Translating (lack of) memories into reports: Conversion processes in responding to unanswerable questions

When queried about events in the past, a person may face questions that concern details that have been witnessed-answerable questions-and details that have not been witnessed-unanswerable questions. With regard to answerable questions, the person's willingness to answer these questions increases as a function of not only information available about the queried detail itself, but also as a function of contextual information. The present research assesses whether the willingness to report specific-and thus incorrect-answers when facing unanswerable questions also increases with the amount of available contextual information. In 3 experiments, we show that when recognition questions for critical details one had not encoded are preceded by reinstated contexts, participants are less willing to respond "don't know" to these questions, thus making more commission errors. These results show how greater access to contextual information, commonly associated with better memory for answerable questions, can also lead to more incorrect responses in the case of unanswerable questions. This documents how conversion processes-metacognitive processes of monitoring retrieval from memory and controlling the quality of output-play an important role in shaping the accuracy of memory reports. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).