False memories—either remembering events that never happened, or remembering the
ID: 3494527 • Letter: F
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False memories—either remembering events that never
happened, or remembering them quite differently from the
way they happened—have recently captured the attention of
both psychologists and the public at large. The primary
impetus for this recent surge of interest is the increase in the
number of cases in which memories of previously unrecognized
abuse are reported during the course of therapy. Some
researchers have argued that certain therapeutic practices can
cause the creation of false memories, and therefore, the
apparent "recovery" of memories during the course of therapy
may actually represent the creation of memories (Lindsay &
Read, 1994; Loftus, 1993). Although the concept of false
memories is currently enjoying an increase in publicity, it is not
new; psychologists have been studying false memories in
several laboratory paradigms for years. Schacter (in press)
provides an historical overview of the study of memory
distortions.
Bartlett (1932) is usually credited with conducting the first
experimental investigation of false memories; he had subjects
read an Indian folktale, "The War of the Ghosts," and recall it
repeatedly. Although he reported no aggregate data, but only
sample protocols, his results seemed to show distortions in
subjects' memories over repeated attempts to recall the story.
Interestingly, Bartlett's repeated reproduction results never
have been successfully replicated by later researchers (see
Gauld & Stephenson, 1967; Roediger, Wheeler, & Rajaram,
1993); indeed, Wheeler and Roediger (1992) showed that
recall of prose passages (including "The War of the Ghosts")
This research was supported by Grant F49620-92-J-0437 from the
Air Force Office of Scientific Research. We thank Ron Haas and
Lubna Manal for aid in conducting this research. Also, we thank Endel
Tulving for bringing the Deese (1959) report to our attention. The
manuscript benefited from comments by Doug Hintzman, Steve
Lindsay, Suparna Rajaram, and Endel Tulving.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to
Henry L. Roediger HI or Kathleen B. McDermott, Department of
Psychology, MS 25, Rice University, 6100 S. Main Street, Houston,
Texas 77005-1892. Electronic mail may be sent via Internet to
roddy@rice.edu or mcdermo@ricevml.rice.edu.
actually improved over repeated tests (with very few errors) if
short delays occurred between study and test.1
Nonetheless, Bartlett's (1932) contribution was an enduring
one because he distinguished between reproductive and reconstructive
memory. Reproductive memory refers to accurate,
rote production of material from memory, whereas reconstructive
memory emphasizes the active process of filling in missing
elements while remembering, with errors frequently occurring.
It generally has been assumed that the act of remembering
materials rich in meaning (e.g., stories and real-life events)
gives rise to reconstructive processes (and therefore errors),
whereas the act of remembering more simplified materials
(e.g., nonsense syllables, word lists) gives rise to reproductive
(and thus accurate) memory. Bartlett (1932) wrote that "I
discarded nonsense materials because, among other difficulties,
its use almost always weights the evidence in favour of
mere rote recapitulation" (p. 204).
The investigators of false memories have generally followed
Bartlett's (1932) lead. Most evidence has been collected in
paradigms that use sentences (Bransford & Franks, 1971;
Brewer, 1977), prose passages (Sulin & Dooling, 1974), slide
sequences (Loftus, Miller, & Burns, 1978), or videotapes
(Loftus & Palmer, 1974). In all these paradigms, evidence of
false memories has been obtained, although the magnitude of
the effect depends on the method of testing (McCloskey &
Zaragoza, 1985; Payne, Toglia, & Anastasi, 1994). The predominance
of materials that tell a story (or can be represented by a
script or schema) can probably be attributed to the belief that
only such materials will cause false memories to occur.
There is one well-known case of false memories being
produced in a list learning paradigm: Underwood (1965)
introduced a technique to study false recognition of words in
1 Bartlett's (1932) results from the serial reproduction paradigm—in
which one subject recalls an event, the next subject reads and then
recalls the first subject's report, and so on—replicates quite well (e.g.,
I. H. Paul, 1959). However, the repeated reproduction research, in
which a subject is tested repeatedly on the same material, is more
germane to the study of false memories in an individual over time. To
our knowledge, no one has successfuly replicated Bartlett's observations
in this paradigm with instructions that emphasize remembering
(see Gauld & Stevenson, 1967).
803
804 HENRY L. ROEDIGER III AND KATHLEEN B. McDERMOTT
lists. He gave subjects a continuous recognition task in which
they decided if each presented word had been given previously
in the list. Later words bore various relations to previously
studied words. Underwood showed that words associatively
related to previously presented words were falsely recognized.
Anisfeld and Knapp (1968), among others, replicated the
phenomenon. Although there have been a few reports of
robust false recognition effects (Hintzman, 1988), in many
experiments the false recognition effect was either rather small
or did not occur at all. For example, in a study by L. M. Paul
(1979), in which synonyms were presented at various lags along
with other, unrelated lures, the false recognition effect was
only 3% (a 20% false-alarm rate for synonyms and a 17% rate
for unrelated lures). Gillund and Shiffrin (1984) failed to find
any false recognition effect for semantically related lures in a
similar paradigm. In general, most research on the false
recognition effect in list learning does little to discourage the
belief that more natural, coherent materials are needed to
demonstrate powerful false memory effects. Interestingly,
most research revealing false memory effects has used recognition
measures; this is true both of the prose memory literature
(e.g., Bransford & Franks, 1971; Sulin & Dooling, 1974) and
the eyewitness memory paradigm (Loftus et al., 1978; McCloskey
& Zaragoza, 1985). Reports of robust levels of false recall
are rarer.
