False Memory: Theories And Experiments

In the history of memory researches, one of the most striking findings is people's tendency to mistakenly recall and recognize the events that never happened or recall and recognize them quite differently from the way in which they occurred. Our memories are not as reliable as we usually imagined, conversely, they could be easily forgotten or misled by other information. Even they could be changed spontaneously only by internal associative processes. More and more recent experimental investigations have focused on the internally generated false memories and demonstrated the characteristics and the underlying mechanism of false memory effect.The Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) list-learning paradigm provides a tractable method to reliably induce and study false memory effect in the laboratory. In DRM paradigm, a list of thematically related words (e.g., bed, rest, awake) that are all related to a critical nonpresented lure (e.g., sleep) is presented to the participants, and then followed by recall or recognition test. After studying such lists, participants not only falsely recall or recognize the critical lures at extraordinarily high rates, but also are extremely confident that the critical lures were actually studied before. Many investigations indicate that such errors in memory are compelling and difficult to avoid, which makes the DRM paradigm most popular in the study of false memory effect.In Chapter 1, the DRM paradigm was introduced in details, compared with the misinformation effect paradigm, the speciality of DRM paradigm was discussed and two broad classes of false memories (i.e. false memories arising from external factors and internal processes) were discriminated. In Chapter 2, current directions of false memory were described respectively. False memory effect will be variable under the influences of many factors, furthermore, there are different individuals who might show different susceptibility to false memories. In addition, the similar or differential neural substrates underlying false memory and veridical memory are still under controversy.Furthermore, several important theoretical implications described to illustrate the underlying mechanism of false memory effect were reviewed respectively in Chapter 3. Some of those theories are mainly activation-based, some of them are mainly monitoring-based, while the rest one integrates activation and monitoring processes together. All these theoretical implications have their main strengths and weaknesses.In Chapter 4, the underlying dual-processing mechanism of false memory wasinvestigated in four serial experiments. This section is the central part in the whole paper. The presentation duration and block/mixed presentation of the lists (experiment 1), three different tasks and block/mixed presentation (experiment 2) were manipulated to investigate the activation in the creation of false memory and the quality of activation. The results suggest that the accumulation of successive activation of critical lures during the encoding phase has effect on false memory (experiment 1 ), and unintentional processing of list words is all that is necessary to produce substantial false memory of critical lures (experiment 2). The implications underlying the results of experiment 2 are that nonconscious activation is sufficient for the creation of false memory effect. In addition, the results of both experiment 1 and experiment 2 indicate that there maybe another processing (i.e. monitoring process) influence the probability of false memory.Experiment 3 was designed to examine the effect of monitoring process on false memory. Experiment 3(a) was a replication of experiment 1, and the results suggest that the monitoring process which is facilitated by warning introduction could attenuate false recognition effectively. While in experiment 3(b), warning introduction had no effect on false recall. The results of experiment 3(b) were discussed according to the modality effect. Both experiment 3(a) and 3(b) confirm that monitoring process has influence on false memory effect.Fur...