Sensory Details Research Articles

False memory for context and true memory for context similarly activate the parahippocampal cortex

The role of the parahippocampal cortex is currently a topic of debate. One view posits that the parahippocampal cortex specifically processes spatial layouts and sensory details (i.e., the visual-spatial processing view). In contrast, the other view posits that the parahippocampal cortex more generally processes spatial and non-spatial contexts (i.e., the general contextual processing view). A large number of studies have found that true memories activate the parahippocampal cortex to a greater degree than false memories, which would appear to support the visual-spatial processing view as true memories are typically associated with greater visual-spatial detail than false memories. However, in previous studies, contextual details were also greater for true memories than false memories. Thus, such differential activity in the parahippocampal cortex may have reflected differences in contextual processing, which would challenge the visual-spatial processing view. In the present functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study, we employed a source memory paradigm to investigate the functional role of the parahippocampal cortex during true memory and false memory for contextual information to distinguish between the visual-spatial processing view and the general contextual processing view. During encoding, abstract shapes were presented to the left or right of fixation. During retrieval, old shapes were presented at fixation and participants indicated whether each shape was previously on the “left” or “right” followed by an “unsure”, “sure”, or “very sure” confidence rating. The conjunction of confident true memories for context and confident false memories for context produced activity in the parahippocampal cortex, which indicates that this region is associated with contextual processing. Furthermore, the direct contrast of true memory and false memory produced activity in the visual cortex but did not produce activity in the parahippocampal cortex. The present evidence suggests that the parahippocampal cortex is associated with general contextual processing rather than only being associated with visual-spatial processing.

Scenes of Hurt and Rapture: Céline Sciamma's Girlhood

Céline Sciamma as writer and director is peculiarly attentive to sensory detail, what things feel like, how they can be touched. This attention can be felt through her collaborative work with director of photography Crystel Fournier, who has worked on all of Sciamma's films to date in a creative collaboration proving just as electric as that between Claire Denis and Agnès Godard. Reflecting on her work to date, linking Girlhood to the earlier films, Didier Péron and Elisabeth Franck-Dumas wrote in Libération that Sciamma makes real the body and emotions of individuals in all their singularity. Intimacy is her real subject in Girlhood. The particular issue in relation to intimacy Sciamma pursues, from Water Lilies on, is that of hurt. She is a filmmaker who in her bodily, affective filmmaking has paid attention to hurt, to abrasion, and to vulnerability; she makes them all part of the robust, adrenaline-pumped feminist politics that pervade her films and their characters. It is this mode of making real—this feeling alive—that Wilson explores in this essay.

An Analysis of Descriptive Features in the English used in an Advertising Text

The goal of advertising is the persuasion of a customer of the merits of a particular product or service. Whatever the strategy advertisers employ in order to influence the consumer, language is the main carrier of the message. Among the components of advertising (visual images, words, logos, brand names, graphic designs and so on), words play a key role since by them the audience is able to grasp the advertising message (Dyer, 1982; Nga, 210) . In advertising, copywriters use English words to project the product or service they are bringing to the audience’s attention in the most attractive fashion. Copywriters use English quite distinctively; they sometimes employ the descriptive style of writing to present their messages. The rationale is that description makes the information more intriguing and engaging for the audience. The primary objective of description in advertising is to frame an image of a product in the minds of the consumer through sufficient details and allow them to experience the product through their five senses. Description in advertising creates a dominant impression, an overall attitude, mood or feeling about a product or service. In the current paper, the writer has analyzed the descriptive elements in the English used in an advertising text in a newspaper in Ghana. The theoretical framework that was adopted was Fairclough’s (1992) Three-Dimensional Model Theory and the qualitative research design was employed for the study. The descriptive features that were realized in the selected advertisement (henceforth advert) were sensory details, figurative expressions, modifiers and picturesque vocabulary. The description of the advertising text was effective, in that, it left the reader with a clear impression: a craving for the Castle Milk Stout alcoholic beverage that was advertised. Keywords : Advertising, description, English, persuasion, Castle Milk Stout

Imagining the personal past: Episodic counterfactuals compared to episodic memories and episodic future projections.

