What if you went to the police and accused your uncle of abuse? Misunderstandings concerning the benefits of memory distortion: A commentary on Fernández (2015)

Believing is seeing

“…Experiment 1 examined what consequences visual false memories might have on the identification performance of the PCT. In line with recent findings of the positive consequences of verbal false memories Otgaar et al, 2015), one might expect to find that visual false memories are more easily recognized than visual true memories on the PCT. However, predictions can be made based on contrasting hypotheses about the nature of mental representation of false memories for visual stimuli.…”

“…That is, when participants were presented on the PCT with a picture of a nonpresented critical item, they were statistically slower in identifying it than when they were presented with studied pictures. When using verbal stimuli (i.e., words), we and others Otgaar et al, 2015) have, however, found that verbal false memories can lead to faster performance on tasks such as the PCT. Specifically, in these studies, it was found that false memories and not true memories served as the best primes.…”

“…Activation of one conceptual node spreads to other related nodes. Activation of related but non-presented concepts not only leads to false recall/recognition of non-presented words but also triggers additional spreading activation that impacts performance on related (e.g., associative) tasks Otgaar et al, 2015). When visual stimuli are presented and visual false memories are induced, it is unclear whether visual representations are integrated in this network and thus, it is unclear whether they will result in any positive priming consequences.…”

“…A 3 (Memory type: studied items, critical lures, unrelated) × 2 (Recognition presentation: yes vs. no) within-subject design was used. Because the PCT is a priming task, the mere presentation of pictures in the recognition test might confound the results (but see Otgaar et al, 2015). In order to control the possible priming effect from the recognition test, a random half of the studied pictures in the PCT were presented in the recognition test and the other half were not shown during the recognition test.…”

“…The main evidence that either supports or refutes the perceptual priming hypothesis for critical lures comes from data in priming tasks including the stem completion task (Hicks & Starns, 2005;McDermott, 1997;McKone & Murphy, 2000), the fragment completion task (McDermott, 1997), the anagram task (Lövdé n & Johansson, 2003), the lexical decision task (McKone, 2004;Tse & Neely, 2005, 2007 and perceptual identification of degraded words (Hicks & Starns, 2005;Otgaar et al, 2015), all of which concern completing/identifying a word, (i.e., verbal in nature). We argue that there are two possible confounding factors in this previous research.…”