The Effects Of False Memory On Word Association

Research prior to Deese’s 1959 study saw few account s of false recognition from a list. This created the idea that more coherent materials were needed to create false memories. Deese was interested in determining why some lists gave rise to false recognition when others didn’t. His general conclusion was that lists where the associations went in both backward and forward directions tended to elicit false recall (Deese 1959 as cited in Roediger & McDermott, 1995). Deese’s study that used a single trial, free recall paradigm which Roediger and McDermott used to try and replicate his results, which found that people were often accurate in remembering lists after one trial. Roediger and McDermott (1995) examined the false recall and false recognition of

This method is appropriate to observe one’s false memory since it is designed bias the participants to recall particular words that was not in the sequence that they were presented with. These particular distractor words were sleep, needle, sweet, chair, mountain, and rough and they were presented one at a time. The sequence of words When the participants report that one of these particular distractor words was in the sequence, then that is the evidence that the participants have created false memories.

False memories are an apparent recollection of an event that did not actually occur. The reason why false memories happen are due to the fact that one's brains can only handle so much.There has been several experiment pertaining to the phenomenon, to find how it works.In the next part of the experiment the psychologist showed the participants a word list.False memories are very common and can happen to anyone. On very rare occasions false memories can be harmful to someone and the people around them.False memories are so common that they affect all of a person's memories. False memories can be made more clear by others memories or they could become more distorted. False memories have caused many wrongful convictions. A psychologist

The phenomenon of explaining false memory occurrences is rising. Researchers have developed a paradigm known as “Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm” in efforts to examine false memories in depth (Dehon, Laroi & Van der Linden, 2011). In the DRM paradigm, participants are introduced to and asked to memorize a list of correlated words congregating towards a vital subject word that is never introduced (Dehon, Laroi & Van der Linden, 2011). The rate that participants recall this false decoy is alarming. Researchers have provided several explanations to explain for the false memories in the DRM paradigm (Dehon, Laroi & Van der Linden, 2011). The two most notable in explaining false memories in the DRM paradigm are the fuzzy-trace theory and the activation/monitoring theory (Dehon, Laroi & Van der Linden, 2011). While the two theories are particularly dissimilar, they both sustain that information developing throughout list encoding attributes an essential part in false memory construction (Dehon, Laroi & Van der Linden, 2011).

False memories created by non-presented akin words demonstrating the vulnerability of memory to being interfered.

Phonological and semantic lists can cause high, strong rates of false memories. Phonological false memories would peat in shorter durations of a presentation, but semantic false memory rates would start to increase with more spread out presentation times. It is also theorized that the semantic and phonological lists are similar with spreading activation, but the processing could differ when it was the speed and depth. Semantic false memory requires deeper conceptual processing for the semantic false memory to activate. Shallow perceptual activation of phonological lures decay faster than semantic activation. When other factors are constant for false recall rates, the rates for phonological and semantic lists are similar. The False recognition rates for phonological lists are lower than semantic lists by twenty to thirty percent.

Psychologists have diligently studied the human mind for many years and have yet to discover some of the ways that the brain performs simple and complex tasks. Since the knowledge that has been obtained concerning processes of the brain remains a mere fraction compared to what is unknown about cognitive functioning, individuals cannot fully grasp the reasoning behind why the brain performs some of the acts it does. Many people daydream, picture themselves recovering lost items in obscure places, or even create stories repeated so much that individuals begin to believe they may have happened; all three of these examples are forms of creating a false memory. Many psychologists have researched, evaluated, and experimented with false memory, which has lead to the discovery of False Memory Syndrome, a condition in which individuals contract false memories while almost always remaining oblivious to the act of creating a memory that is not factual or concrete (Berger 1). False memory syndrome develops as a result of many different internal and external forces such as mind manipulation in psychological malpractice, severe trauma to the brain in the first few years of life, a traumatic experience, or even by forcing one’s self into believing an entirely made-up thought; however, seemingly healthy individuals can contract the syndrome without the slightest idea it is present.

Neurobiological studies show that both suppression and recall and the creation of false memories are possible. (Kandel, 1994) In this paper both sides of the debate will be analyzed and evaluated.

Affect influences many areas of cognition and has a large impact on memory (Robinson, Watkins, & Harmon-Jones, 2013; Packard, Cahill, & McGaugh, 1994). It has been shown that extreme emotional stress can impair memory, while moderate levels of emotional stress can improve learning and memory (Packard et al., 1994). In humans, emotional content is remembered better than non-emotional content and is richer in details (Choi, Kensinger, & Rajaram, 2013). However, it is not totally clear how emotion influences false memories. Past research has examined the effect of emotion on false memories and has reported mixed findings where emotional intensity has increased and decreased false memory (Choi et al., 2013). Storbeck and Clore (2005) found definite results showing that negative emotional affect reduces false memories in adults. The goal of this research is to investigate how positive and negative affective states influence false memory in children and the effect of emotional regulation strategies on memory formation.

A false memory is simply a memory that did not occur. An actual experience can become distorted as best illustrated by the Cog Lab experiment on false memories accessed through Argosy University. The experiment is outlined as follows: a participant is given a list of words that are highly relative in nature at a rate of about one word every 2 seconds. At the finish of the given list, the participant is then shown a list of words in which he or she is to recall the words from the original list. A special distractor is inserted to the list, and this word, although highly relative in nature, was not in the original list. For example, the

The materials used for the experiment was a website called Coglab: The online cognition lab. The scores were conducted simply by using the website and doing the “False Memory” lab and a computer. Participants were asked to read the instructions in the Coglab website.

Roediger and McDermott’ (1995), experiment based on Deese’s (1959) experiment renewed the interest in false memories and invented the Deese-McDermott-Roediger Paradigm which many studies surround. Their study focused on eliciting false memories through receiving lists of words and being asked to recall those that were present from a separate list that included a critical word that if recalled, showed presence of false memory effects. Notably many participants were sure that the

In the first follow-up interview, roughly eighteen percent remembered the false event and in the second follow-up, twenty-five percent remembered the false event (Hyman, Husband, & Billing 1995). As this study indicates, memories are more susceptible to modification when the passage of time allows the original memory to fade. Being lost, however, is not the same as being abused. Another crucial component involved in the formation of false memories is the imagination inflation. Loftus (1997) found that the more often an individual imagined an unperformed action, the more likely they were to later on remember having performed it.

The article is about false memory. The researchers are trying to find out the effect of planting positive false memory in an individual. The authors of the article are; Cara Laney from University of Leicester, Erin K. Morris from University of California, Irvine, Daniel M. Bernstein from Kwantlen University College and University of Washington, Briana M. Wakefield from University of

Memory facilitates necessary functions in daily life activities, but it is not a perfect mechanism in operation. Goldstein (2011) states that memory is, “…the process involved in retaining, retrieving, and using information about stimuli, images, events, ideas, and skills after the original information is no longer present” (p.116). There are many adaptive functions within the complexities of the human memory system and the interlinked constructs between each function leave room for doubt in the accuracy of recollection. Study of the human mind has opened avenues of discovery on the inner workings of our brains and the resulting knowledge suggests that humans are prone to creating false memories and even remembering things that never actually happened. A great deal of information has been written explaining the nature of memory errors and within the following pages a real-life case offers a glimpse into how recall distortions and memory errors can wield unpleasant consequences. Memory errors can be avoided with a significant effort, but the truth remains that no one is perfect and memories are subject to individual bias.