Episodic counterfactuals are imagined events that could have happened, but did not happen, in a person's past. Such imagined past events are important aspects of mental life, affecting emotions, decisions, and behaviors. However, studies examining their phenomenological characteristics and content have been few. Here we introduced a new method to systematically compare self-generated episodic counterfactuals to self-generated episodic memories and future projections with regard to their phenomenological characteristics (e.g., imagery, emotional valence, and rehearsal) and content (e.g., reference to a cultural life script), and how these were affected by temporal distance (1 month, 1 year, 5+ years). The findings showed that the three types of events differed phenomenologically. First, episodic memories were remembered more easily, with more sensory details, and from a dominantly field perspective, as compared to both future projections and episodic counterfactuals. Second, episodic future projections were more positive, more voluntarily rehearsed, and more central to life story and identity than were both episodic memories and episodic counterfactuals. Third, episodic counterfactuals differed from both episodic memories and future projections by neither having the positivity bias of the future events nor the enhanced sensory details of the past events. Across all three event types, sensory details decreased, whereas importance, reference to a cultural life script, and centrality increased with increasing temporal distance. The findings show that imagined events are phenomenologically different from memories of experienced events, consistent with reality-monitoring theory, and that imagined future events are different from both actual and imagined past events, consistent with some theories of motivation.

Prediction Errors but Not Sharpened Signals Simulate Multivoxel fMRI Patterns during Speech Perception.

Successful perception depends on combining sensory input with prior knowledge. However, the underlying mechanism by which these two sources of information are combined is unknown. In speech perception, as in other domains, two functionally distinct coding schemes have been proposed for how expectations influence representation of sensory evidence. Traditional models suggest that expected features of the speech input are enhanced or sharpened via interactive activation (Sharpened Signals). Conversely, Predictive Coding suggests that expected features are suppressed so that unexpected features of the speech input (Prediction Errors) are processed further. The present work is aimed at distinguishing between these two accounts of how prior knowledge influences speech perception. By combining behavioural, univariate, and multivariate fMRI measures of how sensory detail and prior expectations influence speech perception with computational modelling, we provide evidence in favour of Prediction Error computations. Increased sensory detail and informative expectations have additive behavioural and univariate neural effects because they both improve the accuracy of word report and reduce the BOLD signal in lateral temporal lobe regions. However, sensory detail and informative expectations have interacting effects on speech representations shown by multivariate fMRI in the posterior superior temporal sulcus. When prior knowledge was absent, increased sensory detail enhanced the amount of speech information measured in superior temporal multivoxel patterns, but with informative expectations, increased sensory detail reduced the amount of measured information. Computational simulations of Sharpened Signals and Prediction Errors during speech perception could both explain these behavioural and univariate fMRI observations. However, the multivariate fMRI observations were uniquely simulated by a Prediction Error and not a Sharpened Signal model. The interaction between prior expectation and sensory detail provides evidence for a Predictive Coding account of speech perception. Our work establishes methods that can be used to distinguish representations of Prediction Error and Sharpened Signals in other perceptual domains.

Examining Measurement Invariance Across Gender in Self‐defining Autobiographical Memory Characteristics Using a Shortened Version of the Memory Experiences Questionnaire

SummaryParticipants between the ages of 18 and 94 years (n = 279) provided ratings on different phenomenological memory characteristics regarding a self‐defining autobiographical memory by completing a slightly shortened version of the Memory Experiences Questionnaire. Results of a multi‐group invariance analyses across men and women provided evidence of configural, metric, scalar, and structural invariance across gender. These results help to empirically substantiate the assumption that memory phenomenology is invariant across gender. Subsequent latent means analysis found that women, as compared with men, rated their self‐defining memories as being more coherent, having greater emotional intensity, having greater sensory detail, having higher levels of vividness/time perspective, and being more likely to be from a first‐person perspective. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

USING TOURISM BROCHURES IN TEACHING WRITING DESCRIPTIVE TEXT TO IMPROVE THE WRITING ACHIEVEMENT OF THE EIGHTH GRADE STUDENTS AT SMP KARYA IBU PALEMBANG

