Individual differences in susceptibility to false memories: The effect of memory specificity

Abstract

The Deese/Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm, named after studies by Deese (1959) and Roediger and McDermott (1995), has been widely used to investigate the creation of false memories under controlled laboratory conditions. In this procedure, participants study lists of words (bed, rest, wake, etc.) that are semantic associates of a non-studied "critical lure" (e.g., sleep). When memory for the lists is then tested, participants show surprisingly high levels of false recall or false recognition of the critical lures. Roediger and McDermott found that levels of false recall exceeded the correct recall of items presented in the middle of the lists. In addition, the false recognition of critical lures was associated with high levels of confidence and the subjective experience of conscious recollection, as measured by "remember" responses (Tulving, 1985). The compelling nature of the DRM illusion has been demonstrated in many subsequent studies (see Gallo, 2010, for a review). A number of theoretical explanations of the DRM illusion have been proposed. According to activationmonitoring theory (Roediger, Watson, McDermott, & Gallo, 2001), critical lures are spontaneously activated in response to the items presented at study. When the critical lures are presented at test, participants make errors of source monitoring (Johnson, Hashtroudi, & Lindsay, 1993) and falsely claim that they were externally presented rather than internally generated. According to fuzzy-trace theory (see Brainerd, Reyna, & Ceci, 2008) participants encode two parallel traces of the items presented at study. Verbatim traces preserve contextual details of individual items, whereas gist traces represent the overall theme of a set of items. The DRM illusion occurs because the critical lures presented at test are consistent with the gist of the studied items. One surprising finding that has to be accounted for by any theory of false memory is the considerable individual variability in susceptibility to the DRM illusion. For example, elevated levels of false memories have been found in patients with frontal lobe damage (Melo, Winocur, & Moscovitch, 1999), whereas reduced levels of false

Imagining Experiencing an Event in the Future Inflates Certainty That It Occurred in the Past

“…We also examined the relationship between specific memories in the autobiographical memory test and the magnitude of imagination inflation across participants. Based on the study of Dewhurst et al. (2017), we predicted a positive correlation between memory specificity and imagination inflation.…”

“…Participants with higher SCEPT scores are believed to have more specific autobiographical retrieval, whereas those with lower SCEPT scores have more general retrieval. Dewhurst et al. (2017) found that participants’ number of specific memories on the SCEPT was positively correlated with false recognition of both types of critical lures.…”

“…(2006) on the other hand found that among participants with major depressive disorder, those with lower autobiographical memory specificity made more source memory errors. Dewhurst et al. (2017) explained these seemingly discrepant findings by pointing out differences in the tasks used in their study and in Raes et al.’s (2006) study.…”

“…A secondary purpose of this study was to examine possible predictors of susceptibility to imagination inflation. Dewhurst, Anderson, Berry, and Garner (2017) examined the relationship between autobiographical memory specificity and susceptibility to false memories in the DRM paradigm. Their participants completed the Sentence Completion for Events from the Past Test (SCEPT) and DRM tasks with negatively valenced and neutral critical lures.…”

“…(2017) explained these seemingly discrepant findings by pointing out differences in the tasks used in their study and in Raes et al.’s (2006) study. Dewhurst et al. (2017) also recommended that future research examine autobiographical memory specificity in more naturalistic memory paradigms, including the imagination inflation paradigm.…”