Can simple exposure to life event descriptions modify autobiographical beliefs about them

The malleability of autobiographical memory has been documented in various studies, particularly in those involving the inflation of confidence one has experienced a particular life event after imagining a life event description. This study addresses some concerns of the complicated and coercive state of current imagination manipulations by utilizing less coercive cognitive tasks such as listening to an event description or reading a related vignette aloud. Confidence inflation occurring due to either of these manipulations would provide valuable information regarding the generalizability of the confidence inflation effect, as our manipulations are more similar to real-world exposures to event information. Sixty undergraduate students participated in this study, with each participant being exposed to both types of exposure (simple and complex). Participants were randomly assigned into an immediate or delayed condition so that the effect of time between exposure and final rating could be studied. While no effect of complex versus simple exposure was found, a leveling effect was discovered in which it appears that rating context impacts final ratings.;The absence of overall inflationary effects regarding exposure may be due to the potentially diluting effect of using many critical items. Thus, item analyses were conducted to look at how low, moderate, and high occurrence items behave within the paradigm. Low occurrence items rated after a delay showed significant confidence inflation. This supports previous studies' focus on low occurrence critical items and further implicates the role of source confusion in confidence inflation.