About

Charles Brainerd is a Professor in the Department of Psychology at Cornell University. His research focuses on cognitive development in children as well as cognitive processes and aging. He is engaged in understanding how cognitive abilities evolve over the lifespan, with particular attention to developmental changes in childhood and the cognitive mechanisms involved in aging. His work contributes to the broader field of psychology by exploring the dynamics of cognitive growth and decline, providing insights into how cognitive functions are shaped and transformed throughout life.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Psychology
• Cognitive psychology
• Artificial Intelligence
• Social psychology
• Natural Language Processing
• Linguistics
• Philosophy
• Epistemology
• Mathematics
• Medicine
• Pedagogy
• Cognitive science
• Programming language
• Statistics

Selected publications

• Judgments of learning enhance elaborative rather than relational processing: Implications from phonologically related and phonological-semantic mediated pairs

  Journal of Memory and Language · 2025-06-21

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Developmental invariance in deep distortions.

  Psychology and Aging · 2025-01-13 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  = 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).

  PublisherDOI

• Developmental change and invariance in verbatim and gist memory: Cross-sectional and longitudinal applications of the dual-retrieval model.

  Psychology and Aging · 2025-09-22 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  : One component of gist retrieval (reconstruction) improved with age during later recall but declined with age during earlier recall, and the other component (familiarity judgment) improved with age during earlier recall. A critical new finding was that verbatim retrieval is much more responsive to learning opportunities than gist retrieval is. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

  PublisherDOI

• True and false recognition in MINERVA2: Integrating fuzzy-trace theory and computational memory modeling.

  Psychological Review · 2025-02-27 · 5 citations

  articleSenior author

  Previous research suggests that the MINERVA2 model can capture basic Deese/Roediger/McDermott (DRM) false recognition findings with either randomized representations or distributional semantic representations. In the current article, we extended this line of research by showing that MINERVA2 can accommodate not only basic DRM recognition findings but also the effects of various theory-driven manipulations. Importantly, we incorporated two assumptions of fuzzy-trace theory into MINERVA2: the verbatim-gist distinction and hierarchies of gist. To implement the verbatim-gist distinction, we represented local gist traces with distributional semantic vectors and verbatim traces with holographic word-form vectors. With separate representations incorporated, MINERVA2 successfully simulated a wide range of empirical effects in the DRM illusion, as well as remember/know and source judgments. To incorporate hierarchies of gist into the framework, we added an assumption that an item's storage quality depends on its semantic similarity to the preceding item. This accommodated the effect of global gist beyond that of local gist and solved the problem of storage independence in multitrace models of episodic memory. Our findings provided extensive evidence that MINERVA2 is a viable candidate for scalable modeling of the DRM illusion and strengthened the connection between computational modeling and substantive theories of false memory. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

  PublisherDOI

• Memory framing.

  Journal of Experimental Psychology Learning Memory and Cognition · 2025-05-05

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Some prior studies of item recognition, source recognition, and judgments of learning have produced evidence of framing effects in episodic memory. A theoretical consequence of these phenomena is that emotional arousal is not a necessary condition for framing effects because, unlike the classic framing effects of social psychology and behavioral economics, different memory frames are not designed to stimulate different emotional reactions. However, a review of available evidence on framing effects in item recognition revealed that the data were inconsistent for old items and nonexistent for similar distractors. We attempted to secure definitive evidence of whether these types of items display framing effects by analyzing a corpus of 478 sets of data, in which old items and similar distractors are factorially crossed with old? and similar? recognition frames. Both types of items exhibited large framing effects: Recognition was far more accurate for similar items than for old items when probes asked if test items were old, whereas recognition was more accurate for old items than for similar items when probes asked if test items were similar. There was a frame-independence effect, too, such that accuracy in one memory frame was dissociated from accuracy in the other frame. The conjoint-recognition model predicted both the core memory framing effect and its direction (superior recognition of similar distractors in the old? frame but superior recognition of old items in the similar? frame). The model also explained frame independence as a by-product of between-frame differences in how three retrieval processes (true recollection, false recollection, and semantic familiarity) affect accuracy in the different frames. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

