Dolgoarshinnaia Aleksandra, Martin-Luengo Beatriz
Centre for Cognition and Decision Making, Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience, HSE University, Moscow, Russia.
Front Psychol. 2021 Sep 28;12:716336. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.716336. eCollection 2021.
Human memory is prone to memory errors and distortion. Evidence from studies on cognitive functions in bilinguals indicates that they might be prone to different types of memory errors compared to monolinguals; however, the effect of language in false memories is still understudied. Source monitoring processes required for proper memory functioning, presumably, rely on inhibitory control, which is also heavily utilized by bilinguals. Moreover, it is suggested that thinking in a second language leads to more systematic and deliberate reasoning. All these results lead to expect that bilinguals are more analytical when processing information in their second language overcoming some memory errors depending on the language of information. To test this hypothesis, we run a classical misinformation experiment with an explicit source monitoring task with a sample of Russian-English bilinguals. The language of the misinformation presentation did not affect the degree of the misinformation effect between the Russian and English languages. Source monitoring demonstrated an overall higher accuracy for attributions to the English source over the Russian source. Furthermore, analysis on incorrect source attributions showed that when participants misattributed the sources of false information (English or Russian narrative), they favored the Russian source over the not presented condition. Taken together, these results imply that high proficiency in the second language does not affect misinformation and that information processing and memory monitoring in bilinguals can differ depending on the language of the information, which seems to lead to some memory errors and not others.
人类记忆容易出现记忆错误和扭曲。对双语者认知功能的研究证据表明，与单语者相比，他们可能更容易出现不同类型的记忆错误；然而，语言在错误记忆中的作用仍未得到充分研究。正常记忆功能所需的源监控过程大概依赖于抑制控制，双语者也大量使用这种控制。此外，有研究表明，用第二语言思考会导致更系统、更审慎的推理。所有这些结果让人预期，双语者在使用第二语言处理信息时会更具分析性，从而克服一些取决于信息语言的记忆错误。为了验证这一假设，我们对一组俄英双语者进行了一项经典的错误信息实验，并设置了明确的源监控任务。错误信息呈现的语言对俄语和英语之间的错误信息效应程度没有影响。源监控显示，将信息归因于英语来源的总体准确率高于俄语来源。此外，对错误源归因的分析表明，当参与者错误归因错误信息的来源（英语或俄语叙述）时，他们更倾向于俄语来源而非未呈现的情况。综上所述，这些结果表明，第二语言的高熟练度不会影响错误信息，双语者的信息处理和记忆监控可能因信息语言而异，这似乎会导致一些而非其他记忆错误。
