Developmental invariance in deep distortions

Recently, a distinction has been drawn between conventional false memories, which misrepresent specific facts, and deep distortions, which misrepresent relations that connect facts. We report the first study of adult developmental trends in deep distortions, using a paradigm in which people make conjoint recognition judgments about incompatible facts (e.g., Was Einstein born in Austria, Germany, or Switzerland?). As conventional false memories increase over the adult lifespan, it is natural to expect that deep distortions will do likewise. Surprisingly, however, the modal explanation of adult increases in false memory predicts that deep distortions will be developmentally invariant. We tested that prediction in two experiments that measured three deep distortions (violations of the logical laws of additivity, countable additivity, and universal event) in memory for real-world incompatibility relations (e.g., size of planets, geographical location of companies, people in historical events). In Experiment 1, robust violations of all three laws were detected in younger adults (N = 105; M_age = 20), and as predicted, those violations did not increase in adults (N = 182; Mage = 33) or older adults (N = 176; M_age = 62). Experiment 2 was designed to test whether deep distortions would increase with age when there was stronger support for retrieving verbatim memories, but once again, deep distortion levels were the same in young adults (N = 81; M_age = 19), adults (N = 167; M_age = 34), and older adults (N = 170; M_age = 62). Conjoint recognition analyses revealed that throughout the adult lifespan, verbatim memory played no role in deep distortions. Other analyses revealed that although incompatible facts are perfectly compensatory in the real world (Einstein could only be born in Germany to the extent that he was not born in Austria or Switzerland), memory for incompatible facts is noncompensatory throughout the adult lifespan. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).