Remembering words not presented in lists: Can we avoid creating false memories?

Abstract

Can subjects avoid creating false memories as outlined in Roediger and McDermott's (1995) false recognition paradigm if they are forewarned about this memory illusion? We presented subjects with semantically related word lists, followed by a recognition test. The test was composed of studied words, semantically related nonstudied words (critical lures), and unrelated nonstudied words. One group of subjects was uninformed about the false recognition effect, a second group was urged to minimize all false alarms, and a third group was forewarned about falsely recognizing critical lures. Compared with the uninformed and cautious subjects, the forewarned subjects reduced their false alarm rate for critical lures, and they made remember and know judgments equally often for recognized studied words and critical lures. But forewarning did not eliminate the false recognition effect, as these subjects and those in the other groups made numerous false recognitions in this task.

Can test list context manipulations improve recognition accuracy in the DRM paradigm?

“…or otherwise made them reluctant to endorse any word related to a list theme. The effect of related lures was similar to the effect of warning participants about the DRM illusion just prior to the test (e.g., Anastasi et al, 2000;Gallo et al, 1997): Participants were more cautious but were not better able to distinguish critical lures from studied words. According to the activation-monitoring account, cueing use of the monitoring process at test by requiring participants to make finer discriminations between studied and nonstudied words should have reduced false recognition.…”

“…However, turning to correct recognition, a pitfall of test-based attempts at reducing false recognition becomes obvious, namely that the drop in correct recognition in the related-lure context was on par with the drop in false recognition. Drops in correct recognition also occurred in some warning studies (e.g., Gallo et al, 1997.…”

“…Gallo, Roberts, and Seamon's (1997)``cautious'' group were warned that some words on the recognition test would be similar to words heard at study but were not actually presented, and they were urged to avoid false recognition. This warning reduced correct recognition but did not reduce false recognition.…”

Are children’s memory illusions created differently from those of adults? Evidence from levels-of-processing and divided attention paradigms

“…For example, false memories occur even when information has been encoded incidentally (Dodd & MacLeod, 2004), or even after adults are forewarned about the false memory phenomenon (Gallo, Roberts, & Seamon, 1997;McDermott & Roediger, 1998). Similarly, when adults are instructed to "forget" a just studied word list then only true recall but not false recall is reduced (Kimball & Bjork, 2002;Seamon, et al, 2002; but see Marche, Brainerd, Lane, & Loehr, 2005 for a different finding using a different method).…”

On the persuadability of memory: Is changing people's memories no more than changing their minds?

“…Both attitudes and memories, for instance, are changed more readily by credible messengers than by non-credible messengers (Dodd & Bradshaw, 1980;French, Garry, & Mori, 2011;Hovland & Weiss, 1951;Pornpitakpan, 2004), yet these effects diminish over time as memory for the message becomes stronger than memory for its 5 source (Hovland & Weiss, 1951;Underwood & Pezdek, 1998). Both attitudes and memories are often bolstered against change when a warning is provided in advance of an attempt to influence (Gallo, Roberts, & Seamon, 1997;Landau & von Glahn, 2004;Petty & Cacioppo, 1977), but are typically less so when the warning is instead provided afterwards (Gerrie & Garry, 2011;Greene, Flynn, & Loftus, 1982;Kiesler & Kiesler, 1964). Both attitudes and memories tend to become more malleable in response to repeated influence attempts (Hyman & Pentland, 1996;Weiss, 1969), particularly when the individual messages are similar but not identical (Mitchell & Zaragoza, 1996;Schumann, Petty, & Clemons, 1990).…”