A Research On Development Of Children's False Memories With DRM Paradigm

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 misted 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.Distinctiveness effects in children's (6-,8-, and 12-year-olds) false memory illusions were examined using visual materials. In Experiment 1, developmental trends (increasing false memories with age) were obtained usingDeese-Roediger-McDer-mott lists presented as words and color photographs but not line drawings. In Experim-ent 2, when items were photographed with heterogeneous colored backgrounds, develo pmental trends were eliminated relative to words and homogeneous backgrounds. Experiments 3 examined whether the conceptual nature of the back Ground -mattered and presented items in neutral (color only), or theme-congruent contexts. The results showed that the nature of the context did not matter, only whether the backgrounds were homogeneous or heterogeneous. Apparently, childrenuse distinctive perceptual, but not conceptual, features to attenuate false memory illusions...