Biomedical subjects

Tore Helstrup

Publications and source records attributed to Tore Helstrup.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2006

What people believe about memory.

Two representative samples of adult Norwegians (n=2000) were asked a set of general and specific questions regarding their beliefs and opinions about human memory. The results indicate that on many questions, such as time of the earliest memories, inhibiting effects of collaboration, and memory for dramatic versus ordinary events, the views of the general public concurred with current research findings, and people in general had realistic views about their own memory performance. On other questions, such as the reliability of olfactory as compared with visual and auditory memory, the memory of small children in comparison with that of adults, the likelihood of repression of adult traumatic memories, and on more general questions such as the possibility of training memory and the capacity limitations of long-term memory, a large proportion of the participants expressed views that are less supported by scientific evidence. Implications of these findings are briefly discussed.

Adult↗

PubMed2004

The enactment effect is due to more than guesses and beliefs.

Three experiments examined whether the enactment effect - that is, higher recall of enacted than of corresponding non-enacted information - might be explained by guessing rates and performance expectancies. Experiment 1 checked whether the guessing rate of target items would be higher as a result of a narrowed sampling space defined by the enactment condition. By means of pre-experimental instructions, the subjects in Experiments 2 and 3 were induced to expect respectively a positive enactment effect, a negative enactment effect, or no difference in amount of recall of enacted and non-enacted materials. Experiment 2 had a within-subject design, Experiment 3 a between-subject design. The experiments failed to support the proposed explanations.

Culture↗

PubMed2003

Retrieval independence in successive recognition tasks.

In three experiments participants studied AB word pairs and completed two recognition tests. In the first recognition test, which was included in all three experiments, the B word had to be discriminated from two distractors that did not appear on the study list. In Experiment 1, in the second recognition test, an AB target was compared with distractors composed of words not on the study list. In Experiment 2, in the second recognition test, an AB target had to be discriminated from two other pairs that were created by randomly re-pairing A and B words that appeared on the study list. In Experiment 3, on the second recognition test, words from the study list were systematically re-paired to form distractors that contained either the same A term or the same B term as the target pair. Recognition of the B word on the first test was always at least partly independent of recognition of the AB pair on the second test. Even when recognition judgements were restricted to those for which the participants were most confident, all experiments demonstrated significant retrieval independence between the two tests.

Adult↗