False Memory: A Critical Role In Human Life
False Memory
Abstract
This paper explores published work done by several researchers which sheds light on the growing body of literature of false memory. Memory plays a critical role in human life due the important role it plays in cognition including perception, problem solving, decision making and many more factors that we face in our everyday life. Memory plays such an imperative role in society that it can be used to save someone’s life in court or take someone’s life away during murder trials. The dilemma with human memory, science and cognition is that there are always room for errors to be found. This paper focuses on of these errors, false memory, which is defined by Roediger and McDermott (1995) as remembering events …show more content…
that never happened or remembering events differently than they happened. It was hypothesized in our study that (i) people will have a higher percentage of words recalled in a blocked condition versus a random condition, (ii) critical lures will be recalled regardless of condition; and (iii) people will have a higher percentage of recalled critical lures in a blocked condition versus random condition. The findings largely supported all three hypothesis, suggesting that (i) people recalled words at a much higher rate in a blocked condition; (ii) critical lures were recalled regardless of condition; and (iii) people recalled critical lures at a much higher rate in a blocked condition. It is also important to note that this paper was done as a replication to a study done by Roediger and McDermott (1995) in testing the creation of false memories and false recall.
Keywords: memory, false memory, cognition, society
False Memory
False memory refers to a mental experience that is mistakenly taken as a truthful representation of an event from one’s personal past. Due to the increasing number of false memory reported in therapy, it has become a phenomenon that has grabbed the attention of psychologists and the public for most of the century and has been studied extensively within the past twenty years. Researchers and scientists have made many arguments within the realm of this psychological reality of human mind and memory. They have argued that critical lures will be falsely recalled regardless of conditions, while others have stated that people will have a higher percentage of recalling words in a blocked conditions due to advantages of word priming and being able to put words together in a more meaningful way. Lastly, it has been debated that critical lures will be remembered better in a blocked list; thus, there is a significant effect between types of word lists and word recall such that people will recall a higher percentage of actual words and critical lures in a blocked condition. Furthermore, it is important to note that the purpose of this study was to replicate a study done by Roediger and McDermott (1995) in testing the creation of false memories and false recall. Frederic Bartlett, British psychologist, was the first to conduct an experimental investigation on false memories. He did this experiment by having participants read an Indian folktale, “The War of the Ghost,” and recall it repeatedly. His results indicated that there were distortions in the participants’ memories over repeated attempts to recall the story. Some parts of the story were missing, some were overelaborated, and some individuals even built completely new additions to the story (Bartlett, 1932). Bartlett found that subjects recalled the general theme of the story, but they had changed small details to make the story more coherent to their expectations. Participants distorting the story made it easier for them to remember things. Bartlett’s interpretation of this study became that “Memories are not copies of experiences. The mind alters and interprets these experiences” (Bartlett, 1932). To determine word-frequency effects in long-term semantic priming and false memory, Sherman & Jordan (2011) conducted an experiment which consisted of visual presentation of nine lists of 10 words, each list being followed by visual lexical decision task (LDT) including 20 words and 20 non-words. Participants were told to memorize the list items for a later memory task before they were presented with the lists. The order in which the lists were presented, followed Roediger and McDermott (1995) study, where the order of words within each list was kept constant and with the item most associated with the critical lure presented first and item least associated with the lure presented last. Their findings showed that there was a significant effect of long term semantic priming performance (LTSP) on standard effects of word frequency on LTSP performance. The results found by Sherman & Jordan (2011), prove our first hypothesis that people will have a higher percentage of word recall in blocked conditions. This is largely due to priming, which is our perceptual identification of words due to association and particular representations. In a similar study done by Thapar and McDermott (2001), the effects of retention interval and level of processing on false recall and false recognition of associates were examined. They presented subjects with words closely associated with non-studied words to induce false recall and recognition. The conclusion they reached was that lists that were semantically processed showed higher levels of false recall and false recognition than superficially processed lists. This can further tell us that blocked words were recalled more than random words due to the nature of priming.
