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All papers will be fully peer reviewed with publication of the full issue scheduled for later in the same year. Belief in conspiracy theories has become widespread, from COVID-19 and vaccinations to climate change and QAnon. [Extracted from the article]

Can realistic spatial scenarios be used to measure spatial mental imagery? Can people accurately evaluate their spatial imagery? Does gender moderate the relationship between performance on realistic spatial imagery tasks and ratings of imagery realism? Forty-two female and 31 male undergraduates first rated the realism of their images after reading spatial scenarios based on actual spatial tasks. In phase 2, they solved closely related spatial scenario problems, and then completed the VZ-2 Paper Folding test. Performance on realistic spatial scenarios predicted performance on the VZ-2. Men's evaluation of their spatial imagery realism predicted their actual spatial performance, but women's did not. More task experience was positively related to more realistic images and higher scores on the VZ-2. These results were generally consistent with those found with more artificial stimulus materials, but also demonstrated the importance of considering gender differences in spatial problem strategy and/or rating scale interpretation. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: Network science is an emerging area of complexity science that uses mathematical techniques to study complex systems and could represent a new way of quantifying and investigating the internal structure of domain‐specific knowledge as approximated by students' concept maps. Students enrolled in introductory psychology constructed concept maps to represent their understanding of a psychology chapter. Concept networks were constructed based on the concept maps generated by students. Network analysis revealed that the structure of concept networks differed across students (i.e., some networks were better connected than others), and network structure significantly predicted quiz scores, such that concept networks with larger average shortest path lengths (a network metric representing the average of the shortest paths between two nodes in a network) were associated with higher quiz scores, after controlling for network size. This paper illustrates how network science techniques can be used to quantify the conceptual structure of a learner's knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent public testimony concerning sexual abuse on the part of celebrities raises the question of what happens to memories when they enter the public domain. The present paper reviews research on the effects of communication on memory and examines how the context of this communication affects its influence on memory, both in the short and long term. Specifically, we discuss how communication with the self, a small group, and the larger public affects the content and availability of different elements of both emotional and more mundane memories, in the short term and in the long term. Evidence suggests that, although forgetting is rapid in the first few years, it then levels off. Although this pattern would suggest that the effects conversational influences have on memory may be limited to the first few years, the present paper argues that the pattern will vary as the source changes.Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: A prominent example in the literature on relative ranking is the “better‐than‐average” effect: that people have a general tendency to view themselves in a positive light and think they are above average. The current paper evaluates whether such biases are specific to culture. In Experiment 1, Americans exhibited a larger better‐than‐average effect than Chinese. In Experiment 2, the study was designed to understand what drives this cultural difference. Estimates of relative standing for Americans relied more on perceptions of their own ability compared to those for Chinese participants. Relatively structured questions (experimental manipulation of the question frame) facilitate Americans making better judgments but not Chinese, supporting the hypothesis that relative‐ranking estimates are influenced by the degree to which other (vs. self) information is used cross‐culturally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper established a new direction for researchers interested in the malleability of memory in a forensic context or eyewitness paradigm. The paper was the first to extend 'misinformation' effects established in controlled laboratory settings to witness reports following discussions with fellow witnesses. This was achieved within a relatively naturalistic situation and it persuasively demonstrated what had long been observed in the social psychological literature: that the opinions of others affect our behaviour but can also quite dramatically alter our reports as well as our beliefs and memories. When eyewitnesses comply with the reports of others in a social interaction, the longterm consequences for their recollections are clearly substantial. This paper has stimulated much research which has reinforced and extended the basic findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This prominent team of Dutch researchers was among the first to show that every second witness can easily be made to claim falsely to have witnessed a whole, complex and highly emotional event. We confidently claim to have seen what we have not - our memory crashes. The method was simple yet highly innovative and has inspired many other researchers to follow. The paper brings out clear and important applied implications, the findings are explained by the use of a cognitive theory, and it is provocative: Psychology at its best. The paper is ACP trademarked. