Dodd, M. D., & MacLeod, C. M. (2004). False recognition without intentional learning. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 11, 137-142.
Dodd and MacLeod were interested in how deeply words need to be processed in order to elicit false recognition in the DRM paradigm. If false recognition only happens after intentional processing, then there should be no false recognition in an incidental learning paradigm.
Experiment 1
Participants were presented with 3 12-item DRM lists in different font colors. They were to ignore the word and indicate what color the font was. After this task, they took a surprise recognition test.
Participants were very likely to false alarm to critical lures (70%), indicating that intentional encoding is not necessary to elicit false recognition. (The effect remained even with corrected recognition). Interestingly, they only said “old” to 53% of the targets.
Experiment 2
Participants were presented with the same lists as Experiment 1, but they were to read the words and ignore the colors. After this task, they took a surprise recognition task.
Having to read the words increased the rate of true recognition (83%). False recognition was equivalent (71%). When comparing the two experiments, reading the words dramatically increased true recognition (compared to incidental learning), but it had no effect on false recognition.
Thus, false recognition is not dependent on intentional processing. This is the first demonstration of this effect.