Modality Effect In False Memory Of Chinese Characters

One of great puzzles in the false memory is that the mechanism of false memoryis created,which many researchers have used DRM paradigm and versions and havemanipulated many experimental variables to explore.The researches on modalityeffect in false memory stemmed from studying on mechanism of false memory.In1998,Smith and Hunt firstly reported and defined the modality effect on falsememory,namely there is a lower false recognition to critical lures following visualpresentation than following auditory presentation,which was followed by a number ofexperimental studies.The effect of study modality in false memory has now beenexplored by using the DRM paradigm on many written recall tests and on visualrecognition tests.Otherwise,the explanations and factors on modality effect in falsememory deserve more careful scrutiny.The author explored the cognitive mechanism and brain activity of modalityeffect in false recognition from three approaches through conducting 5 behavioralexperiments and 2 ERP experiments.In study 1,the author conducted 2 experimentsrespectively using lexical decision task and Stemberg paradigm and investigated therepresentation form and activated features of critical lures following visual study andauditory study.In study 2,in order to explore the effect of encoding and retrieval onmodality effect in false recognition,the author manipulated some variables duringencoding phase and retrieval phase to increase or reduce item-specific processing andlevel of semantic activation at encoding and reduce the monitoring processing atretrieval in 3 experiments,for instance repeating presentation,presentation format,and divided attention.In study 3,the author investigated the neural activity associatedwith cognitive processes underlying the encoding and retrieval phase following visualpresentation and auditory presentation by means of ERP techniques to further tap intoelectrophysiological processes of modality effect in false memory.It is important tomention that the author firstly explained the findings of the modality effect in falserecognition in our experiments from the view of the different encoding and processingcharacteristics of Chinese characters,and our findings are in general agreement withactivation-monitoring theory of false memory. In conclusion,the present findings showed that:(1) the activation processesunderlying the critical lures during encoding occurred simultaneously with orimmediately after study and the representations of critical lures following visual studyseemed to be graphemes or orthographic.(2) Semantic activation occurred duringencoding phase and monitoring processes during retrieve phase co-played animportant role in modality effect in false recognition,namely the level of activation tocritical lures following visual study was higher than following auditory study,whichalso further led to the difficulty of monitoring processes in the following visualrecognition.(3) ERP measures on modality effect in false recognition alsodemonstrated that visual presentation and auditory presentation have differentinfluences on DIM during encoding phase and parietal old/new effect during retrievephase.(4) Compared with English words,visual graphemes of critical lures inChinese lists were likely to be activated and encoded in participants' mind,thus it wasmore difficult for participants to discriminate later inner graphemes from those itemspresented in visual modality.Hence in Chinese lists visual presentation could lead tomore false recognition than auditory presentation.These findings would be methodologically and theoretically important.On theone hand,the present researches may help to understand deeply the mechanism ofmodality effect in false recognition;on the other hand,the researches can providesome supporting information for false memory in real world.