Since the publication of the famous Roediger and McDermott article (1995), researchers have focused on the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm and studied many factors involved in memory illusions. The aim of the current study has been to investigate the effect of imaginal encoding on memory confusion in the DRM paradigm. Overall, results indicated that imaginal encoding improves true recall and recognition and significantly reduces false recall, whereas no reduction effect occurs on false recognition. These results are interesting because they are inconsistent with what we would expect based on the available findings in the literature. Otherwise, the present results call into question the underlying processes involved in the creation of veridical and false memories during recall and recognition in DRM tasks.
The effects of image and verbal generation on false memories in the Deese–Roediger–McDermott (DRM) paradigm were investigated by comparing three experimental conditions (description, image, and image description). False memory rates were reduced when participants received an explicit imagery instruction rather than when they were asked to describe the characteristics of word referents or both imagine and describe referents. Verbal generation is thought to promote the associated processing of list items and thus increase the probability of activating lures during encoding and of falsely remembering. Conversely, self-generated imagery is expected to decrease the probability of falsely recalling and recognizing the lures. Imagery encoding should be used as a distinctiveness heuristic at retrieval for impeding the false recalls/recognitions of the critical items. Nevertheless, when imagery encoding was coupled with a verbal generation task, mental images were no longer sufficiently stringent criteria for reducing false memories. These findings could challenge the conditions of using imagery techniques when people have to remember an event while evoking it in a mental image so as to describe it in greater detail.
This paper deals with French norms for mental image versus picture agreement for 138 pictures and the imagery value for 138 concrete words and 69 abstract words. The pictures were selected from Snodgrass et Vanderwart's norms (1980). The concrete words correspond to the dominant naming response to the pictorial stimuli. The abstract words were taken from verbal associative norms published by Ferrand (2001). The norms were established according to two variables: 1) mental image vs. picture agreement, and 2) imagery value of words. Three other variables were controlled: 1) picture naming agreement; 2) familiarity of objects referred to in the pictures and the concrete words, and 3) subjective verbal frequency of words. The originality of this work is to provide French imagery norms for the three kinds of stimuli usually compared in research on dual coding. Moreover, these studies focus on figurative and verbal stimuli variations in visual imagery processes.
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