In this study, we also hypothesized that people will recall critical lures in any condition. Goff & Roediger (1998) performed a study to test whether imagining performing an action would later on be recalled as actually doing it (p. 20). Their experiment had two purposes, (i) whether imagining an event would increase the probability that it would be remembered as actually happened and (ii), whether temporal placement of the imagination session would affect imagination inflation and recognition confusion. Their results showed that participants who experienced events in the first session and then imagined events a day later confused the events on a test given two weeks later. Their results further showed that recognition accuracy was highest when the imagining session occurred immediately before the test. The patterns followed a decrease in recognition accuracy with increased numbers of imaginings. The results in their experiments revealed that imagining actions led subjects to believe that they had actually performed the action when they had not. Goff & Roediger’s study is extremely relevant to the hypothesis that we made because it shows that in any condition, you can recall a critical lure due to false memory and the close associations our minds can make. To go further into this, Pilotti et al. (2000), conducted an experiment to examine the effects of imagery in explicit memory with a cued recall task. Their results showed that hearing words at study consistently produced larger priming effects than imagining words on auditory implicit tests. Lastly, their study revealed that sensitivity of a memory test to perceptual information (directly perceived or imagined) is an extremely imperative dimension for dissociating implicit and explicit retrieval processes. Lastly, we predicted that critical lures would have a higher chance of being recalled in a blocked condition versus a random condition. In 1995, Roediger & McDermott conducted a study that was originally replicated by Deese in 1959 to observe the creation of false memories. They did this by using the six lists in Deese’s experiment that the highest levels of erroneous recalls. They used the DRM paradigm in their experiment, where in their first experiment exposed subjects to a list of 12 words (e.g. bed, rest, awake); each of their lists were composed of one critical lure. The experiment consisted of students hearing and recalling the lists and then receiving a recognition test over both studied and non-studied items, including the critical lures. The results in their experiment showed that critical lures were recalled at about the same level as items that were actually presented in the middle of the list. The false-recall rate for the critical lures was much higher than for other related words that had not been presented. The DRM paradigm used in Roediger and McDermott’s study followed our prediction that critical lures would have a higher percentage of recall in a blocked condition.
Method
Participants Participants included 142 college students from George Mason University (age ranging from 18-25).
Materials
The materials used in this experiment included pen or pencil for the participant with a piece of paper to write down words recalled and a blocked, random, or both blocked and random word list for the experimenter.
Procedure
This experiment had to two phases. During phase I of the experimenter told the participants that they will hear a list of 50 words and upon hearing all the words they would be tested on their memory of the words. After hearing all words, participants were given 5 minutes to recall the words. Upon completion of the recall of words, experimenters asked the participants how many “recalled” the critical lures (bread, chair, doctor, sleep and sweet).
Results
The purpose of this study was to replicate a study done by Roediger and McDermott in testing the creation of false memories and false recall. This study had begun with three hypothesis in mind: (i) people will recall a higher percentage of words in a blocked list; (ii) critical lures will be falsely recalled regardless of condition; (iii) critical lures will be better remembered in a blocked list.
Hypothesis 1 A One-Way ANOVA (Analysis of Variance) was conducted to compare the effects of types of word lists on percentage of words recalled in random or blocked conditions. It was hypothesized that people will recall a higher percentage of words in a blocked list. Results showed that there is a significant main effect of types of word list on percentage of words recalled [F (1, 140) = 15.411, p<0.001]. Results showed that people recall a higher percentage of words in blocked list (M = 32.93%, SD = 13.12) than in a random list (M = 29.7%, SD = 10.19).
Result supported the hypothesis that people will recall a higher percentage of words in a blocked list). Hypothesis 2 For this portion of the experiment we hypothesized that critical lures will be falsely recalled regardless of condition. We calculated the percentage of critical words and found that regardless of condition, participants falsely recalled critical lures by 22%. Thus, supporting our hypothesis that critical lures will be falsely recalled regardless of condition.