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This themed issue consists of seven empirical papers, as well as an introduction and discussion, and has its genesis in three symposia, organised by the authors of this article and presented at the 2006 Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) in San Francisco, California. The papers investigate a number of conditions under which instructional animations may be effective. This article uses cognitive load theory (CLT) to provide an explanation for why animated instructions have not currently produced the learning benefits expected. A brief overview of the papers with a focus on how they accommodate critical aspects of cognitive load is given. The issue finishes with a discussion on each paper and identifies some common principles and recommendations for instructional design and research into animations. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The primary claim in this paper is that questions are one of the fundamental cognitive components that guide human reasoning. That is, threads of coherent reasoning are built around the questions that humans ask and their answers to these questions. Explanatory reasoning is elicited by particular classes of questions (such as why, how, and what-if) that invite the construction of casual chains, goal-plan-action hierarchies, and logical justifications. This paper identifies the psychological mechanisms that underline human question asking and questions answering, along with some empirical findings that support these mechanisms. We also discuss some ways that educational software can be designed to facilitate question-driven explanatory reasoning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relation between affect and retrospective duration estimation has hardly been examined. In this paper, we contribute to filling this gap by studying the influence of arousal on the remembered duration of positive events. On the basis of the contextual change model, we expected that high-arousal positive events would be remembered as longer compared with low-arousal positive events. To test this hypothesis, we set up a naturalistic study in which participants were asked at the end of a pleasant amusement park ride at the local fair to rate how pleasant and aroused they felt during the ride as well as to estimate the ride's duration. Feeling more aroused during a ride was associated with longer estimates of the ride's duration. Results are discussed within the framework of retrospective time estimation models. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mental health clinicians are tasked to diagnose and treat the millions of people worldwide seeking help for mental health issues. This paper investigates the memory clinicians have for patient information. We hypothesize that clinicians encapsulate mental health knowledge through experience into more abstract concepts, as in other domains changing what clinicians remember about patients compared with non-professionals. We tested memory for realistic patient-therapist interactions in experienced clinicians, intermediately trained graduate students, and laypeople. Clinicians recalled fewer facts than intermediate trainees and as many as laypeople. Furthermore, clinicians reported more abstracted information than all other participants, providing the first empirical demonstration of knowledge encapsulation in the memory of mental health clinicians. We discuss how our results fit into the existing literature on clinical expertise in mental health and the implications of our findings for future research relevant to mental health care. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Autobiographical memories might be identified using a variant of the implicit association test (IAT), or the autobiographical IAT (aIAT). The aIAT provides a measure of association between true sentences and sentences describing an autobiographical event. This tool might be used to evaluate whether specific autobiographical information is encoded within the respondent's mind/brain. This paper examines possible problems arising when the aIAT is used as a lie-detector technique. The results indicate that, when given previous instruction or training with an aIAT, examinees can alter their results and beat the 'memory-detector'. However, we have been able to detect successful fakers of aIAT on the basis of their specific response patterns. Our algorithm has the ability to spot the faker in a satisfactory manner. If, as demonstrated here, faking can be detected, then the real autobiographical event might also be identified when the examinee attempts to alter their results. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper appeared in the very first volume of the very first issue of Applied Cognitive Psychology and exemplifies the place of this journal in the field. The authors present an elegant theoretical framework about the study of time from philosophical and psychological traditions, and discuss how time and memory are interwoven. In a series of experiments, Loftus et al. examined participants' perception of time as a function of arousal level, and showed that arousal increases time estimations, especially for females. Throughout the manuscript, the authors knit together theoretical ideas with forensic implications, reinforcing the mission of Applied Cognitive Psychology to present the best science that also has profound implications for real world issues and applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper has been cited on over 100 occasions according to both the Web of Science and Scopus, with over 300 citations in Google Scholar. It is significant because it investigated three major effects in multimedia instructional design simultaneously: split-attention, modality and the redundancy effect. Split-attention occurs when text and diagrams are separated from each other and the learner is required to integrate the two sources together. Redundancy occurs when the two sources contain overlapping material. The study not only showed that split-attention could be avoided by modality effects (aligning pictures and spoken narrative) but also by directing the learner's attention through colour coding techniques. Interactions with