A “hyper-recency” bias in memory characterizes both psychoticism and déjà vu experiences

J Exp Psychol Gen. 2025 May;154(5):1428-1444. doi: 10.1037/xge0001754.

ABSTRACT

Psychosis is characterized by salient conflicts between reality and one’s experience of it. Many people in the general population experience similar conflicts, albeit to a lesser extent-including during déjà vu, in which one is struck by the feeling that they have lived through the present moment before, despite not being able to pinpoint why or knowing that this cannot be true. The cognitive processes underlying these conflicts between reality and experience in psychosis and the general population remain poorly understood. Identifying shared cognitive correlates of psychosis-like symptoms and déjà vu is a compelling starting place for better understanding how such conflicts arise. Here, we hypothesized that psychosis-like symptoms and déjà vu might be related to breakdowns in memory for when events happened. Across two preregistered experiments (N = 500), we found that members of the general population endorsing higher levels of psychoticism (i.e., paranoia, positive, and disorganized symptoms) judged correctly recognized stimuli to have occurred more recently in time relative to ground truth. A similar illusion of recency was apparent for falsely recognized stimuli. These same participants were less sensitive to actual stimulus recency when making recognition memory judgments, exhibiting reduced differentiation between recently presented and novel stimuli. Similar patterns were found in association with déjà vu, but not negative (i.e., mood-related) symptoms, suggesting specificity to uncanny subjective experiences. These findings suggest that a “hyper-recency” bias in memory-wherein remotely encountered events are perceived as having happened recently-might represent one salient source of conflict between experience and reality. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

PMID:40372909 | DOI:10.1037/xge0001754