No abstract

Source attributions for falsely remembered material were investigated in two experiments. A male and a female speaker each presented either an entire word list or half of the items from each of multiple Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) lists commonly used in this paradigm. In the latter condition the tendency of each list half to activate a nonpresented, critical list theme item was manipulated. All of the list halves differed in backward associative strength (BAS), and each was presented by one or the other of the two speakers. In these correlated conditions, when critical items were falsely recognized (Experiments 1 and 2) or recalled (Experiment 2), source attributions were more frequently made to the speaker of the list items with the higher average BAS. This source attribution effect appears to result from the binding of list item source characteristics to activated critical items during encoding, as opposed to being the result of a biased retrieval process. The results are interpreted as consistent with an activation/monitoring account of false memory in the DRM paradigm.

The goal of this study was to augment the standard event-based prospective memory paradigm with an output monitoring component. That component involves memory for past actions and, in the context of prospective memory, is largely responsible for repetition and omission errors. The modified paradigm also provides an index of what people believe to be true concerning their past prospective memory performance. More elaborate prospective responses decreased forgetting that an intention had been fulfilled, whereas contextual change increased forgetting. In Experiments 1-3, people often reported that they had fulfilled an intention on a previous occasion when they actually had not, but distinctive responses reduced that error in Experiment 4. Therefore, people's beliefs about their past performance can influence the incidence of repetition and omission errors in event-based prospective memory tasks.

Three experiments were conducted to explore the interaction between the nature of an event-based prospective intention and the ongoing activity in which it was embedded. Following the basic predictions of E. A. Maylor's (1996Maylor's ( , 1998 task appropriate processing framework, we orthogonally crossed semantic and structural ongoing activities with intentions to respond to semantic and structural event-based cues. In Experiments 1 and 2, we found a cross-over interaction in which the match of the ongoing task and the nature of the intention resulted in better event-based performance than a mismatch between the two. Experiment 3 attempted to de®ne boundary conditions for these effects by demonstrating that the task appropriate processing effect will not occur when event-based cues are particularly salient. The implications of the results and suggestions for further investigations are discussed.

In four experiments, the activation level in memory of critical lures was assessed after encoding Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) lists. The results demonstrated that studying longer, 14-item lists resulted in superadditive priming of the lures because they were more available in memory than truly studied items. Studying shorter DRM lists resulted in activation levels of the lures that was similar to studied items. Collectively, the results suggest that a first stage in creating false memories with the DRM paradigm is making the critical lures highly available in memory during list encoding. Moreover, the results suggest that false memories are likely to have occurred at the time a list is studied by a mechanism such as an implicit associative response, but a monitoring phase at retrieval is acknowledged that could be used to avoid them. Other theoretical accounts are also considered.