This study aimed at seeing whether the use of tourism brochures was effective to improve students’ achievement in writing descriptive text. In particular, it sought to find out whether tourism brochures was an effective means for generating ideas in writing descriptive text. The design selected for this study was a quasi-experimental study using nonequivalent pretest posttest design. The population of the study was all eighth grade students at SMP Karya Ibu Palembang. This study involved 262 students of the eighth graders. The sample was purposively chosen as the sample of the study in which 20 students belonged to the experimental group and 20 students belonged to the control group. The data were obtained by means of writing test as the instruments. The study lasted one and half months in that during the treatment, the student were exposed to a wide range of writing activities including process writing particularly a prewriting activity by using tourism brochures. The result shows that there was a significant difference among the writing test mean scores before and after they were exposed to tourism brochures and there was a significant difference in students’ test scores between the students who were taught by tourism brochures and those who were not. The research findings revealed that the use of tourism brochures was effective to improve students’ writing achievement. These findings were also supported by the significant improvement in writing achievement between the two groups in terms of the six aspects of writing (topic sentence, supporting detail sentence, concluding sentence, word choice, mechanics and grammar, sensory details). The results of the pre-test and post-test showed a positive response that tourism brochures was very helpful for the students in improving their descriptive writing achievement especially in generating, gathering, exploring and organizing their ideas prior to writing a descriptive text. The study was expected to yield a better quality of writing and build writing habit among students in a greater scale.Key Word: Writing achievement, Tourism brochures, Descriptive text

Early Memories of Individuals on the Autism Spectrum Assessed Using Online Self-Reports.

“When I was one and a half years old, I was on a ferry lying on red seats” – while several autobiographical accounts by people with autism reveal vivid memories of early childhood, the vast amount of experimental investigations found deficits in personal autobiographic memory in autism. To assess this contradiction empirically, we implemented an online questionnaire on early childhood events to compare people on the autism spectrum (AS) and non-autistic people with respect to their earliest autobiographical episodic memories and the earliest semantic know event as told by another person. Results indicate that people on the AS do not differ from non-autistic people in the age of their earliest know events but remember events from an earlier age in childhood and with more sensory details, contradicting the assumption of an overall deficit in personal episodic memory in autism. Furthermore, our results emphasize the supporting influence of language for memory formation and give evidence for an important role of sensory features in memories of people on the AS.

Deathless Blondes and Permanent Waves: Women’s Hairstyles in Interwar Britain

The interwar era saw a boom in women’s hairdressing, with a great number of women in Britain, Europe and America opting to wear their hair short. This article explores the contexts of the evolution of these short hairstyles during the 1920s and 1930s in Britain and their representations in the period’s literature and film. It argues that the most popular interwar hairstyles held cultural meanings and associations that were more complex than the often-cited general notions of female independence and that decoding these meanings ought to involve an examination of the material and sensory properties of the hairstyles women wanted. The ‘makeover’ changed not only the woman’s look, but also the texture and ‘feel’ of her hair, and involved complex procedures and technological innovations that offered a range of sensory experiences, from the pleasure of having one’s hair washed to the horror of having it burned. The cultural mythology that grew around the trip to the hairdresser was inseparable from this wealth of sensory detail.

How Do We Remember Happy Life Events? A Comparison Between Eudaimonic and Hedonic Autobiographical Memories

ABSTRACTAlthough positive events occur frequently in people's lives, autobiographical memory for happy events has received only marginal attention within the psychology literature. This study followed a between-subjects design to examine the similarities and differences between eudaimonic and hedonic happy memories. Two groups of undergraduates provided narratives of personally experienced eudaimonic and hedonic events, respectively. They also completed questionnaires assessing the memory characteristics of recalled events and the centrality of such events for the individual's identity and life story. In addition, the participants' levels of well-being were assessed. The content analysis of narratives revealed that eudaimonic memories mostly referred to transitional life events; by contrast, the most reported hedonic memories referred to close relationship experiences. Eudaimonic and hedonic recollections were further compared on quantitative measures of memory characteristics, statistically controlling for retention interval and event centrality. Results showed that eudaimonic memories involved more intense feelings of pride and were socially shared more frequently than hedonic memories. However, the two memory types were similar with respect to a number of features (e.g., sensory details). It is argued that participants remembering eudaimonic events were more influenced by cultural life scripts. Implications of the findings for the measurement of psychological well-being are also discussed.

Vantage perspective during encoding: The effects on phenomenological memory characteristics.

The vantage perspective from which a memory is retrieved influences the memory's emotional impact, intrusiveness, and phenomenological characteristics. This study tested whether similar effects are observed when participants were instructed to imagine the events from a specific perspective. Fifty student participants listened to a verbal report of car-accidents and visualized the scenery from either a field or observer perspective. There were no between-condition differences in emotionality of memories and the number of intrusions, but imagery experienced from a relative observer perspective was rated as less self-relevant. In contrast to earlier studies on memory retrieval, vantage perspective influenced phenomenological memory characteristics of the memory representation such as sensory details, and ratings of vividness and distancing of the memory. However, vantage perspective is most likely not a stable phenomenological characteristic itself. Implications and suggestions for future research are discussed.