Hypothesis 3 A One-Way ANOA (Analysis of Variance) was conducted to compare whether random or blocked group will yield a higher percentage of lures recalled. It was hypothesized that critical lures will be better remembered in a blocked list. Results showed that there is a significant main effect of word lists on percentage of lures recalled [F (1, 140) = 22.4, p<0.001]. Results showed that people recalled a high percentage of lures in a blocked list (M = 29.31%, SD = 24.96) than in a random list (M = 15.07%, SD = 17.96). Results supported the hypothesis that critical lures will be better remembered in a blocked list.
Interaction
It’s important to note that, although not hypothesized, through the statement of analysis it can be seen that an interaction exists between types of words and types of word lists on the actual percentage of recall [F (1, 140) = 8.141, p<.005]. (See Graph 1.)
Discussion
False memory is a type of deformation in episodic memory and it’s a phenomenon that nearly everyone experiences.
It can be defined as representations of events that we think have occurred that have not. The purpose of this paper was to replicate a study done by Roediger and McDermott done in 1995 in creating false memories. This paper went in depth with research to prove the three hypothesis that we had stated: (i) people will have a higher percentage of recalling words in a blocked condition; (ii) critical lures can be recalled in any condition; and (iii) people have a higher percentage of recalling critical lures in a blocked condition. The literature in this paper proved all of three of our hypothesis stated to be true, thus, showing a successful replication of the study done by Roediger and …show more content…
McDermott. One implication in this study was the high sum of internal validity. It’s important for any successful experiment to have low internal validity because that will show the most accurate results. Internal validity refers to how much manipulation is presented on the independent variable by the researcher, therefore, the higher the internal validity, the more bias the research is said to have. It’s also imperative to consider other extraneous variables when conducting an experiment. In order for a study to have the most accurate results, it should be administered by one experimenter to reduce researcher bias. This study was administered by all lab professors, instead of just one lab professor administering to the 140 participants. This can cause researcher bias because each person has a different way of saying and presenting things, which can in return cause confusion. It’s also extremely important that the research on false memory continues because of the many benefits that can rise from it.
The phenomenon of false memories are well-documented in many court cases where defendants have been found guilty based on the testimony that were received from eye witnesses who were extremely sure and confident about their memory recollection, but later on, through DNA evidence or other measures were found to be incorrect. MIT conducted a study in trying to understand the traces of false memories by planting false memories in the brains of mice (Trafton, 2013). By doing this study, they have found that many neurological traces of these faulty memories are identical to those of authentic memories. Their study further provided evidence that memories are “stored in networks of neurons that form memory traces for each experience we have” (Trafton, 2013). These memory traces are called engrams and are the future study of false memories. Due to the high growing number of false memory situations being reported and the effect it has on everyday life, it is of foremost importance that the research in understanding this phenomenon is continued. By being able to fully understand false memory, and all that is associated with it, many benefits can arise in understanding the human mind, brain, and
behavior.
References
Gallo, D. A., McDermott, K. B., Percer, J. M., Roediger III, H. L. (2001). Modality effects in false recall and false recognition. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning,
Memory, and Cognition, 27(2), 339-353.
Goff, L. M., Roediger III, H. L. (1998). Imagination inflation for action events: Repeated imaginings lead to illusory recollections. Memory & Cognition, 26(1), 20-33.
Loftus, E.F. & Pickrell, J.E. (1995). The formation of false memories. Psychiatric Annals,
25, 720-725.
Roediger III, H. L., McDermott, K. B. (1995). Creating false memories remembering words not presented in lists. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and
Cognition, 21(4), 803-814.
Sherman, S. M., Jordan, T. R. (2011). Word-frequency effects in long-term semantic priming and false memory. British Journal of Psychology, (102), 559-568.
