Previous research has shown that when information about a narrative event is retracted, people continue to use that information even though it has been explicitly identified as incorrect. Not only can this occur for implicitly inferred information, but also when the change is stated explicitly. The current study explored whether this effect reflects, at least in part, an unwillingness of some readers to accept changes to their understanding. Experiment 1 assessed this using a continued influence effect paradigm with an additional probe asking whether participants believed the explicitly stated change. Most did not. Those that did accept it showed evidence of a reduced use of the incorrect information, while those that did not accept it performed similarly to those who received no correction (control). Experiment 2 included an additional explicit instruction that participants could say "don't know" if they were unsure of how to respond. The pattern of results was largely the same as for Experiment 1. Experiment 3 modified the alternative account to increase plausibility, and added two additional stories/question sets to ensure effects were not limited to one set of materials. A greater number of participants found the retractions believable than in Experiments 1 and 2. Nonetheless, a similar pattern of results was found. Overall, these findings suggest that at least some of the evidence for the continued use of retracted information may be due to some people not accepting the retraction, even in the absence of external motivation to disregard it.

The current study explored the persistence of event model organizations and how this influences the experience of interference during retrieval. People in this study memorized lists of sentences about objects in locations, such as "The potted palm is in the hotel." Previous work has shown that such information can either be stored in separate event models, thereby producing retrieval interference, or integrated into common event models, thereby eliminating retrieval interference. Unlike prior studies, the current work explored the impact of forgetting up to 2 weeks later on this pattern of performance. We explored three possible outcomes across the various retention intervals. First, consistent with research showing that longer delays reduce proactive and retroactive interference, any retrieval interference effects of competing event models could be reduced over time. Second, the binding of information into events models may weaken over time, causing interference effects to emerge when they had previously been absent. Third, and finally, the organization of information into event models could remain stable over long periods of time. The results reported here are most consistent with the last outcome. While there were some minor variations across the various retention intervals, the basic pattern of event model organization remained preserved over the two-week retention period.

This study explores location-based prospective memory. People often have to remember to do things when in a particular location, such as buying tissues the next time they are in the supermarket. For event cognition theory, location is important for structuring events. However, because event cognition has not been used to examine prospective memory, the question remains of how multiple events will influence prospective memory performance. In our experiments, people delivered messages from store to store in a virtual shopping mall as an ongoing task. The prospective tasks were to do certain activities in certain stores. For Experiment 1, each trial involved one prospective memory task to be done in a single location at one of three delays. The virtual environment and location cues were effective for prospective memory, and performance was unaffected by delay. For Experiment 2, each trial involved two prospective memory tasks, given in either one or two instruction locations, and to be done in either one or two store locations. There was improved performance when people received instructions from two locations and did both tasks in one location relative to other combinations. This demonstrates that location-based event structure influences how well people perform on prospective memory tasks.

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