  PublisherDOI

• Judgments of Learning Reactivity on Item-Specific and Relational Processing

  Journal of Intelligence · 2024-01-05 · 10 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Judgments of learning (JOLs) reactivity refers to the finding that the mere solicitation of JOLs modifies subsequent memory performance. One theoretical explanation is the item-specific processing hypothesis, which posits that item-level JOLs redound to the benefit of later memory performance because they enhance item-specific processing. The current study was designed to test this account. We factorially manipulated the organization (blocked vs. randomized) of categorized lists and JOL condition (item-JOLs, list-JOLs, no-JOLs) between participants, and fit the dual-retrieval model to free recall data to pinpoint the underlying memory processes that were affected by JOL solicitation. Our results showed that item-level JOLs produced positive reactivity for randomized but not for blocked categorized lists. Moreover, we found that the positive JOL reactivity for randomized categorized lists was tied to a familiarity judgment process that is associated with gist processing, rather than to item-specific recollective processes. Thus, our results pose a challenge to the item-specific processing explanation of JOL reactivity. We argue that JOL reactivity is not restricted to item-specific processing; instead, whether JOLs predominantly engage participants with item-specific or relational processing depends on the interaction between learning stimuli and JOLs.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Effects of emotional ambiguity and emotional intensity on true and false memory

  Memory & Cognition · 2024-05-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Deep distortions in everyday memory: Fact memory is illogical, too.

  Journal of Experimental Psychology General · 2024 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Psychology
  • Cognitive psychology

  A distinction has recently been drawn between surface distortions and deep distortions in false memory, where the former are conventional errors of commission and the latter are illogical relations among multiple memories of items. The deep distortions that have been studied to date are violations of the logical rules that govern incompatibility relations, such as additivity and countable additivity. Because that work is confined to laboratory word-list tasks, it is subject to the ecological validity criticism that memory for everyday facts may not exhibit such phenomena. We report evidence that memory for everyday facts displays the same deep distortions as laboratory tasks. We developed a version of the conjoint-recognition paradigm that measures memory for incompatible general knowledge facts, similar to those found on the quiz program Jeopardy! In experiments with university participants, four deep distortions were detected (violations of the additivity, countable additivity, universal set, and compensation rules), with participants consistently remembering more than what is logically possible. The distortions were more robust than in laboratory experiments, and memories of incompatible facts (e.g., Jupiter and Saturn cannot both be the largest planet in the solar system) did not suppress each other. These patterns were replicated in subsequent experiments with older and more diverse participant samples. Consistent with the notion that deep distortions are by-products of gist memory, conjoint-recognition modeling analyses revealed that memory for everyday facts was even more reliant on gist than memory for word lists, and that verbatim memory was near-floor. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

  PublisherDOI

• From association to gist: Some critical tests.

  Journal of Experimental Psychology Learning Memory and Cognition · 2023-11-16 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  We report the first evidence that the gist mechanism of fuzzy-trace theory and the associative mechanism of activation monitoring theory operate in parallel, in the recall version of the Deese/Roediger/McDermott illusion. In three experiments, we implemented a new methodology that allows their respective empirical indexes, gist strength (GS) and backward associative strength (BAS), to each be manipulated while the other is held constant. In Experiment 1, increasing GS increased false recall of missing words, but increasing BAS did not. In Experiments 2 and 3, however, increasing GS and increasing BAS both increased recall of missing words, and those effects were independent and additive. In all three experiments, GS and BAS affected true recall of list words in qualitatively different ways: (a) Increasing GS always improved true recall, regardless of whether BAS was high or low, but (b) increasing BAS impaired true recall when GS was high and improved true recall when GS was low. To pinpoint the retrieval loci of the two variables' effects, we analyzed the data of all experiments with the dual-retrieval model. Those analyses showed that the variables' respective effects were due to different retrieval processes. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

  PublisherDOI

• Theoretical explanations of developmental reversals in memory and reasoning

  Developmental Review · 2023-07-07 · 6 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• NIH Grant RC1AG03691501

  NIH · $378k · 2011

• NIH Grant RC1AG03691502

  NIH · $379k · 2012

• NIH Grant R01MH061211

  NIH · $2.3M · 2008

Frequent coauthors

• Valerie F. Reyna

  130 shared

• Emma Butterfield

  36 shared

• M Luco

  University of Wisconsin System

  36 shared

• D Mesulam

  Princeton University

  36 shared

• Daniel Rolls

  University of Hertfordshire

  36 shared

• Robert L. Sternberg

  36 shared

• Jessica Ayers

  36 shared

• Richard Latto

  36 shared

Labs

• Charles Brainerd LabPI