Tactics and Tactility: A Sensory Semiotics of Handshakes in Coastal Kenya

ABSTRACTIn this article, I approach hand greetings in coastal Kenya as both a form of embodied social action and an everyday tactic used in the presentation of self, the assessment of others, and the negotiation of interpersonal relations. Looking beyond the assumption that a handshake is a simple social performance subject to strategic manipulation, I draw attention to the significance of the felt bodily contact associated with this gesture in order to propose that meaning is generated not only in the dichotomous acts of offering or refusing a handshake but also in utilizing the gesture's tactility. In particular, I argue that women in coastal Kenya negotiate changing understandings of heshima (respectability), and the social positions to which it is tied, by manipulating the sensory details of hand greetings. This article contributes to recent discussions in sensory anthropology while also providing an ethnographic illustration of an embodied theory of social interaction.

The Neglected “R”: Improving Writing Instruction Through iPad Apps

In this study the authors investigated the effects of integrating iPad applications into writing instruction for fifth grade students. By comparing the writing of students taught with paper and pencil methods with that of students utilizing the iPad writing applications, two research questions guided the study: (1) Are there differences in student writing, especially in visualizing, sequencing, or incorporating sensory details, depending on whether they used iPad apps or paper and pencil? (2) What are, if any, the influences of iPad apps on student’s attitude, behavior, or social relations during the writing instruction? The results demonstrated that the students with iPad apps wrote more cohesive, sequential stories using more sensory details than those with paper and pencil. iPad apps also had an impact on motivation to write and changed the classroom dynamics as iPad apps made the writing process more social and engaging.

An Analysis of Descriptive Features in the English used in an Advertising Text

The goal of advertising is the persuasion of a customer of the merits of a particular product or service. Whatever the strategy advertisers employ in order to influence the consumer, language is the main carrier of the message. Among the components of advertising (visual images, words, logos, brand names, graphic designs and so on), words play a key role since by them the audience is able to grasp the advertising message (Dyer, 1982; Nga, 210) . In advertising, copywriters use English words to project the product or service they are bringing to the audience’s attention in the most attractive fashion. Copywriters use English quite distinctively; they sometimes employ the descriptive style of writing to present their messages. The rationale is that description makes the information more intriguing and engaging for the audience. The primary objective of description in advertising is to frame an image of a product in the minds of the consumer through sufficient details and allow them to experience the product through their five senses. Description in advertising creates a dominant impression, an overall attitude, mood or feeling about a product or service. In the current paper, the writer has analyzed the descriptive elements in the English used in an advertising text in a newspaper in Ghana. The theoretical framework that was adopted was Fairclough’s (1992) Three-Dimensional Model Theory and the qualitative research design was employed for the study. The descriptive features that were realized in the selected advertisement (henceforth advert) were sensory details, figurative expressions, modifiers and picturesque vocabulary. The description of the advertising text was effective, in that, it left the reader with a clear impression: a craving for the Castle Milk Stout alcoholic beverage that was advertised. Keywords : Advertising, description, English, persuasion, Castle Milk Stout

Concrete Sensations: Imagining Feeling in A Farewell to Arms

Despite its enumeration of sensory details and tangible specifics, A Farewell to Arms often resists and even refuses imaginative access to the love story it creates. Rather than reading the narrative’s resistance as a necessary outcome of Hemingway’s minimalist style, this essay argues that the novel flattens the lived world inhabited by reader and character in order to enact at the level of representation a dynamic of absent presence that registers Frederic’s traumatic loss of Catherine.

