This study examines the subjective experiential quality of
false memories in a word learning paradigm involving category exemplar
lists. Participants studied lists
comprised of category exemplars presented visually on a computer screen. Each category was represented by either one exemplar,
four exemplars, or eight exemplars.
Participants then took a recognition test including targets, related
lures, and unrelated lures. Participants
indicated whether the item was old or new, and if they indicated that the item
was old indicated whether they were making a remember judgment, a know
judgment, or a guess. Participants also wrote explanations of their
responses.
For targets, correct know
responses increased as the number of category exemplars increased. For related
lures, both remember judgments and know judgments increased as the number
of studied exemplars increased. Participants’ descriptions of their remember
responses were coded into 7 categories:
Inter-list associations
Extra-list associations
Strategies
Images
Item-Specific Responses
Autobiographical References
Others
The proportion of each category of response did not reliably
differ between true and false remember judgments. Moreover, raters could not
reliably distinguish between true and false memories based on their descriptions.
The main findings of this experiment were as follows. First, increasing the number
of category exemplars significantly increased false remember judgments.
Moreover, false remember judgments were difficult to distinguish from true
remember judgments. Accounts of vivid
false memories include the production of implicit associative responses at
study, as well as the content borrowing account provided by Lampinen,
Meier, Arnal, and Leding
(in press). False remember judgments are more difficult to account for with
simple familiarity based accounts of recognition.