The Soul Goes Beyond The Time

Sometimes people recall things that they have never experienced. And sometimes what they could recall are totally different from what have really happened. We call this phenomenon "Memory Illusion". It is one of the important things about memory. Human beings began to explore their own memory processes since 1885 when H. Ebbinghaus first had his book of Memory published.The psychology of memory follows the quantity oriented paradigm.Memory psychologists use recall or recognition rate to evaluate people's memory.They took it for granted that the false rate came from guessing or forgetting.Bartlett's"The War of the Ghost" in 1932 began an accuracy oriented research paradigm in which memory was taken as the representation or reconstructure of the past experiences.They evaluate memory based on not only the amount of the output information,but also whether they are consistent with the past experiences.Therefore, such researches focus on not only how much and what a person has memorized,but also what kind of mistakes they have made and why they make mistakes.Along with the change of the research paradigms, memory illusion becomes one of the hotspots of memory researches recently.The problem of whether certain types of human beings are more likely to experience memory illusion than others are very important in applied areas such as:court room judgement.psychotherapy,daily study and work.But literature works shows that there has being little work has been done on this.This research chose participants' age,gender,characters of their imagination and personality as independent variables.Classic DRM paradigm and the imagination explosion paradigm has been used to conduct 3 series of experiments to test the effects of individual differences on illusion memory.Below are the conclusions of the current research.(1) Age has significant effects on participants' illusion memory. In the memory tasks based on DRM paradigm,old participants' false memory rate is significantly higher than that of the youngsters.But when memorizing the daily events,old participants' false memory rate is significantly lower than that of the youngsters.Gender can't be used to predict illusion memory.(2) People's ability of imagination doesn't affect their false memory rate caused by imagination explosion significantly.The imagination of daily events brings out participants' feeling of familiarity to inexperienced things.And thus caused the source monitoring obstacle and illusion memory.(3) Personality influences people's illusion memory by affecting individual's cognitive processing mode.Among the 16 personality traits,dominance,liveliness,rule consciousness and social boldness have significant effects on illusive memory. People with higher scores in dominance tend to be more field-independent. Participants with lower scores in dominance tend to be more field-dependent and have high false memory rate. On the dimension of social boldness, people with high scores tend to be more the processing of cognitive impulse, and their false recognition rate are higher than that of the participants with lower scores.(4) The results of this research support the activation-detection dual processing theory and the source monitoring theory.