Introduction
False memory is usually defined as the act of recollecting an incident that never took place or recollecting the incident in a different version other than it originally happened (Ferraro, 2004). The past five years have witnessed an increase in research using what was termed as DRM (Deese-Roediger-McDermott) procedure by Bruce and Winograd (Wade et al., 2006). The Deese Roediger and McDermott (DRM) paradigm is widely used in studying the errors made by individuals while trying to recollect items and ideas. The emotional valence of the material of interest is a factor that influences the rate at which memory mistakes are made during the process of remembering. The experimental evidence of this is, however, fragmented and sometimes contradictory and has been criticized by some researchers. This experiment re-evaluates the emotional effect of listed words on the rate at which a person falsely remembers a word that is semantically related to the listed words. The results of this experiment are significant as they will be used in developing student’s skills in running, analyzing and writing up research.
Research in false memory was initiated by James Deese in 1959 and was not widely applied until the ’90s following the works of Henry L. Roediger III and Kathleen McDermott. Roediger and McDermott (1995) established that some lists elicit high degrees of false memory with high confidence and declarations of remembering as compared to familiarity. Deese developed 36 lists each with 12 primary connections for critical and non-presented word. He observed that the lists prompted the subjects to produce the critical word on a free recall test shortly after that. Deese observed that some lists simulated smaller critical lures while others had higher rates. Roediger and McDermott (1995) explained their results via the semantic activation theory. Other theories put in place to explain false memories are the implicit activation hypothesis (Underwood, 1965), source monitoring theory, the fuzzy-trace theory (Brainerd & Reyna, 1990), and the criterion-shift theory (Schneider, 2004).
The hypothesis was as follows: a list of associate words creates a false memory by remembering a critical lure when the list is presented to a subject and a recall test done shortly after that.
Method
Participants: The participants were 117 university master’s students that voluntarily participated as part of a course project in the unit Cognitive Psychology and Cognition.
Materials: twelve lists were developed from resources scheduled in Deese’s (1959) expose. The twelve lists were categorized by three distinct areas: a negative list consisting of 4 lists with words that create a negative impression to the subject (e.g. war); a positive list with four sub-lists consisting of words that impact positively to the subject (e.g. strength); and a third neutral list of four sub-lists of words that create a neutral impression for the subject (e.g. time). For each list of twelve connected words, a critical lure was created in harmony with Russell and Jenkins’s word relationship rules (1954).
Procedure: each master’s student taking the units Cognitive Psychology and Cognition was required to approach two closely related students who would volunteer to be tested. The subjects were tested in serene environments without distractions. A list of twelve words was read to the subject. The subject was then given a filler task that lasted 30 seconds and then given a plain piece of paper and asked to write as many words as they remembered and in any order, they liked within 90 seconds. The lists were presented randomly to the subjects, and each time the participant wrote down as many words they could remember.
Results:
From a table of estimates, the Critical Lure for the negative critical lure had the highest mean and a corresponding low standard error compared to the positive critical lure and the neutral critical lure. This shows that those participants remembered the events that never occurred. The means for the critical lure are consistent with Roediger and McDermott’s findings, and therefore the hypothesis stated in the research was met. Upon conducting the Mauchly’s Test of Sphericity to the collected data, a chi-squared distribution of X2=7. 02 were obtained. The probability of Mauchly’s Test statistic was obtained as P=.03. The probability of Mauchly’s Test statistic obtained was less than.05 (.03 =P <.05). It was therefore concluded that since there were considerable differences between variances, the Mauchly’s Test of Sphericity had thus been breached.
Following the breach of the Mauchly’s Test, sphericity could not be obtained. The Greenhouse-Geisser corrected model was therefore used as an ANOVA measure to in place as it requires no assumption of sphericity. According to O’Brien and Kaiser (1985), a Multivariate ANOVA should be used in cases where sphericity is violated as it requires no sphericity assumptions. From the model, the F-ratio was obtained as F (1.88, 219.04) =6. 59, and probability P=. 002, which were valid statistics.
It was observed that the participants of the experiment yielded more critical lures in the negative list, followed by the positive list while the neutral list produced the least number of critical lures. The mean difference was obtained as -.043 and the P-value obtained as.65. These results were similarly related to those obtained by Roediger and McDermott (1995) and Schneider (2004).
Discussion
This experiment was designed to investigate whether associate listed words would lead to the stimulation of false memory and constant the remembrance of the critical lure. This hypothesis was successfully met owing to the results of the experiment that showed high rates of positive lures. The results of this experiment showed a closer relationship to the DRM experiments conducted by Bauste and Ferraro (2004) on gender stereotypes effects on false memory. The results of the two versions of the experiments are in close agreement except for the fact that the current experiment breaches the Mauchly’s Test of Sphericity and an ANOVA statistic is used to determine the F-test and the probability measure.
Limitations
This experiment was conducted in serene environments with typical laboratory conditions and chances of the subjects behaving similarly in real-life situations are not 100% guaranteed. Pezdek & Lam (2007) criticized research in false memory, arguing that the results of such experiments have been misapplied to real-life situations.
Implications
The results obtained in this experiment point out a remarkable memory illusion. This paper predicts that the same illusion is true in circumstances that people recall events that never occurred. These results, however, do not show any bearing to current controversies over the issue of false memory but imply that false memory of events that never occurred may be witnessed in life.
Conclusion
Numerous researches have been done in the field of false memory using the DRM paradigm. This experiment was set up in the same environmental conditions and setups as previous experiments and yielded similar results. This paper, therefore, asserts that false memory usually occurs when a critical lure is produced when an individual is presented with a list of associate words.
References
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