Phonological And Semantic False Memory

Burgess and Hitch (1999) added to and tested the original model of the phonological loop. They created multiple lists: one with the combination of short and long words, one with short words, and one with long words. Burgess and Hitch predicted that the short list would have a higher recall rate, while the long list would take longer to memorize. However, the mixed list would take less time to recall but longer time to memorize (Burgess & Hitch,1999).

False memories can consist of either remembering items or events that never happened, or remembering them differently from the way they actually occurred. The DRM paradigm has been extensively analysed, and it has been concluded that participants readily recall words that are associated with presented lists, however, not presented in the lists. This phenomenon is known as false recall. The 240 participants in the study, were orally presented with 6 lists of semantically related words that contained 15 word per list, presented to them in a male voice recording with each word being presented in a one second rate. They were later asked to write down the words they remembered in any order just like the previous literature study Louis C. Sanford, John E. Fisk, 2009, where the participants were asked to verbally recall the words, and it was later concluded that extraverts falsely recalled more critical lures and non-critical words relative to the other two groups and that the DRM paradigm may be developed by an automatic spread of activation from presented words to critical lures.

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

Further evidence for the existence of the phonological loop comes from Conrads and Hulls (1975 in Passer, 2009) experiment in which they examined the effect of phonological similarity. They found that serial recall in a list of similar sounding words tended to yield poorer results with participants finding it difficult to remember compared to words that sounded different. It has also been found that recall in semantically similar words tended to have little or no effect, supporting the idea that verbal information is transferred in a phonological manner in working memory. In addition, Vallar and Papagno (1995 in Smith, 2007) found that the phonological store in brain damaged patients were dysfunctional.

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

Elliott (1973) examined the concept that those who used imagery would have better recall than those who used rehearsal memory techniques while performing an additional task of either looking at an unrelated picture, reading a short passage or listening to numbers being recited. He also hypothesized that words that were more concrete in nature would have a higher recall rate than those that were abstract. As he expected, Elliott (1973) found that those who used imagery to memorize information did better on recall during all three additional tasks and that concrete words overall had a higher recall rate. He further cemented this idea when he unexpectedly tested participants on their long-term memory after

Salame and Baddeley (1986) attributed this disappearance of phonologically similarity to the assumption that the strategy of phonological coding is 'abandoned' as a list length is increased. In addition, Baddeley (2007), posits that this abandonment for longer lengths is due to overloading the phonological system. This is consistent with the study by Imbo and Vandierendonck (2007) where results also suggested a list length of more than five letters would overload the phonological system. Furthermore, research suggests when abandonment of phonological coding occurs, executive processes and other strategies such as semantic coding are used instead (Imbo & Vandierendonck, 2007; Larsen et al., 2000). In contrast, Spurgeon et al. (2014) questioned why phonological coding would be abandoned in very short or very long lists yet be used in middle length lists. By using varied length list, Spurgeon et al. (2014) suggested that phonological coding is not abandoned but used throughout however, PSE is sensitive to floor and ceiling effects thus only showed significance in middle length

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).

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.

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

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.

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.

Prior to the early 1970s the prominent idea of how memories were formed and retrieved revolved around the idea of processing memory into specific stores (Francis & Neath, 2014). These memory stores were identified as sensory memory, short-term memory, and long-term memory. In contrast to this idea, two researchers named Fergus Craik and Robert Lockhart proposed an idea linking the type of encoding to retrieval (Goldstein, 2015). This idea is known as the levels of processing theory. According to this theory, memory depends on the depth of processing that a given item is received by an individual (Goldstein, 2015). Craik and Lockhart stressed four points in supporting their theory. First, they argued that memory was the result of a series of analyses, each level of the series forming a deeper level of processing than the preceding level (Francis & Neath, 2014). The shallow levels of processing were believed to hold less importance and are defined as giving little attention to meaning of an item. Examples of which include focusing on how a word sounds or memorizing a phone number by repeating it over and over again (Francis & Neath, 2014) (Goldstein, 2015). The deeper levels processing involve paying close attention to the meaning of an item and relating that meaning to something else, an example of which would be focusing on the meaning of a word rather than just how the word sounds (Francis & Neath, 2014) (Goldstein, 2015). The second point Craik and Lockhart

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

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.