Semantic and phonological false memory: A review of theory and data

Abstract

• False memory share surface or semantic resemblance or both with actual experience. • Semantic and phonological DRM illusions mostly display dissociative patterns. • Fuzzy trace theory and activation monitoring framework explain the two illusions differently. • Both theories can offer a fairly good account of the reviewed data. False memories typically share semantic or surface features with actual experiences, sometimes both. However, it is unclear whether false memories that are rooted in semantic versus surface resemblance obey the same laws. The Deese/Roediger/McDermott (DRM) illusion offers an attractive testbed for comparing semantic and surface false memories under closely matched conditions, owing to parallel semantic and phonological versions of the illusion. We review three lines of evidence in which semantic and phonological DRM illusions have been compared: (a) studies in which the two illusions were tracked in populations with different semantic or surface memory abilities; (b) studies that investigated the effects of manipulations that target semantic content or surface content or both; and (c) studies that examined hybrid forms of the illusion in which there was both semantic and surface resemblance between false memories and actual experiences. The three lines of evidence showed that semantic and phonological DRM illusions display dissociative patterns in most instances, indicating that they are two distinct types of false memories. The two major theories of the DRM illusion, fuzzy-trace theory and the activation/monitoring framework, have different views of the underlying mechanisms for the semantic and phonological illusions. We discuss the implications of this literature for the two theories.