redundancy were also identified. These findings influenced both instructional designers and researchers in the decade that followed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviewed research on the association of children's suggestibility with cognitive, psycho-social and demographic variables. It is impressive, both in scope and depth of analysis. The results of more than 500 measures derived from 69 published and unpublished studies were synthesized with several levels of analysis. Discussion focused on potential mechanisms that underlie suggestibility effects, the interactions between variables and how findings differ depending upon the component of suggestibility examined. Bruck and Melnyk concluded that apart from intellectual status, a strong case could not be made for any other variable being critical. Methodological and conceptual limitations were discussed in an effort to establish how these might have contributed to non-significant results and could be addressed in future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Feedback administered to eyewitnesses after they make a line-up identification dramatically distorts a wide range of retrospective judgements (e.g. G. L. Wells & A. L. Bradfield, 1998 Journal of Applied Psychology, 83(3), 360–376.). This paper presents a meta-analysis of extant research on post-identification feedback, including 20 experimental tests with over 2400 participant-witnesses. The effect of confirming feedback (i.e. ‘Good, you identified the suspect’) was robust. Large effect sizes were obtained for most dependent measures, including the key measures of retrospective certainty, view and attention. Smaller effect sizes were obtained for so-called objective measures (e.g. length of time the culprit was in view) and comparisons between disconfirming feedback and control conditions. This meta-analysis demonstrates the reliability and robustness of the post-identification feedback effect. It reinforces recommendations for double-blind testing, recording of eyewitness reports immediately after an identification is made, and reconsideration by court systems of variables currently recommended for consideration in eyewitness evaluations. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Flashbulb memories are defined as vivid, long-lasting, and detailed memories for the circumstances in which people learned of shocking and important public events, that is the so-called reception context (Brown & Kulik, 1977). They are considered as highly integrated cores of autobiographical knowledge which aggregate attributes of the reception context (Conway, 1995). The present paper deals with the measurement of flashbulb memories. Data from both a correlational and an experimental study were submitted to confirmatory factor analysis, latent trait model, and latent class model (LCM) procedures. Results confirmed that the clustered nature of flashbulb memories is better assessed by a LCM. The attribute of mass media as a source of the original news seemed to be crucial in defining flashbulb memories. The impact of the mass media was discussed, in that flashbulb memories appear to be not indelible and immune to forgetting. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The benefit to memory of spacing presentations of material is well established but lacks an adequate explanation and is rarely applied in education. This paper presents three experiments that examined the spacing effect and its application to education. Experiment 1 demonstrated that spacing repeated presentations of items is equally beneficial to memory for a wide range of ages, contrary to some theories. Experiment 2 introduced ‘clustered’ presentations as a more relevant control than massed, reflecting the fact that massed presentation of material is uncommon in education. The scheduling of clustered presentations was intermediate between massed and distributed, yet recall was no different than for massed. Experiment 3, a classroom-based study, demonstrated the benefit of distributed over clustered teaching of reading through modification of the scheduling of everyday lessons. Thus, the effectiveness of teaching may be improved by increasing the degree to which lessons are distributed. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the effects of September 11, 2001 terrorists' attack on decision making. It was hypothesized that after terrorists' attacks people would make more conservative and less risky decisions, as a way of compensating for the feelings of insecurity caused by the disaster. Prospect Theory is used as theoretical framework. This theory has successfully accounted for decision making under normal circumstances. To verify whether and how the terrorists' attack against the USA influenced individual decision making processes, two samples of Italian university students were tested, one month and six months after the disaster. The results show the emergence of two tendencies, which are absent during ‘normal’ historical periods: a strong, long-term lasting search for security when the outcome of a decision is perceived as a gain, and a medium-term risk avoiding behavior in the loss domain. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The organization of autobiographical memory is critical for both theory and application in many areas of psychology. Several theories of autobiographical memory state that memories are nested within higher-order cognitive structures. A procedure developed by Brown and Schopflocher is extended and used to explore similarities of various characteristics within these structures, which they call ‘event clusters’. This phrase, event cluster, is used to describe events which cue one another. The purpose of this paper is to explore the similarities of events within the same cluster. We find that memories within a cluster are more likely to be similar with respect to clarity, emotion, importance, happiness and the estimated date in which they occurred compared with events from other clusters. Further, having nearly 1900 memories allows hypotheses about the relationships among clarity, emotion and importance to be examined in a way that is not possible with many other autobiographical data sets. