Presentation modality affects false memory

Abstract

Roediger and McDermott (1995)rejuvenated interest in Deese's (1959) paradigm for producing reliable intrusions and false alarms. Using this paradigm in three experiments, we demonstrated that visual study presentation dramatically reduces the rate of false memories. Only auditory study presentation resulted in equal production of studied and critical items. Correct recall and recognition were unaffected. The suggestion that visual presentation provides a means for discriminating between false and true memories was supported by Experiment 3: Pleasantness rating of study items significantly reduced the creation of false memories regardless of modality.False memories can be created reliably by presenting lists of words that are all strong associates of a nonpresented word. The strong associate usually is recalled and recognized at the same rate as that for presented items. This laboratory technique for invoking predictable intrusions or false alarms has received considerable attention in the literature following Roediger and McDermott's (1995) replication and extension of Deese's (1959) work.The experiments that we report here were motivated by an interest in the effects of item-specific processing of list words on recall of the critical, nonpresented associates. Item-specific processing is assumed to affect a discriminative process of distinctiveness at retrieval. Thus, item-specific processing of list words may facilitate discrimination of those items from nonpresented items and thereby reduce the level of false memory. We began this research by using a powerful item-specific study task that requires subjects to report one thing that is different about an item from all other items in the list (Hunt & Smith, 1996). Unfortunately, we were unable to evaluate the proposed role of distinctive processing because we failed to create false memories at a rate equivalent to true memories in the control condition of that experiment, a condition comparable to the critical conditions ofRoediger and McDermott (1995). As it happened, we had inadvertently changed an apparently important aspect of the experimental paradigm: modality oflist presentation. Our items were presented via a computer monitor, and the results showed unusually low levels of intrusions in conditions that normally yield critical intrusions at the same rate as that for actually studied items. A search of We thank Robert Crowder, Arthur Glenberg, David Payne, and Henry Roediger for helpful comments on a previous version of the manuscript. This research was supported in part by funds from the Research Council of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro granted to the second author. Correspondence may be addressed to R. E. Smith or R. R. Hunt, Department of Psychology, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Greensboro, NC, 27412 (e-mail: resmith@hamlet.uncg. edu or huntrr@hamlet.uncg.edu).the literature supported our suspicions that visual presentation was the cause of this reduction.'All published reports of created memories obtained with the Roedig...

Are children conservative, liberal, or metacognitive? Preliminary evidence for the involvement of the distinctiveness heuristic in decision making

“…According to the impoverished relational encoding account, distinctive encoding enhances the processing of the differences between studied items, resulting in a reduction of the false recognition rate at test (Ghetti et al, 2002;Smith & Hunt, 1998). However, this explanation is only conceivable if, as in the DRM paradigm, the studied items share some common features (e.g., semantic relation) and the false-recognition rate at test depends on the participants' ability to detect these common features during study.…”

“…Ghetti et al (2002) offered two alternative explanations for the distinctiveness effect on children's false recognition. Following Smith and Hunt (1998), they first supposed that distinctive encoding spontaneously impoverishes relational encoding by improving the processing of the differences between items. If the relation between items is not detected during study, then there should be less activation of conceptually related lures during the study, and these should consequently be less subject to false recognition at test.…”

Age-related differences in memory after attending to distinctiveness or similarity during learning

“…Using this procedure, participants are more likely to falsely recognize lures that are semantically related to target items than those that are not. This effect can be attenuated in younger adults by presenting words visually; the interpretation is that if participants are generating semantically related lures during study, these will be more distinct from auditorily presented targets and thus easier to reject (Smith & Hunt, 1998). The results have been mixed as to whether older adults show the same benefit of distinctiveness processing for rejecting semantically related lures (Schacter, Israel, & Racine, 1999;Smith, Lozito, & Bayen, 2005).…”

Television advertisements create false memories for competitor brands.

“…Previous research investigating effects of modality in the DRM paradigm (e.g., Smith & Hunt, 1998) have found lower levels of false memory following visual presentation of word lists relative to auditory presentation, whilst research using static pictures to induce false memories (e.g., Israel & Schacter, 1997) found lower levels of false recognition using pictures relative to words. We were keen to explore the effect of visual-only presentation of the adverts (analogous to watching television with the sound muted) with visual and auditory presentation (analogous to watching television with the sound on).…”