There is no item vs. I wish there were an item: Implicit negation causes false recall just as well as explicit negation.

Józef Maciuszek,Mateusz Polak,Martyna Sekulak

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0215283

Abstract

When talking about absence, we may express it in a negative statement (using explicit negation e.g. I was not) or in a positive statement (using implicit negation e.g. I wished I were). Previous research has shown that explicitly negated statements may cause false recall–negated items may paradoxically be remembered as present. The current study compares false recall caused by implicit and explicit negation. Participants listened to a recording in which some objects were mentioned as present, some as absent, and some not mentioned at all. The absence of objects was expressed using explicit or implicit negation. Participants’ recall of the recording was measured either five minutes or one week after exposure to the recording. Results indicate that implicit and explicit negation lead to a nearly identical false recall of negated items. However, items not mentioned in the recording (i.e. neither mentioned nor negated) were more often recognized as present by participants exposed to implicit, rather than explicit negation. We postulate that false recall of negated items could be explained by participants remembering the item itself, but forgetting the context in which it was present (an affirmative or a negative statement), hence objects would be recalled as present just because they were spoken of.

Highlights

In everyday communication, one of the main functions of negation is to inform about the absence of objects (e.g. There is no fireplace in the living room), as well as to deny events (e.g. Yesterday, the last flight from Washington was not late) and behavior (e.g. John did not stop at a red light)
We investigate whether the false recall of negated items is to be explained by the cognitive processing of explicitly negative statements using the words no, not, none, absent, etc., or are other explanations required
negation related false memories” (NRFM) led to a significantly higher number of false alarms regarding negated than not mentioned items. This finding raised a question whether the NRFM effect is to be explained by cognitive processing of explicit negation or whether it can be accounted for within a broader theoretical scope

Summary

Introduction

One of the main functions of negation is to inform about the absence of objects (e.g. There is no fireplace in the living room), as well as to deny events (e.g. Yesterday, the last flight from Washington was not late) and behavior (e.g. John did not stop at a red light). How negation influences the memory of negated objects or behavior is of interest both from a scientific (e.g. memory and language theories) and practical standpoint (e.g. forensic psychology). Many psycholinguistic studies have found that negatives are harder to process than affirmatives [1, 2, 3] Negative statements impede memory [4, 8, 9]) showed that people remember affirmative sentences better than negative ones.

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Conclusion