Individual Cognitive Demand Of False Memory In The Drm Paradigm

Our memories are not as reliable as we usually thought, and conversely they could be easily forgotten or misled by other information. Even they could changed spontaneously only by internal associative processes. A popular technique for studying memory illusions in the laboratory is the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm. The researchers use the DRM paradigm to carry out plenty of studies, and severies have been put forth to explain how false memory work in the DRM task. There are many researches to discuss what can infect false memory in the DRM task, but just in these studies, very few studies have examined how individual differences in processing affect performance on the task, especially individuals personality. Need for cognition demand as an important personality characteristics, which not only largely affect individual organizating, refining and evaluate the breadth and depth of information, but also have an impact on the process of memory. The primary goal of the present research is to examine how an individual difference variable—need for cognition affects DRM task performance through one questionnaire and two experiments based on the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm.This research assumption:(1)Need for cognition can affect DRM task performance, which high NFC participants would show a preater rate of false recognition for critical items.(2)Two types of word lists are used. It is hypothesized that high NFC individuals would falsely recognize a greater proportion of critical items for both strong and weak lists.The conclusions:(1)In semantic association conditions, either high NFC participants or low NFC participants produce significant false recognition, which also proves that DRM paradigm has effect on activation of false memory.(2)The impact of personality of false memory is found. This paper finds that there is individual difference in relatedness false memory affected by need for cognition. Compared participants in low NFC, high NFC participants show a greater rate of false recognition for critical items. (3)Divides the word lists into strong and weak, it is found that the deeper processing of high NFC individuals have not produced similar levels of false recognition of critical items for both strong and weak lists.