Trafton, A. (2013). Neuroscientists plant false memories in the brain. MIT News. Retrieved from http://newsoffice.mit.edu/2013/neuroscientists-plant-false-memories-in-the-brain-0725. Appendix
Graph 1
Interaction between Word Types and Conditions
Abstract
This paper explores published work done by several researchers which sheds light on the growing body of literature of false memory. Memory plays a critical role in human life due the important role it plays in cognition including perception, problem solving, decision making and many more factors that we face in our everyday life. Memory plays such an imperative role in society that it can be used to save someone’s life in court or take someone’s life away during murder trials. The dilemma with human memory, science and cognition is that there are always room for errors to be found. This paper focuses on of these errors, false memory, which is defined by Roediger and McDermott (1995) as remembering events …show more content…
that never happened or remembering events differently than they happened. It was hypothesized in our study that (i) people will have a higher percentage of words recalled in a blocked condition versus a random condition, (ii) critical lures will be recalled regardless of condition; and (iii) people will have a higher percentage of recalled critical lures in a blocked condition versus random condition. The findings largely supported all three hypothesis, suggesting that (i) people recalled words at a much higher rate in a blocked condition; (ii) critical lures were recalled regardless of condition; and (iii) people recalled critical lures at a much higher rate in a blocked condition. It is also important to note that this paper was done as a replication to a study done by Roediger and McDermott (1995) in testing the creation of false memories and false recall.
Keywords: memory, false memory, cognition, society
False Memory
False memory refers to a mental experience that is mistakenly taken as a truthful representation of an event from one’s personal past. Due to the increasing number of false memory reported in therapy, it has become a phenomenon that has grabbed the attention of psychologists and the public for most of the century and has been studied extensively within the past twenty years. Researchers and scientists have made many arguments within the realm of this psychological reality of human mind and memory. They have argued that critical lures will be falsely recalled regardless of conditions, while others have stated that people will have a higher percentage of recalling words in a blocked conditions due to advantages of word priming and being able to put words together in a more meaningful way. Lastly, it has been debated that critical lures will be remembered better in a blocked list; thus, there is a significant effect between types of word lists and word recall such that people will recall a higher percentage of actual words and critical lures in a blocked condition. Furthermore, it is important to note that the purpose of this study was to replicate a study done by Roediger and McDermott (1995) in testing the creation of false memories and false recall. Frederic Bartlett, British psychologist, was the first to conduct an experimental investigation on false memories. He did this experiment by having participants read an Indian folktale, “The War of the Ghost,” and recall it repeatedly. His results indicated that there were distortions in the participants’ memories over repeated attempts to recall the story. Some parts of the story were missing, some were overelaborated, and some individuals even built completely new additions to the story (Bartlett, 1932). Bartlett found that subjects recalled the general theme of the story, but they had changed small details to make the story more coherent to their expectations. Participants distorting the story made it easier for them to remember things. Bartlett’s interpretation of this study became that “Memories are not copies of experiences. The mind alters and interprets these experiences” (Bartlett, 1932). To determine word-frequency effects in long-term semantic priming and false memory, Sherman & Jordan (2011) conducted an experiment which consisted of visual presentation of nine lists of 10 words, each list being followed by visual lexical decision task (LDT) including 20 words and 20 non-words. Participants were told to memorize the list items for a later memory task before they were presented with the lists. The order in which the lists were presented, followed Roediger and McDermott (1995) study, where the order of words within each list was kept constant and with the item most associated with the critical lure presented first and item least associated with the lure presented last. Their findings showed that there was a significant effect of long term semantic priming performance (LTSP) on standard effects of word frequency on LTSP performance. The results found by Sherman & Jordan (2011), prove our first hypothesis that people will have a higher percentage of word recall in blocked conditions. This is largely due to priming, which is our perceptual identification of words due to association and particular representations. In a similar study done by Thapar and McDermott (2001), the effects of retention interval and level of processing on false recall and false recognition of associates were examined. They presented subjects with words closely associated with non-studied words to induce false recall and recognition. The conclusion they reached was that lists that were semantically processed showed higher levels of false recall and false recognition than superficially processed lists. This can further tell us that blocked words were recalled more than random words due to the nature of priming.
