Recollection of "true" feedback is better than "false" feedback independently of a priori beliefs: an investigation from the perspective of dual-recollection theory.

The processes underlying memory for truth and falsity have been explored and discussed in experimental psychology for over thirty years now. Psychologists have often referred to the Spinozan and Cartesian models about truth-value information "tagging" but, so far, experimental results have been inconsistent. This paper investigates memory for truth and falsity from the new perspective of the dual-recollection theory. We conducted two experiments using the conjoint recognition paradigm and multinomial modelling as a measurement model. Both our experiments confirmed a satisfactory goodness of fit of the data to the dual-recollection multinomial model. In Experiment 1, the context recollection parameter representing memory for feedback information was significantly higher for true than for false statements. This finding was replicated in the second experiment, which controlled the potential impact of participants' previous knowledge on memory performance. Experiment 2 indicated that the target recollection parameter representing memory for the sentence itself was significantly higher for true than for false sentences solely when participants believed this sentence to be true but not when they perceived it as false before the memory experiment. Our research was the first attempt to look at memory for truth and falsity from the perspective of the recently developed dual-recollection theory.