Creating Non-Believed Memories for Recent Autobiographical Events

A recent study showed that many people spontaneously report vivid memories of events that they do not believe to have occurred [1]. In the present experiment we tested for the first time whether, after powerful false memories have been created, debriefing might leave behind nonbelieved memories for the fake events. In Session 1 participants imitated simple actions, and in Session 2 they saw doctored video-recordings containing clips that falsely suggested they had performed additional (fake) actions. As in earlier studies, this procedure created powerful false memories. In Session 3, participants were debriefed and told that specific actions in the video were not truly performed. Beliefs and memories for all critical actions were tested before and after the debriefing. Results showed that debriefing undermined participants' beliefs in fake actions, but left behind residual memory-like content. These results indicate that debriefing can leave behind vivid false memories which are no longer believed, and thus we demonstrate for the first time that the memory of an event can be experimentally dissociated from the belief in the event's occurrence. These results also confirm that belief in and memory for an event can be independently-occurring constructs

Magnetic ordering of Mn sublattice, dense Kondo lattice behavior of Ce in (RPd3)8Mn (R = La, Ce)

We have synthesized two new interstitial compounds (RPd3)8Mn (R = La and Ce). The Mn ions present in "dilute" concentration of just 3 molar percent form a sublattice with an unusually large Mn-Mn near neighbor distance of ~ 85 nm. While the existence of (RPd3)8M (where M is a p-block element) is already documented in the literature, the present work reports for the first time the formation of this phase with M being a 3d element. In (LaPd3)8Mn, the Mn sub-lattice orders antiferromagnetically as inferred from the peaks in low-field magnetization at 48 K and 23 K. The latter peak progressively shifts towards lower temperatures in increasing magnetic field and disappears below 1.8 K in a field of ~ 8 kOe. On the other hand in (CePd3)8Mn the Mn sublattice undergoes a ferromagnetic transition around 35 K. The Ce ions form a dense Kondo-lattice and are in a paramagnetic state at least down to 1.5 K. A strongly correlated electronic ground state arising from Kondo effect is inferred from the large extrapolated value of C/T = 275 mJ/Ce-mol K^2 at T = 0 K. In contrast, the interstitial alloys RPd3Mnx (x = 0.03 and 0.06), also synthesized for the first time, have a spin glass ground state due to the random distribution of the Mn ions over the available "1b" sites in the parent RPd3 crystal lattice.Comment: 18 figures and 20 pages of text documen