In this study, we also hypothesized that people will recall critical lures in any condition. Goff & Roediger (1998) performed a study to test whether imagining performing an action would later on be recalled as actually doing it (p. 20). Their experiment had two purposes, (i) whether imagining an event would increase the probability that it would be remembered as actually happened and (ii), whether temporal placement of the imagination session would affect imagination inflation and recognition confusion. Their results showed that participants who experienced events in the first session and then imagined events a day later confused the events on a test given two weeks later. Their results further showed that recognition accuracy was highest when the imagining session occurred immediately before the test. The patterns followed a decrease in recognition accuracy with increased numbers of imaginings. The results in their experiments revealed that imagining actions led subjects to believe that they had actually performed the action when they had not. Goff & Roediger’s study is extremely relevant to the hypothesis that we made because it shows that in any condition, you can recall a critical lure due to false memory and the close associations our minds can make. To go further into this, Pilotti et al. (2000), conducted an experiment to examine the effects of imagery in explicit memory with a cued recall task. Their results showed that hearing words at study consistently produced larger priming effects than imagining words on auditory implicit tests. Lastly, their study revealed that sensitivity of a memory test to perceptual information (directly perceived or imagined) is an extremely imperative dimension for dissociating implicit and explicit retrieval processes. Lastly, we predicted that critical lures would have a higher chance of being recalled in a blocked condition versus a random condition. In 1995, Roediger & McDermott conducted a study that was originally replicated by Deese in 1959 to observe the creation of false memories. They did this by using the six lists in Deese’s experiment that the highest levels of erroneous recalls. They used the DRM paradigm in their experiment, where in their first experiment exposed subjects to a list of 12 words (e.g. bed, rest, awake); each of their lists were composed of one critical lure. The experiment consisted of students hearing and recalling the lists and then receiving a recognition test over both studied and non-studied items, including the critical lures. The results in their experiment showed that critical lures were recalled at about the same level as items that were actually presented in the middle of the list. The false-recall rate for the critical lures was much higher than for other related words that had not been presented. The DRM paradigm used in Roediger and McDermott’s study followed our prediction that critical lures would have a higher percentage of recall in a blocked condition.
Method
Participants Participants included 142 college students from George Mason University (age ranging from 18-25).
Materials
The materials used in this experiment included pen or pencil for the participant with a piece of paper to write down words recalled and a blocked, random, or both blocked and random word list for the experimenter.
Procedure
This experiment had to two phases. During phase I of the experimenter told the participants that they will hear a list of 50 words and upon hearing all the words they would be tested on their memory of the words. After hearing all words, participants were given 5 minutes to recall the words. Upon completion of the recall of words, experimenters asked the participants how many “recalled” the critical lures (bread, chair, doctor, sleep and sweet).
Results
The purpose of this study was to replicate a study done by Roediger and McDermott in testing the creation of false memories and false recall. This study had begun with three hypothesis in mind: (i) people will recall a higher percentage of words in a blocked list; (ii) critical lures will be falsely recalled regardless of condition; (iii) critical lures will be better remembered in a blocked list.
Hypothesis 1 A One-Way ANOVA (Analysis of Variance) was conducted to compare the effects of types of word lists on percentage of words recalled in random or blocked conditions. It was hypothesized that people will recall a higher percentage of words in a blocked list. Results showed that there is a significant main effect of types of word list on percentage of words recalled [F (1, 140) = 15.411, p<0.001]. Results showed that people recall a higher percentage of words in blocked list (M = 32.93%, SD = 13.12) than in a random list (M = 29.7%, SD = 10.19).
Result supported the hypothesis that people will recall a higher percentage of words in a blocked list). Hypothesis 2 For this portion of the experiment we hypothesized that critical lures will be falsely recalled regardless of condition. We calculated the percentage of critical words and found that regardless of condition, participants falsely recalled critical lures by 22%. Thus, supporting our hypothesis that critical lures will be falsely recalled regardless of condition.
