The long term objective of this project is to gain a better understanding of false memories, which can be defined as memories for events that never actually occurred. The goal of this proposal is to contribute to the theoretical understanding of false memories, with the eventual goal of extending these results to erroneous memories that occur in more naturalistic settings. Previous work has shown that false memories can be reliably induced in the laboratory. One method of doing so is to have people study a series of 15 associated words (e.g. bed, rest, awake, tired, dream, etc.); interest lies in the probability with which people will then erroneously remember having heard a word associated with the presented works but not itself presented (in this example, sleep). The first two series of proposed experiments examine the effects of retention interval and presentation rate on the probability of false recall as measured with this associative word list paradigm. The goal is to discover conditions in which false memories can be dissociated from accurate memories. Such conditions will be informative with respect to our understanding of false memories because in almost all studies to date that have employed this method of studying false memories, false and accurate memories have reacted similarly to manipulations of independent variables. Discovering conditions in which we can dissociate accurate and false remembering would have important theoretical implications in that it would give us an important leverage point in understanding how the processes underlying false memories and accurate memories differ. Specifically, it is hypothesized that retention interval and presentation rate will provide the desired patterns of results. The third series of experiments is designed to gain a better understanding of the mechanisms underlying this paradigm, which the PI and numerous other investigators have recently been using extensively. The goal is to use a regression analysis to reveal factors inherent in these word lists that contribute to the false memory effects. Although the studies proposed here all employ a laboratory-based paradigm to induce false memories, the eventual goal is to gain generalizability to these results so that we can confidently and appropriately apply our findings to the study of false memories outside the laboratory.
| Thapar, A; McDermott, K B (2001) False recall and false recognition induced by presentation of associated words: effects of retention interval and level of processing. Mem Cognit 29:424-32 |
| Gallo, D A; Roediger 3rd, H L; McDermott, K B (2001) Associative false recognition occurs without strategic criterion shifts. Psychon Bull Rev 8:579-86 |
| Roediger 3rd, H L; Watson, J M; McDermott, K B et al. (2001) Factors that determine false recall: a multiple regression analysis. Psychon Bull Rev 8:385-407 |
