Israel, L. & Schacter, D.L. (1997). Pictorial encoding reduces false recognition of semantic associates. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 4, 577-581.
Background and Purpose of the Research
- DRM paradigm
: Roediger & McDermott (1995) recently showed that its possible to get very high rates of false recognition by presenting lists of words that are all related to a non-presented critical word.
- Perceptual Details
: There is some evidence that true and false memories differ in terms of the degree to which they include records of perceptual details. True memories may contain more perceptual detail than false memories.
- Picture False Memories
: If this is true, it might be possible to decrease the rate of false memories by emphasizing the perceptual details associated with true memories, thereby making them more distinctive from false memories. One way to do this is to use pictures rather than words.
Method
Materials:
- Created study lists by taking 12 highest associates that could be represented pictorially.
- 14 lists presented for study
- Test contained 96 items
TRUE TARGETS: Items that were presented (3 items from every list)
TRUE TARGET CONTROLS: Items from non-studied lists
FALSE TARGETS: The critical lure plus the 2nd highest associate
FALSE TARGET CONTROLS: False targets from the non-presented lists.
Procedure:
- Three conditions (In experiment 2 there was no auditory control)
WORD: Both see and hear word
PICTURE: See picture and hear word
AUDITORY CONTROL: Only hear word
- Items were presented every three seconds with the visual component visible for half that time period
- At test items were presented in either a visual or visual + auditory format.
- Subjects made remember/know judgments
Results
- Corrected Recognition Scores: Reduces data to corrected recognition scores obtained by subtracting out recognition of control items.
CR TARGET = TARGET - TARGET CONTROL
CR FALSE TARGET = FALSE TARGET - FALSE TARGET CONTROL
- CR TARGET greater for pictures (M = .71; M = .69) than for words (M = .52; M = .58).
- This difference was due to greater levels of remember responses for pictures than for words.
- Non-significant differences in CR FALSE TARGET for pictures than for words, however when looking at corrected remember responses there was a lower false recognition rate for pictures than for words.
- Its clear that the biggest effect of word vs. picture encoding occurs when the test is visual + auditory.
Discussion by Israel and Schacter
- Claim that this result shows that pictorial encoding reduces the rate of false recognition and this seems to be especially true when pictorial testing is also used.
- Fuzzy trace theory interpretation is given (Brainerd & Reyna). Pictorial encoding increases verbatim memory of targets. False memories are gist based. Thus it is easier to distinguish between true and false memories when true memories are largely verbatim based.