Abstract
The creation of false memories within the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm has been shown to be sensitive to many factors such as task instructions, participant mood, or even presentation modality. However, do other simple perceptual differences also impact performance on the DRM and the creation of false memories? This study explores the potential impact of changes in perceptual disfluency on DRM performance. To test for a potential influence of disfluency on false memory creation, participants viewed lists under either perceptually disfluent conditions or not. Results indicated that disfluency did significantly impact performance in the DRM paradigm; more disfluent presentations significantly increased the recall and recognition of unpresented information, although they did not impact recall or recognition of presented information. Thus, although disfluency did impact performance, disfluency did not produce a positive benefit related to overall task performance. This finding instead suggests that more disfluent presentations can increase the likelihood that false memories are created, and provide little positive performance benefit.
Highlights
The creation of false memories within the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM; [1]) paradigm is an observable, robust, and reproducible effect that has been studied extensively since its initial discovery decades ago [2]
Is it possible that other simple perceptual differences in presentation impact the creation of false memories in the DRM paradigm? For example, other research has suggested that simple changes in the perceptual disfluency of presented material can have significant impacts on judgments related to the task performance, and may potentially have an influence on how task-relevant information is processed [7]
There was found to be no reliable difference between disfluency groups in performance on the Working memory capacity (WMC) task (t(49) = 1.41, p = .17), suggesting that the groups were well-matched on general cognitive ability
Summary
The creation of false memories within the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM; [1]) paradigm is an observable, robust, and reproducible effect that has been studied extensively since its initial discovery decades ago [2]. The production of false memories within the DRM task has been shown to be sensitive to many factors, on both the individual level (e.g., amount of sleep, mood; [3, 4]), and related to how these lists of words are presented (modality; [5]) or the instructions given at time of encoding [6]. Is it possible that other simple perceptual differences in presentation impact the creation of false memories in the DRM paradigm? An open question is whether disfluency can have a marked effect on the creation of false memories within the DRM task?
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