Creating False Memories of Words With or Without Recognition of List Items: Evidence for Nonconscious Processes

Abstract

Subjects exposed to lists of semantically related words falsely remember nonstudied words that are associated with the list items (e.g., Deese, 1959; Roediger & McDermott, 1995). To determine if subjects would demonstrate this false memory effect if they were unable to recognize the list items, we presented lists of semantically related words with or without a concurrent memory load at rates of 2 s, 250 ms, or 20 ms per word (Experiment 1, between-subjects design) and 2 s or 20 ms per word (Experiment 2, within-subjects design). We found that the subjects falsely recognized semantically related nonstudied words in all conditions, even when they were unable to discriminate studied words from unrelated nonstudied words. Recognition of list items was unnecessary for the occurrence of the false memory effect. This finding suggests that this memory illusion can be based on the nonconscious activation of semantic concepts during list presentation.

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

“…However, these contrasting findings may be due to individual differences in the susceptibility to false memories, something a between-participants design cannot control for. Our results are in line with Seamon et al (1998) who found that memory load had no effect or decreased false recognition depending on whether a within-or between-participants design was used, respectively. The advantage of a within-participant design is that it controls for variability in false memory rates that occur especially in children and is more comparable to an everyday life scenario where some information may be encoded more deeply (e.g., an event that is particularly unusual or interesting such as taking a plane for going on holidays) and some information may be encoded on a shallow level (e.g., events that have been encountered many times such as a trip to the supermarket).…”

“…In particular, it has been shown that the introduction of a secondary task at encoding increases false recall (Dewhurst, Barry, & Holmes, 2005;Pérez-Mata, Read, & Diges, 2002;Peters, Jelicic, Gorski, Sijstermans, Giesbrecht, Merckelbach, 2008) but decreases false recognition (Dewhurst, et al, 2005;Dewhurst, Barry, Swannell, Holmes, & Bathurst, 2007). Similarly, when introducing an additional memory load at encoding rather than using a divided attention paradigm, false recognition is reduced (but only in a between-participants condition not in a within-participant design) (Seamon, et al, 1998). It has also been shown that divided attention at encoding impairs true recognition but not false recognition (Seamon et al, 2003).…”

Implicit false memory in the DRM paradigm: Effects of amnesia, encoding instructions, and encoding duration.

“…Such a decrease, however, has only consistently been shown for free recall, but much less so for false recognition (e.g., Arndt & Hirshman, 1998;Gallo & Roediger, 2002;Seamon, Luo, & Gallo, 1998). Furthermore, the effect of study duration on false memory has been shown to depend on the participant group tested, as both Dehon (2006) and Koutstaal et al (2001) obtained a decrease in false memory with increasing study time for younger, but not for older adults (probably due to diminished monitoring abilities in the latter group; cf.…”

Falsas memórias no Teste Pictórico de Memória

“…Mantendo o tempo de exposição da lâmina em 1 minuto, as autoras constataram que os estí-mulos mais recordados pelos participantes foram os verbais (palavras) quando comparados aos mesmos estímu-los apresentados na forma pictórica, resultado este que vem ao encontro da teoria da codificação dupla de Paivio (1986) Estudos com tarefas de reconhecimento mostram um padrão de resultados semelhante àqueles que ocorrem em situações de durações curtas na apresentação dos itens da lista. Por exemplo, Seamon et al (1998), utilizando durações de apresentação de 20, 250 e 2000 ms, mostraram um aumento no falso reconhecimento dos itens críticos não apresentados com o aumento da duração da apresentação dos itens da lista. Arndt e Hirshman (1998) obtiveram resultados semelhantes quanto aos falsos reconhecimentos em durações que variaram de 300 a 3000 ms. O estudo de Huang e Janczura (2008) também vai na mesma direção: manipulando quatro tempos de apresentação dos estímulos (20 ms, 250 ms, 1000 ms e 3000 ms), eles mostraram que intervalos de tempo maiores produzem índices maiores de falsas memórias.…”