Memory is not “reproductive”, as it has been thought for decades. It would rather be “reconstructive” (Bartlett, 1932). In that case, a memory is more like a reconstruction, linked to our knowledge and beliefs, than a simple reproduction of what we perceive and experience (Langevin, N’Kaoua, Taconnat & Sauzéon, 2009). Little by little, the interest in that field of research has grown around the concept of false memory. According to Corson and Verrier (2013), there are two kinds of false memories. It can be a distortion, that is to say the memory of an event which really happened but that has been modified by the individual; or a creation, in other words, the memory of an event which never happened.
The Deese-Roediger-McDermott Paradigm
Several studies have been carried out about false memories and the most used experimental paradigm in that scientific field is the The Deese-Roediger-McDermott Paradigm (DRM), which is about presenting several lists of words to the participants of the study. Each list is composed of semantically related words (such as: “honey, hive, buzzing, pollen”, etc.) and which are related to a common theme-word that is not presented in the list (here, “bee”). This theme-word is called the “lure” or “critical word”. After studying the lists, the participants usually have to recall or recognize the words. We consider that a false memory has been created as soon as the critical word of a list is recalled or recognized afterwards.
The effects of encoding instructions on DRM false memories
Experimental instructions have a strong influence on false memories and can reduce them in some given circumstances, under the DRM paradigm. For instance, when the words were presented both orally and visually with an image, Schacter, Israel and Racine (1999) obtained a reduction of false memories. According to the task the participants have to do while encoding the words, the same kind of results can be found.
The emotions the participants are feeling during the experience, or the emotions they feel towards the presented words, can also have an influence on the production of false memories in the DRM paradigm. As a matter of fact, according to the paradox of negative emotions (Porter, Taylor & Ten Brinke, 2008), the words which are negatively judged by the subjects while encoding them are better recalled and would also lead to more false recall than the positively judged words, or the neutrally judged words. Nevertheless, Dehon, Laroi and Van der Linden (2010) have not found a significant difference between the amount of false memories of negatively, positively or neutrally judged items. This being said, they found that the amount of false memories is higher for negatively and positively judged items anyway.
Other kinds of judgments and encoding have been studied. On the one hand, Toglia, Neuschatz and Goodwin (1999) have compared a judgment on the pleasantness of the presented words, to a task which was about saying if the presented words contained the vowel “a” or not. In fact, this comparison was a way to compare two levels of cognitive treatment (Craik & Lockhart, 1972): a deep encoding, with the pleasantness task, and a shallow encoding, with the vowel task. Toglia and al. (1999) showed that the deeper the encoding is, the better the ratio of correct recall is (that is to say: the words that truly were presented are better recalled), but the more false memories are created by the participants. Huff and Bodner (2013) call this effect the “more is less pattern”.
On the other hand, the same results have been demonstrated by Hunt, Smith and Dunlap (2011) and according to these authors, they are not striking because false memories are the result of an understanding of the words by the participants and, moreover, the access to the critical words and the studied words is limited through a shallow task. This is explained by a theory called the impoverished relational-encoding (Hege & Dodson, 2004). Briefly, this theory postulates that the fact to study distinctive information while encoding interferes in encoding relational information (the lures), which in this case explains the reduction of false memories.
However, when a pleasantness task is compared to a control task – which simply consists in asking to remember the words, less false memories are observed following the pleasantness task (Smith & Hunt, 1998). In that case, the authors called this effect the “mirror-effect pattern” (Huff & Bodner, 2013). Hunt and al. (2011) have thereby reached the conclusion that the amount of false memories recalled after a pleasantness task depends on the kind of task to which it is compared: it leads to a greater amount of false memories while compared to a shallow encoding task and to a reduced amount of false memories while compared to a control task. Huff and Bodner (2013) have compared two pleasantness tasks: the first one included a specific treatment of the words (to judge the pleasantness of each presented words, independently) and the second one included a relational encoding (to judge the pleasantness of each presented words, comparing them to each other). The first task led to less false recognitions, but the authors concluded that the encoding tasks can’t intrinsically be completely item-specific, nor completely relational. Once more, they justified their results using the impoverished relational-encoding theory. But they also relied on a second explanation: the distinctiveness heuristic theory (Schacter, Israel & Racine, 1999), which is the fact that participants can differentiate the words they have studied from the words they have not studied, according to some very specific and distinctive characteristics they have encoded about the words.
Finally, the imagination of the participants can also influence the amount of false memories while using the DRM paradigm. Winograd, Peluso and Glover (1998) have found a link between the recall of lures and the score obtained to a questionnaire assessing the mental imagery capacities of the participants: the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire (VVIQ, Marks, 1973). Winograd and al. (1998) have thus demonstrated that the people who produced the most vivid images on that questionnaire are more prone to create false memories.
Some other authors have studied the effects of imagery instructions on false memories, but, to this day, there are quite few studies about this topic in the scientific literature. Therefore, it could be interesting to investigate the effects of imagery in such a context. This could be useful to better understand the link between mental imagery and memory. According to the results, it could then be applied to the therapeutic field, more specifically to the therapies using hypnosis and/or mindfulness.
References
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. Corson, Y., & Verrier, N. (2013). Les faux souvenirs. Bruxelles : De Boeck.
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