INTRODUCTION

The Roediger and McDermott’s (1995) revitalization and extension of Deese’s (1959) laboratory design has received the most attention for creating false memories. The technique involves presenting lists of semantically related words. Then see if critical lures appear in tests of free recall or recognition memory. The goal of the present study is to reintroduce a technique that examines beliefs of memories and apply the technique to false remembering. Obviously the participants do believe that the critical lure was in the presented list with a free recall test. However, you cannot make the same assumptions with recognition tests. Based on confidence ratings, source attributions and remember-know decisions it appears that participants receiving recognition tests also hold strong beliefs about having seen the critical lure.

They added a previous method to the false paradigm and came up with three distinct phases: study, recall, and past recall performance. The output-monitoring test is assessing what they remember having written down during the free recall. Input monitoring on the hand assesses memory for whether items were studied during encoding. So they performed a combined output-input monitoring test in which the participants identified old and new items as new, as studied and not recalled, or as studied and recalled during the free recall tests.

Theoretically, when a critical lure was erroneously recalled, then they expected the participant would identify it as a studied and recalled item (SR). If the SR belief persisted then the item should be labeled SR on the final input-output monitoring test. However, if critical lure not mistakenly recalled then the appropriate response would be new on the input-out monitoring test. The extent to which the participants labeled an unrecalled critical lure as an SR item, then that would represent a dual false memory effect. It is important to note that the 3-alternative test format of the final input-output monitoring tests allowed them to compare beliefs about the critical lures; they were recalled vs. ones that weren’t. The results of this study could inform the fuzzy trace and implicit associative responses (IARs) theories.

The first experiment input-output monitoring claims were tested for critical lures that had and hadn’t been recalled. The test was done two ways: 1. With items from each of the lists locked at test and 2. The items from all lists were randomly intermingled together. The blocking manipulation increases the false recognition. The blocked version served to assess whether IARs might occur during testing. If they do, then erroneous claims should be higher under blocked, not mixed testing. In experiment 2 they tried to reduce erroneous claims on the final test by leaving the recall protocol on the computer during the free recall tests. Finally, experiment 3 again attempted to reduce the high levels of erroneous claims by changing the response options.

EXPERIMENT 1

THE balance of SNR vs. SR claims will be revealing about changes in the phenomenological experience that occur from the free recall test in the second stage of the experiment to the input-output monitoring test in the third stage.

Method- Six Roediger and McDermott lists were presented at encoding. The participants then did some addition problems. A one-minute free recall followed, after each word was entered the word would disappear from the screen. Finally the input-output monitoring (IOM) test was administered. Participants were assigned to either a blocked or mixed condition for the IOM test. The blocked participants had the studied items rerandomized with the critical nonpresented critical lure and 16 new, semantically dissimilar, items.

Results and Discussion-

• blocked vs. mixed testing didn’t affect the overall proportion of studied items that were recalled.
• Performance on old items was at 86% for both SR and SNR items. SR and SNR did not appear to affect performance when introduced at test.
• Participants claimed the critical lure was on the study list about 90% of the time. This fact combined with a veridical recognition of 86%, the data suggests that the participants believed the critical lures were on the study list at a rate higher than the truly studied items.
• THE most interesting data were the claims for critical lures that had not been recalled during the free recall test. The unrecalled lures weren’t uniform across the 3 options – very few were labeled new, as they should have been. Usually the participant claimed they were SNR or SR.
• Participants were very accurate at identifying that they had recalled a critical lure, but they were claiming that it was studied (which it wasn’t) and recalled (which it erroneously was).
• New false memories were created, said the critical lure was on the study list 90% and that they had been typed into the computer half of that time. This represents a dual false memory.

Method- the same as experiment 1, except the free recall tests. In this experiment when the participant entered the words in free recall the words stayed on the screen at the same time.

Results and Discussion-

• Again the results are novel b/c the participants believed the critical lures were studied and that they were typed in during free recall.
• Unrecalled critical lures are identified as SR items much more than unrecalled studied items, despite the fact that neither the study not the recall events actually occurred for critical lures whereas studied items were at least seen at encoding.

Method- Since the blocked vs. mixed manipulation doesn’t affect performance the manipulation was abandoned. The materials and basic procedure was virtually identical to those used before. The free recall section was increased 30 seconds. The authors felt the participants would probably use the additional 30 would be used to study the recall protocol. This should result in information that could be used to avoid erroneously identifying the critical lures as recalled b/c deeper or better encoding generally leads to better source monitoring. The only other change was on the input-output monitoring test. They increased the number of options by keeping SR and SNR but adding, for new items they could claim the item was not presented and they hadn’t recalled it or that the item was new and they had erroneously recalled it during free recall test.

Results and Discussion –

• The incidence of false recall was approximately 50% in the protocol absent condition but was significantly less in the protocol present condition. This indicates that allowing participants to review their recall protocol for long enough can aid in reducing false recall by minimizing the recall burden involved with discriminating what had been recalled from what had not yet been recalled.
• The lengthened recall period allowed participants to study their recall and resulted in a reduction of false memories.
• Replicated experiments 1 and 2 finding that once a critical lure is recalled, participants’ beliefs generally reflect that it was both studied and recalled.
• However, #3 also found that a small amount (11%) identified the false memories as false memories.
• In the protocol absent condition more critical lures were labeled recalled than not recalled. More items were claimed to be new and not recalled when the recall protocol was present then when it was absent. The last two combined results suggest much better input and output monitoring when the recall protocol was available and extra time to study was provided.
• Protocol absence appeared to exacerbate the belief that items were recalled when in fact they were not. This is important b/c it leads to a dual false memory.

The purpose of the study was to explore what people believed concerning the false memories that were created by a free recall test. In general, erroneous beliefs that critical lures were experienced will persist if they have been mistakenly recalled earlier. It is interesting that recalled and unrecalled lures were claimed to have been studied at similar rates. Surprisingly, the unrecalled lures were asserted to have been studied 50% of the time, which has been labeled a false memory of a false memory (dual false memory). The authors argue that the results seem to support the fuzzy trace theory more than the IARs theory. Given that over 50% of the studied items were recalled, people may judge by inference that some proportion of the unrecalled lures were recalled. This argument is entirely consistent with gist-based responding as argued by fuzzy trace theory.