Watson, J.M., Bunting, M. F.,
susceptibility to false memory in the Deese-Roediger-McDermott Paradigm. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 31, 76-85.
Because one of the primary functions of working memory is attentional control (Kane & Engle, 2002) and because avoiding a false memory for a critical lure could be due to attentional control & monitoring abilities, the authors were interested in seeing if the individual difference of working memory capacity would have differing results on the DRM paradigm.
In the first experiment, 50 high span individuals and 50 low span individuals were presented with DRM lists. Half of these participants were given a warning about the nature of the “trickiness” of the DRM paradigm, the other half were not.
Results indicated that for those participants that were not warned, high span individuals recalled more targets than low span individuals with no differences in false memories. For warned participants, however, high span individuals recalled fewer critical words than the low span individuals.
These results show that individuals with a higher WMC could be able to exert control over the creation of false memories in the DRM paradigm, but only when they are warned about the nature of the paradigm.
BUT, because the high span people recalled more targets, and BECAUSE Neuschatz, et al. (2002) found that the more words you recall the less likely you are to recall the critical lure, it COULD BE that this is why high span individuals did not recall as many critical lures. Experiment 2 set out to test this.
In the second experiment the authors added a within subjects variable of study-test trial. The participants had five chances to study the list and take the recall test. In addition, there were high vs. low span individuals and warned vs. not warned conditions.
The basic results were similar to those in Experiment 1. High span individuals recalled more targets than low span individuals, and the number of targets recalled increased from the first to the fifth test. High span individuals were able to increase their veridical recall to a greater degree than the low span individuals.
For false recall, warned participants recalled fewer critical lures than non-warned participants, and participants recalled fewer critical lures from the first to the fifth test. High spans decreased their recall of critical words in the warning condition to a greater degree than the no warning condition, whereas low spans were not influenced by the warning manipulation.
The authors discuss the results in terms of the spreading activation account of false memories in the DRM paradigm. They say that high and low span individuals differ in their abilities to actively maintain task goals (like identifying but not recalling the “trick” word) and so low spans are more susceptible to the influence of habit (that is, the automatic activation of the critical lures in the semantic network.)
Important Legal
Disclaimer: The preceding are articles we read together in the Lampinen Lab Spring 2006 false memory reading group. By
clicking on the button next to the article you can see the summary of that
article. The summary was prepared by the student presenting that article and it
is of course the case that the views expressed in the summary do not
necessarily represent the views of the reading group as a whole, Dr. Lampinen, the Lampinen Lab,
Hugo's, the University of Arkansas, the Razorback Football or Basketball teams
(although we're not sure about cross country), people living down the street
from us, Bob Dylan, Jack Fate, our extended families, or anyone else for that
matter except for the student who wrote the summary (and they don't necessarily
believe what they wrote either).