The purpose of this study is to determine whether participants could distinguish between false memories and memories for events that had actually occurred.

• Previous research has shown the false memory effects using the DRM list and related list to be robust.
• The current set of studies explores three different avenues to test how far reaching this effect is.

Experiment 1

• 20 participants were tested in groups ranging from 2-6.
• Experimenters used 4 of the word lists developed by Nelson, McEvoy, and Schreider.
• The lists were blocked so that there was no space between the presentation of the lists.
• The words in each sublist were randomized

• Participants were shown a video on which a Caucasian man and an African- American woman presented the words. The list were counter balance so that each word was read by each individual an equal number of times.
• After the lists were presented the participants were asked to complete a word fragment task. This was used as a filler activity for 8 minuets.
• After completing the test the participants were given a 24 item

Summary of Results of Experiment 1

• Critical lures were remembered at about the same frequency as targets, and both were remembered more that either distracters or distracter lures.
• Participants were as likely to attribute a source to critical lures as they were to targets.

• 20 participants were tested in groups ranging form 2-6
• The same word list was used for experiment 2 and experiment 1. The difference was that the words were presented in written form on a screen.
• After the presentation of the words the participants were given the same word completion task as in the previous experiment.
• After this filler task half of the participants were given an explicit warning that the sublist were composed of words related to a central theme, and that some of the words on the recognition test would be detractors that had not been previously presented.
• The other half of the participants were given no such warning.
• After the participants made their old/new responses on a 96-item recognition test. They were also told to give confidence ratings for those responses.

• There was no significant difference found between the critical lures and the targets on either old/new responses or confidence ratings.

• There was a significant item type x warning interaction. Participants were significantly more confident that the critical lures had been presented on the original list when they received no warning than when they received a warning.

• 60 participants were tested in groups ranging from 2-6.
• The same warning was administered as in experiment 2. The same word list was used but only seven of the words were presented and the rest were used as additional critical lures.
• In addition the participants were asked to make remember/know judgments for each item they marked as old on a 144-item recognition test.

• Once again no difference was found for critical lures or targets on any of the dimensions measured.

• However there was a significant item type x judgement interaction. When participants were not given a warning, the critical lures revealed a pattern similar to the list items (more remember than know responses) whereas the distracter showed more know that remember judgments.

• The false memories that are found using these methods are indeed robust. In fact they seem to be nearly impossible to distinguish from true memories.

• Several explanations for these results have been proposed including IAR and Source-monitoring. (fuzzy-trace)