Postcards

Postcards compiled and edited by Barbara Lehman Set in the hustle and bustle of New York City’s Manhattan, Bob Staake’s Bluebird is a wordless narrative that brings together a shy young boy and a charismatic little bird in its exploration of both camaraderie and bereavement. After quietly observing the boy’s rough day at school under the jeers of some schoolyard bullies, the bluebird takes it upon himself to swoop in and befriend him. Staake’s effective use of multi-paneled spreads traces the nuances of the boy and the bluebird’s blossoming relationship as they play a game of hide and seek, share a cookie, and sail a toy boat at the pond where the bluebird connects the boy to the other friendly children playing around them. The increasing darkness of Staake’s grey, white, and blue palette brings with it a reappearance of the scowling bullies; and as the bluebird dives between the boy and the stick one of the bullies throws, the unexpected death of the bluebird is tackled head on by Staake through a small solid black panel followed by a zoomed in focus on the boy’s emotional changes from shock to grief and, finally, acceptance. The bullies fearfully run away, but in their place the boy is greeted by a flock of rainbow-coloured birds, which lift him and the bluebird high above the city skyline. Meant to be an open-ended conclusion to the book, the reader is encouraged to bring his or her own interpretation to the story – a powerfully visual and wordless way to escape didacticism and empower discussion about an intense subject matter. Melissa Li Sheung Ying Bluebird Bob Staake New York: Schwartz & Wade Books, 2013; 40 pp. ISBN 9780375870378 (Picture Book; Ages 4+) Kata Kata Kata The Building is a story about a treadle sewing machine, a little girl, and her grandmother. The machine amazes the little girl because it makes many beautiful things and answers her wishes. One day while her grandmother is halfway done making her drama costume, the machine stops working; therefore, the grandmother finishes sewing the costume by hand. Standing proudly on stage in the costume made by her grandmother, the girl realizes it is grandma who makes her wishes come true. To give her grandma a surprise, the girl and her father transform the out-of-order sewing machine into a table for the grandma to enjoy tea. Told from the girl’s point of view, Kata Kata Kata is a book full of sensory details. Through the words and pictures, readers see how the sewing machine works, hear its kata kata kata sound, smell the osmanthus, and feel the line of stitches on the cover. The endpapers show the motif of wallpapers in the girl’s home, which set the mood for the story. The unrestricted lines and strokes match the girl’s mischievous behaviors and imaginative mind. This book received the 2015 Feng Zikai Best Chinese Children’s Picture Book Award. Yi-Ching Su (Kata Kata Kata) Bei Lynn Illus. Bei Lynn Taipei: Art & Collection Group, 2014. 36 pp. ISBN: 978-986-6049-66-8 (Picture book; ages 5+) Canadian musician Stan Rogers composed the song “Northwest Passage” in 1981 to describe his own “passage overland, In the footsteps” of explorers and to remember John Franklin’s disastrous 1845 expedition to find the Northwest Passage. In this stunning book, recipient of Canada’s Governor General’s Literary Award for Children’s Illustration, Matt James combines paintings that accompany the song with illustrations about Franklin’s quest to discover the Northwest Passage, a sea route to connect the Arctic region with the Pacific Ocean. The resulting visual feast features colorful, expressive illustrations rendered in India ink and acrylic paint that depict the words of the song, the journey of Stan Rogers, and interesting facts about exploring the Northwest Passage. The song’s chorus refers to John Franklin, who lost two ships, 134 men and his own life, in his failed attempt to discover the Passage. An annotated timeline begins in 6000 BCE with the arrival of the first Arctic peoples and ends in 2012 with the lowest recorded ice levels in...

Constraints on Sensitivity to Auditory Modulation in the Perceptual Organization of Speech

Background/Study Context: The perception of speech requires the integration of sensory details from a rapidly fading trace of a time-varying spectrum. This effortful cognitive function has been difficult to assess. New tests measuring intelligibility of sine-wave replicas of speech provided an assay of this critical function in normal-hearing young adults.Methods: Four time-varying sinusoids replicated the frequency and amplitude variation of the natural resonances of spoken sentences. The temporal tolerance of perceptual integration of speech was measured by determining the effect on intelligibility of desynchronizing a single sine-wave component in each sentence. This method was applied in tests in which the sentences were temporally compressed or expanded over a 40% range.Results: Desynchrony was harmful to perceptual integration over a narrow temporal range, indicating that modulation sensitivity is keyed to a rate of 20 Hz. No effect of variation in speech rate was observed on the intelligibility measure, whether rate was accelerated or decelerated relative to the natural rate.Conclusion: Performance measures of desynchrony tolerance did not vary when speech rate was accelerated or decelerated, revealing constraints on integration that are arguably primitive, sensory, auditory, and fixed. Because these are not adaptable, they limit the potential for perceptual learning in this aspect of perceptual organization. Implications for describing the elderly listener are noted.

