Hemmer, P., Shi, J., & Steyvers, M. (submitted). The influence of prior knowledge on recall for height.

In this paper we explore how having general knowledge about heights of people, as well as specific knowledge about the height of men and women can influence recall for the height of a person.

We focus on naturalistic stimuli pertaining to the height of males and females because  there is a prominent difference in mean height between genders. In addition,  the stereotype of correlation between certain height ranges and gender is both accurate and universal and is drawn from real-world distributions and is consistent in nature.

Panel A shows how recall might be biased toward the overall mean population height. People at heights below the mean population height are overestimated and people at heights above the mean population height are underestimated. Read more »