False Memory Paper

INTRODUCTION

One of the more fascinating phenomena in Psychology has been the false memory syndrome. False memories gained notoriety in 1960s America, when record levels of therapy patients reported that they had been sexually abused by family members, but were only able to recover these previously suppressed and unrecognized memories of said abuses while in therapy. This led many psychological researchers to conclude that particular psychodynamic practices used by therapists were more than likely the source of these false memories. To support these claims, researchers went on to demonstrate that false memories could be induced in participants using complex paradigms such as paragraphs or simple word list paradigms, as all memory at its
Using 80 mono and di-syllabic words to present to their participants along with an added 40 unrelated lures selected for the recognition task, they had their critical and unrelated lures match on several factors including word length. Furthermore, each word had two versions (one pronounced by a native American English speaker vs one spoken by a native Dutch speaker). Participants (all native English speakers) were presented with the word lists and had to either simply listen or listen and repeat the word. After listening to all the words, they were asked to freely recall the words they had been presented and following a second filler math problem task were given the recognition task where they were instructed to identify whether they had heard the word before or not. In a second experiment, the same procedure described above was performed with the exclusion of a free recall task prior to the recognition task to negate any carryover effects from the recall