Individual differences in susceptibility to memory illusions

Abstract

Forty‐two individuals studied sixteen word lists, each of which converged on a common list associate that was not studied. Ten measures of individual differences in cognition and personality were also administered. The tendency to intrude words in recall and to falsely recognize distractor words in a recognition memory test were significantly correlated with reports of dissociative experiences and vivid mental imagery. It is argued that the memory errors, as well as the reports of dissociative experiences, reflect difficulties in source monitoring, in particular, in the discrimination of events that originate externally from those that originate internally. Copyright © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Individual Differences in Susceptibility to False Memory in the Deese-Roediger-McDermott Paradigm.

“…To influence the likelihood of false memories, we included warning instructions at encoding (Experiments 1 and 2) and repeated study-test trials (Experiment 2), both of which are thought to influence the source monitoring or attentional-inhibitory control component of an activation-monitoring framework of false memories in the DRM paradigm (Balota et al, 1999;Watson et al, 2004). Winograd et al (1998) found that self-reports of high levels of dissociative experiences and vivid mental imagery correlated with high levels of false recognition for nonpresented critical words in the DRM paradigm. Although these results suggest that some young adults may be more susceptible than others to false memories elicited by the DRM paradigm, it is noteworthy that individual differences in 10 different cognitive (e.g., vocabulary, memory, and aptitude tests) or personality measures (e.g., the Dissociative Experiences Scale; Bernstein & Putnam, 1986) did not correlate with participants' false recall of critical words.…”

The influence of delusional ideation and dissociative experiences on the resistance to false memories in normal healthy subjects

“…Indeed, studies have examined whether a tendency towards dissociative experiences is associated to a higher susceptibility to false memories using various paradigms, including the DRM paradigm. Overall, the results are somewhat mixed with some studies Delusional ideation, dissociative experiences and false recall -5 finding a positive association between the presence of dissociative experiences (as measured by the Dissociative Experiences Scale; DES) and the probability to produce false memories (e.g., Hyman & Billings, 1998;Winograd et al, 1998) while others not (e.g., Platt et al, 1998, Wright et al, 2005Winograd et al, 1998).…”

Habitual acceptance of misinformation: Examination of individual differences and source attributions

“…The source-monitoring literature has specified a variety of factors (e.g., use of lax decision criteria) that influence source attributions (for a review, see Mitchell & Johnson, 2000), and these were considered when some of the individual difference variables were selected. Moreover, research in the false memory literature has empirically demonstrated relations between false memory creation and various individual difference variables, and findings from this literature also guided the selection of variables (e.g., Hyman & Billings, 1998;Paddock, Terranova, Kwok, & Halpern, 2000;Winograd, Peluso, & Glover, 1998). In all, 11 variables were measured in the present study, and these included confidence-accuracy calibration measures for both misinformation items and nonmisinformation items, total accuracy on nonmisinformation items, dissociation, absorption, vividness of imagery, dysphoria, state self-esteem, external locus of control, fear of negative evaluation, and boredom proneness.…”