The Context Associations Have Different Influences On Children’ S False Memory

Memory processes are re-building events or situations, it is difficult to do the interpretation accurately, more or less there will be deviations in the reconstruction process.When people recognize or recall the memories,they may deviate from the truth. The researchers have revealed a strong false memory effect through using the Deese/Roediger-McDermott (DRM) lists. DRM paradigm has become a classic study for false memory paradigm,exploring and developing the laboratory studies of false memories.Currently,the false memory research has found that it is influenced by many factors,such as warnings, sensory channels, etc.The other study emphasis focus on the trend of false memory with age development. Most previous studies are based on the traditional DRM vocabulary experimental material. And,there are a variety of theories to explain the age effect on children’s false memories. Associative activation theory is the theoretical basis of this study.On the basis of the traditional research paradigm,we tried to embed the standard Deese/Roediger-McDermott(DRM)lists into stories whose context biased interpretation either toward or away from the overall themes of the DRM lists on both true and false recognition.These biased story contexts were compared with the situation false memory illusions using the standard DRM list presentation paradigm.134children,8-,10-, and12-years old, participated in this study, using the DRM paradigm and its variants.The results showed that There are different effects between stories toward and away from the critical lures:compared with those no context condition (DRM list group),context promotion has a significant increase in the children’s false memories,and context interference significantly reduced children’s false memories. The story bias, no matter toward or away, increased children’s true recognition rates:a bias toward the theme increased true and false memory rates, and a bias away from the theme decreased false memory rates, also increasing true memory rates.8to12-year-old children’s false and true memories increase with age.The increasing effect brought by the story toward bias on false memory rises from age8to12.But,the bias away from the theme have no influence on children of8years old, but significantly increased10,12-year-old children’s false memories.