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much memory research involves recording several autobiographical memories for each of several people. These memories are not independent of each other, an assumption of the statistical procedures used in many cognitive psychology papers. In recent years there have been both statistical and computational advances for modelling these hierarchical data structures. This is often called multilevel modelling . Using data from recent memory research (Burt et al ., 1995), I describe this approach and show how it compares favourably with traditional approaches. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A large body of research has examined the effect of contextual knowledge on deductive reasoning. Relatively little work, however, has examined context effects on statistical reasoning. In this paper, we document that in a context such as drawing marbles from an urn, children correctly think of sampling as a way to measure the distribution of marbles. However in other context, such as taking a survey of people’s opinions, children design samples that have the effect of causing a distribution. For example, they sample members of the population most likely to have positive opinions. We interpret these results by proposing that knowledge of statistics comes in discrete pieces of intuitive understanding whose elicitation is contingent upon the problem context. We describe a model of instruction that acknowledges the effects of context on statistical reasoning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The growth of expertise is frequently accompanied by an increased role being played by expectancy and anticipatory behavior. Such influences on behavior should be readily observable in the ways participants construe task-related scenarios, and distinguishable from more general experience gained from age. This paper reports an extensive study of how matched groups of motorists conceptualize the danger involved in various video-taped driving scenarios. Results demonstrate separable effects of both age and driving experience on the factor structure of drivers' rating of such stimuli. In particular, different emphases are placed on the danger and difficulty depicted in driving scenes. Younger drivers (irrespective of driving experience) concentrate on the danger rather than on the difficulty involved in carrying out particular maneuvers, but then under-rate the dangers encountered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes a new method for assessing the effect of normal ageing on degree of awareness of the current temporal context in everyday life. The Current Orientation Test (COT) investigates ability to describe the most recent occurrence of 15 common everyday events and to rank them in temporal sequence. Fourteen subjects between 18 and 30 years of age were compared with 17 older subjects (60-78 years). The older group was slower in producing descriptions of these events, took longer to rank them in sequence, and showed much less consistency of ranking on a re-test. A specific relationship of the COT to everyday episodic memory was suggested by significant correlations with subjects' relatives ratings of forgetfulness and with a test of verbal episodic memory (Story Recall), in contrast to no correlation with a test involving semantic memory (Adult Silent Reading Test). The COT shows promise as a method for assessing memory decline or disorder, and may provide insights into the normal cognitive processes involved in the up-dating of current awareness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent paper by Schraw (Measures of feeling-of-knowing accuracy: a new look at an old problem. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 1995, 9, 321-332) is flawed by several inaccuracies and by Schraw's failure to distinguish between two fundamentally different aspects of the accuracy of metacognitive predictions: (1) calibration (aka absolute accuracy, defined in terms of whether the predicted value assigned to a single item is followed by the occurrence of that value on the criterion test), and (2) resolution (aka relative accuracy, defined in terms of whether the predicted performance on one item relative to another item is followed by the occurrence of that ordering of the two items on the criterion test). Because of these (and other) problems, his recommendations seem misleading and counterproductive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The effectiveness of the cognitive interview (CI) technique has been demonstrated in experimental studies of eyewitness memory conducted in the USA, Germany, and the UK. Much of the research, however, has used college students as interviewers rather than professionals who regularly interview witnesses (e.g. police officers). The aim of this research was to examine the effects of such CI training using experienced police officers with established interviewing styles. An armed robbery was staged and information was elicited in witness interviews. The CI did not significantly increase correct recall but tended to produce more suppositions and errors. A qualitative analysis of interviewer behaviour showed that many officers had difficulty in applying the new cognitive techniques and in avoiding the use of closed and leading questions. The paper addresses two issues: first, that of training experienced police officers who have received relatively little prior training in investigative interviewing, and second, the extent to which we can generalized from the laboratory data elicited in previous studies of CI. