of very different memory tasks and their relationships with the personality and cognitive dimensions being tested. This will allow for a more detailed understanding of the mechanisms involved in memory accuracy and distortion. A better understanding of these mechanisms may make it possible to better differentiate between real life memories that are likely to be accurate and those that may have been distorted.
