The Effects Of Detected Relationship Between List Items And Critical Lures On False Memories

Memory is a hot research field in cognitive psychology. The study of false memory could help us understand the mechanism of memory from another perspective. The findings obtained with DRM paradigm showed that false memory is the result of the relationship between list items and the critical nonpresented words. Similar experiments using pictures as study materials showed that physical similarity could also lead to source confusion. However, the same study lists under different experimental conditions demonstrated different patterns, which were attributed, by many researchers, to the differences about conditions and subjects. The author argues that the detected relationship between list items and critical lures will affect the occurrence of false memory. The hypothesis was explored in two experiments.The findings provided new evidences for further exploring the mechanism of false memory and understanding memory and its nature, which had some important practical values in improving memory efficiency.In this study, the detected relationship was manipulated by presenting the leaning items in 2 different modes: sequencely or simultaneously. In experiment 1, using a DRM paradigm, the detectability effect was explored with 2 types of word lists (one possessed strong relationship between list items and critical nonpresented lure, the other week relationship). In experiment 2, paired picture-word stimuliwere used to examine the impact of detected relationship on source monitoring. The experiments marked the complexity of the impact of relationship in false memories and supply us with new perspectives and viewpoints to understand false memory and memory itself. The results show that:(1) It is an important factor whether the participants could detect the relationship between list items and critical lures in false-memory occurrence.(2) In the DRM paradigm, the easier the relationship was detected, the more rigid relationship between word-list and critical nonpresented lures was established, and then the more frequently false memory occurred.(3) In paired-stimuli-learning paradigm, the more clearly the differences between list-item and lure were detected, the less confusion would be made, and then the less the false-memory occurred.