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Memory issues arise in the law in many different ways. At the must fundamental level. assumptions about memory are inherent in both substantive laws and procedural rules that govern the operation of the legal system. For example. the rules and procedures used to govern the conduct of jury trials reflect a great deal of faith in jurors' ability to understand and retain information over long periods of time, often with much intervening information. Memory issues also arise in the context of individual cases. For example, the ability of an attorney to satisfactorily prosecute or defend a case on behalf of a client often relies largely upon the completeness and accuracy of the memory of the client and other witnesses. This paper discusses examples of memory issues in the law and describes how applied research on these issues can be used to inform basic memory theory, particularly with respect to the relationship between emotion and memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is widely accepted that the structure of performance depends on the relationship between task demands and information processing resources. This relationship is affected by many factors including practice. For instance, it is claimed that while use of task-specific knowledge, an information-processing resource, may benefit performance in the long term, the costs of its use in the short term are quite high. It is difficult to find any studies which can be used to test this claim, as those which have been undertaken typically measure gross performance only, Jack any measure of the subjective costs of resource investment, and are of relatively short duration. In this paper an experiment is reported which looks at effects of task-specific knowledge on gross and process performance, and on a number of subjective indices over a longitudinal time frame. The results are discussed in terms of the relationships between the context of performance, the perception of control, and strategies of resource management. Finally, the argument that the data suggest a need for the reconceptualization of demands and resources is mooted and some methodological implications are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of the mnemonic keyword method involves (a) the formation of an orthographic link between the form of a foreign word and that of physically similar word in one's mother tongue (i.e. the keyword), and (b) the formation of a semantic link between the referent of the foreign word and that of the keyword. In a variation of this study method, English-speaking learners were asked to study the grammatical gender of German nouns by substituting the concepts of a woman, a man, and an inanimate object for the feminine, masculine, and neuter genders, respectively. This more concrete representation of gender was then to be incorporated to an interactive image along with the referent of the keyword and that of the German noun. The three experiments reported in this paper yielded four main results: (a) instructing learners to recode the gender tag and to include its representation into an interactive mental image along with the referent of the German noun facilitated the recall of genders; (b) the facilitating effect of imagery instructions on the recall of genders was obtained only if the English translation was recalled; (c) the probability of correctly reporting the gender given that the English translation was not recalled was higher than the baseline for guessing if the learners were instructed to encode the gender before the translation, otherwise it was consistently near the baseline; and (d) in contrast with prior studies with French-speaking subjects, the modified keyword method did not always enhance the recall of the familiar translation equivalents. The discussion bears mainly on the factors that might account for the difficulty of detecting a consistent keyword advantage in the recall of the familiar translation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we argue that industrial accidents are the end-results of long chains of events that start with decisions at management level. Often these decisions create latent failures, which may remain hidden for a long time. Latent failures can be grouped into a limited number of classes, which are called general failure types. Examples are: wrongly designed machines. unsuitable work procedures. and incompatible goals. Latent failures will affect the psychological processes determining the actual behaviour of workers on the shop floor. ConsequentIy, these workers will commit unsafe acts that, provided the system lacks appropriate defences, will cause accidents. Our discussion of accidents and their cognitive causes follows this logic, and stresses the point that, in modern industries, preventive action will be more effective when aimed at changes based on management decisions. The reason for this is that many unsafe acts are not simple slips, but intentional and reasoned actions that end in unforeseen results. Erroneous plans are not easily avoided on the shop floor, once they are invited by operational conditions replete with latent failures. However, the removal of latent failures requires a more thorough understanding of how they shape behaviour, than is provided by our current insights in cognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author comments this collection of papers on applied cognitive psychology and the Guest Editor's distinction between basic, ecologically valid and applied research. The relationship of these three varieties of research is discussed in relation to the findings reported by the various contributors to this Special Issue of Applied Cognitive Psychology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper illustrates how the author started research in the field of applied cognitive psychology. The paper describes the obstacles and opportunities associated with living in a country where Psychology was underdeveloped. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article announces a call for papers on psychological analyses of memory, learning, problem solving, language and consciousness as they occur in real-world settings to be published in the 2018 Special Issue of the journal "Applied Cognitive Psychology."