Earliest Memories of Pets Predict Adult Attitudes: Phenomenological, Structural, and Textual Analyses

Abstract The human-animal interaction literature has many examples of how early childhood experiences affect adult pet attitudes, social development, and empathy; however, there have been no specific studies of the memories that are the bases of these attitudes and dispositions. In this study, adults described their earliest childhood memories of a pet, friend, or automobile in their own words, rated each memory on several phenomenological dimensions, and reported their current attitudes towards pets. Participants rated pet memories as being more emotionally intense and accessible and having more sensory detail than friend memories. Earliest memories of a friend were more positive than earliest memories of pets, largely due to early pet memories focusing more on death and loss. There was a modest positive correlation between assessed pet memory valence and attitudes towards pets. Participants who recalled memories of their own pet and described more interactive pet memories had more positive adult attitudes towards pets. Results of the linguistic analysis of the recorded memories converged with the valence and pet attitude measures, and further showed that negative emotion words and impersonal pronouns used in pet and friend memories were more similar for those with more positive attitudes toward pets. The study reveals the complexities of the relationship between the earliest childhood memories of pets and adult attitudes towards pets. Future research should investigate how pets are represented and processed in the full range of human cognition.

Histone Deacetylase Inhibition via RGFP966 Releases the Brakes on Sensory Cortical Plasticity and the Specificity of Memory Formation.

Research over the past decade indicates a novel role for epigenetic mechanisms in memory formation. Of particular interest is chromatin modification by histone deacetylases (HDACs), which, in general, negatively regulate transcription. HDAC deletion or inhibition facilitates transcription during memory consolidation and enhances long-lasting forms of synaptic plasticity and long-term memory. A key open question remains: How does blocking HDAC activity lead to memory enhancements? To address this question, we tested whether a normal function of HDACs is to gate information processing during memory formation. We used a class I HDAC inhibitor, RGFP966 (C21H19FN4O), to test the role of HDAC inhibition for information processing in an auditory memory model of learning-induced cortical plasticity. HDAC inhibition may act beyond memory enhancement per se to instead regulate information in ways that lead to encoding more vivid sensory details into memory. Indeed, we found that RGFP966 controls memory induction for acoustic details of sound-to-reward learning. Rats treated with RGFP966 while learning to associate sound with reward had stronger memory and additional information encoded into memory for highly specific features of sounds associated with reward. Moreover, behavioral effects occurred with unusually specific plasticity in primary auditory cortex (A1). Class I HDAC inhibition appears to engage A1 plasticity that enables additional acoustic features to become encoded in memory. Thus, epigenetic mechanisms act to regulate sensory cortical plasticity, which offers an information processing mechanism for gating what and how much is encoded to produce exceptionally persistent and vivid memories. Significance statement: Here we provide evidence of an epigenetic mechanism for information processing. The study reveals that a class I HDAC inhibitor (Malvaez et al., 2013; Rumbaugh et al., 2015; RGFP966, chemical formula C21H19FN4O) alters the formation of auditory memory by enabling more acoustic information to become encoded into memory. Moreover, RGFP966 appears to affect cortical plasticity: the primary auditory cortex reorganized in a manner that was unusually "tuned-in" to the specific sound cues and acoustic features that were related to reward and subsequently remembered. We propose that HDACs control "informational capture" at a systems level for what and how much information is encoded by gating sensory cortical plasticity that underlies the sensory richness of newly formed memories.

Encoding disorganized memories for an analogue trauma does not increase memory distortion or analogue symptoms of PTSD

Background and ObjectivesEmpirical studies with objective measures and control conditions have failed to demonstrate disorganization; yet people tend to self-report disorganization in their trauma narratives, which may have other effects. Thus, we investigated whether a disorganized trauma memory produces more analogue PTSD symptoms and memory distortion, compared to an organized memory. MethodsParticipants watched a traumatic film with missing scenes. Some saw the scenes in their correct temporal sequence; others saw a random sequence; thus for some participants we implanted a disorganized memory. We also told some participants to focus on the meaning of the event (conceptual), some on the sensory details (data-driven), and some received no instruction (control). Participants recorded their intrusions for a week. Then, they reported analogue symptoms and we tested their memory for the film and their confidence in what they remembered. ResultsAnalogue symptoms and number of reported intrusions did not differ across conditions, nor did the degree of memory distortion or confidence in those memories. However, participants who self-reported feeling more memory disorganization reported more avoidance symptoms and more memory distortion. LimitationsWe did not measure memory for real trauma, nor did we assess for a history of PTSD. Our results may also be restricted to temporal disorganization. ConclusionsAlthough objective assessments of disorganization do not appear important, people's feelings regarding the disorganization of their memories not only affect their assessment of the severity of their PTSD symptoms, but also the kinds of memory errors they make.