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 dierences 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 signi®cantly 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, re¯ect diculties in source monitoring, in particular, in the discrimination of events that originate externally from those that originate internally. #The extent to which memories are accurate re¯ections of past events is a question of great current interest, as well as one with an interesting history (see Roediger, 1996, andSchacter, 1995 for historical reviews). Much recent eort has been aimed at determining the bases upon which individuals decide they are accurately remembering (e.g. Johnson et al., 1993;Johnson and Raye, 1981), and at examining the extent of individuals' phenomenological experiences during remembering (Gardiner, 1988;Tulving, 1985). Just within the last decade, an entirely new focus of study has emerged from this literature in which both the objective and subjective dierences between accurate memories and inaccurate memories are being explored. The majority of this research has centred on the study of memory illusions, and how aspects of the content of inaccurate memories may dier from accurate memories (e.g. Mather et al., in press;Roediger and McDermott, 1995). The motivation for the present research was to examine the extent to which individual dierences in memory performance and phenomenological experiences of remembering might distinguish people who are more susceptible to memory illusions from those who are less susceptible.As Roediger et al. (1998) point out, it is possible not only to distinguish between the susceptibilities of populations, such as young versus old people, but also to identify individual dierences in susceptibility within populations. The literature on the relationship between individual dierences in cognition and personality and the tendency to produce memory errors is not extensive. In general, errors have been CCC 0888±4080/98/SI00S5±23 $17.50 examined in three related areas of research, eyewitness memory, source memory, and autobiographical memory. As there are a number of commonalities between these areas and the present research, each will be brie¯y discussed below. Following a review of this literature, we will turn to the rationale for our experiment. MEMORY ILLUSIONS IN THE LITERATURESchooler and Loftus (1993) provide a thorough review of studies investigating the relationship between various cognitive and personality measures and the extent to which they predict accuracy and suggestibility in eyewitness memory tasks. Among the measures reviewed are ®eld dependence, locus of control, hypnotic suggestibility, introversion±extroversion, working memory, and intel...

Individual differences in suggestibility: examining the influence of dissociation, absorption, and a history of childhood abuse

“…Speci®cally, scoring on the DES was related to errors on misleading questions as a group, and errors on the central misleading questions. This is consistent with ®ndings reported by other investigators who have found a relationship between dissociation and suggestibility in both adults (Hyman and Billings, 1998;Paddock et al, 1998;Winograd et al, 1998), and children (Eisen et al, 1997), using a variety of dierent paradigms. Interestingly, although dissociation was generally related to suggestibility in this study, scoring on the DES was not related to errors on the peripheral misleading questions.…”

Absorption, dissociation, and fantasy-proneness as predictors of memory distortion in autobiographical and laboratory-generated memories

“…Recently, the investigation of individual dierences in false memory has been expanded to a word list paradigm. Winograd et al (1998) replicated and extended Roediger and McDermott's (1995) research by examining individual dierences in false recall and recognition of non-presented words that are strong associates of the presented words. They found that scores on the DES were positively correlated with the production of false memories for items on the list learning task.…”

“…Participants from this earlier study were recontacted and asked to complete the personality inventories. They also completed a word-list memory task similar to that used by Roediger and McDermott (1995) and Winograd et al (1998). Thus, the study was designed to address three central issues.…”

“…There has been a recent increase in research investigating individual dierences in susceptibility to false memories (e.g. Hyman and Billings, 1998;Winograd et al, 1998). This is an important issue in a number of applied contexts.…”

Misremembering Pain: Memory Bias for Pain Words in Women Reporting Sexual Pain

“…This repeated activation through experience is likely to have contributed to these women developing stronger networks related to pain, which were then more likely to be activated in this context. Additional support for this possibility can be found in Winograd, Peluso, and Glover's [31] findings of an association between word memory distortions and reports of dissociative experiences and vivid mental imagery. Perhaps the women with sexual pain in our study had stronger mental imagery for words related to pain than any other type of word because of the heightened personal distress associated with pain words.…”