Hypothesis 3 A One-Way ANOA (Analysis of Variance) was conducted to compare whether random or blocked group will yield a higher percentage of lures recalled. It was hypothesized that critical lures will be better remembered in a blocked list. Results showed that there is a significant main effect of word lists on percentage of lures recalled [F (1, 140) = 22.4, p<0.001]. Results showed that people recalled a high percentage of lures in a blocked list (M = 29.31%, SD = 24.96) than in a random list (M = 15.07%, SD = 17.96). Results supported the hypothesis that critical lures will be better remembered in a blocked list.
Interaction
It’s important to note that, although not hypothesized, through the statement of analysis it can be seen that an interaction exists between types of words and types of word lists on the actual percentage of recall [F (1, 140) = 8.141, p<.005]. (See Graph 1.)
Discussion
False memory is a type of deformation in episodic memory and it’s a phenomenon that nearly everyone experiences.
It can be defined as representations of events that we think have occurred that have not. The purpose of this paper was to replicate a study done by Roediger and McDermott done in 1995 in creating false memories. This paper went in depth with research to prove the three hypothesis that we had stated: (i) people will have a higher percentage of recalling words in a blocked condition; (ii) critical lures can be recalled in any condition; and (iii) people have a higher percentage of recalling critical lures in a blocked condition. The literature in this paper proved all of three of our hypothesis stated to be true, thus, showing a successful replication of the study done by Roediger and …show more content…
McDermott. One implication in this study was the high sum of internal validity. It’s important for any successful experiment to have low internal validity because that will show the most accurate results. Internal validity refers to how much manipulation is presented on the independent variable by the researcher, therefore, the higher the internal validity, the more bias the research is said to have. It’s also imperative to consider other extraneous variables when conducting an experiment. In order for a study to have the most accurate results, it should be administered by one experimenter to reduce researcher bias. This study was administered by all lab professors, instead of just one lab professor administering to the 140 participants. This can cause researcher bias because each person has a different way of saying and presenting things, which can in return cause confusion. It’s also extremely important that the research on false memory continues because of the many benefits that can rise from it.
The phenomenon of false memories are well-documented in many court cases where defendants have been found guilty based on the testimony that were received from eye witnesses who were extremely sure and confident about their memory recollection, but later on, through DNA evidence or other measures were found to be incorrect. MIT conducted a study in trying to understand the traces of false memories by planting false memories in the brains of mice (Trafton, 2013). By doing this study, they have found that many neurological traces of these faulty memories are identical to those of authentic memories. Their study further provided evidence that memories are “stored in networks of neurons that form memory traces for each experience we have” (Trafton, 2013). These memory traces are called engrams and are the future study of false memories. Due to the high growing number of false memory situations being reported and the effect it has on everyday life, it is of foremost importance that the research in understanding this phenomenon is continued. By being able to fully understand false memory, and all that is associated with it, many benefits can arise in understanding the human mind, brain, and
behavior.
References
Gallo, D. A., McDermott, K. B., Percer, J. M., Roediger III, H. L. (2001). Modality effects in false recall and false recognition. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning,
Memory, and Cognition, 27(2), 339-353.
Goff, L. M., Roediger III, H. L. (1998). Imagination inflation for action events: Repeated imaginings lead to illusory recollections. Memory & Cognition, 26(1), 20-33.
Loftus, E.F. & Pickrell, J.E. (1995). The formation of false memories. Psychiatric Annals,
25, 720-725.
Roediger III, H. L., McDermott, K. B. (1995). Creating false memories remembering words not presented in lists. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and
Cognition, 21(4), 803-814.
Sherman, S. M., Jordan, T. R. (2011). Word-frequency effects in long-term semantic priming and false memory. British Journal of Psychology, (102), 559-568.
Trafton, A. (2013). Neuroscientists plant false memories in the brain. MIT News. Retrieved from http://newsoffice.mit.edu/2013/neuroscientists-plant-false-memories-in-the-brain-0725. Appendix
Graph 1
Interaction between Word Types and Conditions