Partial matching in the Moses illusion: Response bias not sensitivity

Abstract

Previous research has demonstrated that people have enormous difficultyin detecting distortions in such questions as, "How many animals of each kind did Moses take in the Ark?" Reder and Kusbit (1991) argued that the locus of the effect must be the existence of a partial-match process. Other research has suggested that this partial-match process operates at the word level and that, with adequate focus on the relevant word, the Moses illusion is greatly diminished. The present experimental results argue that those conclusions were based on a shift in response criterion with no concomitant change in ability to detect distortions. Furthermore, the data suggest that the matching process operates below the word level, at the level of distinctive features.Understanding the nature of access to memory-how we parse questions, query memory, and decide that the requisite information has been found-is one of the central issues in understanding memory. An important premise in our work is that the matching process in memory must be a partial-matching process. This may not seem obvious until one considers, for example, that information is often not queried in exactly the same form as originally presented or encoded, and that people do not look exactly the same from one occasion to the next; thus, person recognition must be flexible. Given that we believe that the memory-match process must be a partial-match process, the questions become: How much must the memory probe overlap with the memory trace to be accepted as a match? What portions of the memory probe are used to match to memory?One fruitful approach to these questions is to look at instances in which this partial-matching system leads people astray. For example, when asked, "How many animals ofeach kind did Moses take in the Ark?" most people immediately respond with "Two." This confident answer comes even from those who know that Noah, not Moses, built the Ark (Erickson & Mattson, 1981). When a term in a sentence or question (the "critical" term) is replaced with a semantically similar but incorrect term (the "distorted" term), people sometimes respond as if this distortion were not present. This tendency to overlook distortions in statements is known as the Moses illusion. Studying when the Moses illusion occurs and what factors influence it can shed light on the underlying memory processes in question answering and text comprehension.The work reported here was sponsored by Grant BNS-8908030 from the National Science Foundation to L.M.R. and by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship to E.N.K. We thank G. Kusbit for her assistance in conducting Experiments I and 3 and Jason Wyse for comments on the manuscript. Correspondence concerning this paper should be addressed to L. M. Reder, Department of Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213 (e-mail: reder+@cmu.edu). This paper continues the line of research begun by Reder and Kusbit (1991), in which they concluded that the best explanation for the Moses illusion was imperfect matching...

The phenomenology of real and illusory tip-of-the-tongue states

“…The source monitoring account suggests that illusory TOTs may be akin to the Moses illusion (Kamas, Reder, & Ayers, 1996).1 In the Moses illusion, participants fail to recognize that an error exists in the question (e.g., How many animals did Moses take on his ark?). Thus, they will often make a response without realizing the error.…”

The Moses, Mega-Moses, and Armstrong Illusions: Integrating Language Comprehension and Semantic Memory

“…However, task, syntactic structure, sentential focus, instructions, and recent experience all influence the frequency of Moses mistakes (e.g., Bredart & Modolo, 1988;Buyer & Radvansky, 1995;Erickson & Mattson, 1981). For example, if participants first study a relevant fact about Noah (e.g., "Noah took two animals of each kind on the Ark"), they make fewer Moses mistakes (Reder & Kusbit, 1991), and if they learn a misleading association (e.g., "Moses-Ark"), they make more Moses mistakes (Kamas, Reder, & Ayers, 1996;Reder & Cleeremans, 1990;van Oostendorp & Kok, 1990).…”

Interpretation‐based processing: a unified theory of semantic sentence comprehension

“…For Moses illusion, there is some evidence that moving the distortion in focus using cleft sentences may actually decrease the illusion rate (Bredart & Modolo, 1988); it is possible that this effect be a position effect, since focused nouns in cleft sentences occur at the beginning of the sentence (e.g., It was Moses who took two animals of each kind on the ark. Bredart and Docquier (1989) also showed that this effect holds when capitalization of the distorted term is used; however, Kamas, Reder, and Ayers (1996) replicated the study and used a bias-sensitivity analysis to prove that capitalization mainly affected participants' bias towards calling a sentence distorted rather than their sensitivity to distortions. Jaarsveld, Dijkstra, and Hermans (1997) investigated position effects on Moses illusion, but, since they did not include an undistorted condition in their experiments, it remains to be shown that their result was indeed an effect of the manipulation.…”