Effects of reliability against others on generation of false memory

Abstract

False memory is a phenomenon of “remembering what has not happened” or “remembering what quite differently from the way it happened”. The DRM paradigm often easily generates this phenomenon. In many studies with the paradigm, the experimental participants perform the cognitive tasks alone, but false memories are generally generated in conversations with others. We hypothesized that the generation of false memory is more likely to occur during conversations with others and that the relationship with others significantly influences the generation of false memory. Participants in this experiment memorized words selected based on the paradigm and shared the information about the words with the agent with text-to-speech software through an online conferencing system. We analyzed the influence of explicit information on the reliability of the agent by indicating the reliability in %, the influence of the impression factor of others by changing the gender of the text-to-speech agent, and the influence of the etiquette of behavior that suggestively determines social positioning, on the generation of false memory. The results suggest that explicit reliability, gender of the other person, and the etiquette of behavior influenced the generation of false memories. The rate of false-memory-generation increased when the explicit reliability level matched the perceived reliability level of the agent, and tended to be higher for male agents than for female agents. The results also indicated that the rate of false-memory-generation increased with the etiquette of behavior to the agent suggests that the etiquette of behavior unconsciously increases the reliability of the agent and tends to make participants positively trust information from the agent. Whereas, less activation of working-memory-activity was observed, suggesting that the interaction with the agent, instead of a person, has inhibitory effects on the generation of false memory.