We have discovered a potentially important exception to
these claims, one that reveals false recall in a standard list
learning paradigm. It is represented in an experimental report
published by Deese in 1959 that has been largely overlooked
for the intervening 36 years, despite the fact that his observations
would seem to bear importantly on the study of false
memories. Deese's procedure was remarkably straightforward;
he tested memory for word lists in a single-trial, free-recall
paradigm. Because this paradigm was just gaining favor among
experimental psychologists at that time and was the focus of
much attention during the 1960s, the neglect of Deese's report
is even more surprising. However, since the Social Science
Citation Index began publication in 1969, the article has been
cited only 14 times, and only once since 1983. Most authors
mentioned it only in passing, several authors apparently cited
it by mistake, and no one has followed up Deese's interesting
observations until now, although Cramer (1965) reported
similar observations and did appropriately cite Deese's (1959)
article. (While working on this article, we learned that Don
Read was conducting similar research, which is described
briefly in Lindsay & Read, 1994, p. 291. f
Deese (1959) was interested in predicting the occurrence of
extralist intrusions in single-trial free recall. To this end, he
developed 36 lists, with 12 words per list. Each list was
composed of the 12 primary associates of a critical (nonpresented)
word. For example, for the critical word needle, the list
words were thread, pin, eye, sewing, sharp, point, pricked,
thimble, haystack, pain, hurt, and injection. He found that some
of the lists reliably induced subjects to produce the critical
nonpresented word as an intrusion on the immediate free
recall test. Deese's interest was in determining why some lists
gave rise to this effect, whereas others did not. His general
conclusion was that the lists for which the associations went in
a backward (as well as forward) direction tended to elicit false
recall. That is, he measured the average probability with which
people produced the critical word from which the list was
generated when they were asked to associate to the individual
words in the list. For example, subjects were given sewing,
point, thimble, and so on, and the average probability of
producing needle as an associate was measured. Deese obtained
a correlation of .87 between the probability of an
intrusion in recall (from one group of subjects) and the
probability of occurrence of the word as an associate to
members of the list (from a different group). Our interest in
Deese's materials was in using his best lists and developing his
paradigm as a way to examine false memory phenomena.
Our first goal was to try to replicate Deese's (1959) finding of
reliable, predictable extralist intrusions in a single-trial, freerecall
paradigm. We found his result to be surprising in light of
the literature showing that subjects are often extremely accurate
in recalling lists after a single trial, making few intrusions
unless instructed to guess (see Cofer, 1967; Roediger & Payne,
1985). As previously noted, most prior research on false
memory phenomena has employed measures of recognition
memory or cued recall. Deese's paradigm potentially offers a
method to study false recollections in free recall. However, we
also extended Deese's paradigm to recognition tests. In Experiment
1, we examined false recall and false recognition of the
critical nonpresented words and the confidence with which
subjects accepted or rejected the critical nonpresented words
as having been in the study lists. In Experiment 2, we tested
other lists constructed to produce extralist intrusions in singletrial
free recall, to generalize the finding across a wider set of
materials. In addition, we examined the extent to which the
initial false recall of items led to later false recognition of those
same items. Finally, we employed the remember-know procedure
developed by Tulving (1985) to examine subjects' phenomenological
experience during false recognition of the critical
nonpresented items. We describe this procedure more fully
below.
QUESTION IS
1) IDENTIFY THE MAIN AIM OF THIS RESEARCH STUDY
2) SUMMARISE WHAT THE INTRODUCTION SAYS ABOUT PAST RESEARCH ON FALSE MEMORY ( 80 WORDS)
Explanation / Answer
1) IDENTIFY THE MAIN AIM OF THIS RESEARCH STUDY
The main aim of the research is that the author wants to focus on false memories. The author emphasises that false memories have been looked into since a very long time, but little attention has been paid to it. Also, there is a sudden interest in the field of reconstruction of memories, since there have been increasing number of incidences coming forward in the recent past. This has come more into light since previously unrecognised abuse is coming up in the therapy. Also, many researchers say that many times, recollection of memories results in planting memories and this is due to the wrong practices.
2) SUMMARISE WHAT THE INTRODUCTION SAYS ABOUT PAST RESEARCH ON FALSE MEMORY
One of the most important and under - recognised research has been Desse's. his method suggests that false recognition can be a part of free recall, rather than cued recall which has been established by most of the researchers. Another important research was carried out by Barlette, and was attributed to be one of the first research. Barlette showed the repeated recall protocol, which has not been replicated ever. Also, the false recall which was done initially, would be recognised later, and this was identified.
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