We conducted this study in order to investigate the production of false memories with aging. A false memory is defined as remembering an event that never happened or as falsely remembering an event that indeed happened. This definition distinguishes memory creation from memory distortion.
Our study comes from a simple question, are elderly people more prone to be influenced by false memory? Aging is known to induce cognitive disorder that impacts on our memory. Our overview shows that aging induces difficulties to encode and to retrieve information (Taconnat & Isingrini, 1997). The ability to store information is not impaired by normal aging. However, many researches describe an increasement of false memories with aging (Norman & Schacter, 1997 ; Tun, Wingfield, Rosen, & Blanchard, 1998 ; Balota et al., 1999 ; Déhon & Brédart, 2004). But when you analyse the literature on false memories, the term “false memory” is always used, whatever the kind of false memory which has been studied, memory creation or memory distortion, and beyond the fact that those researches do not necessary use the same paradigm. Our overview highlights that the production of false memory relies on the paradigm used, other authors have also investigated this issue (Patihis, Frenda & Loftus, 2018). Indeed, some studies do not show that elderly people product more false memories (Marche, Jordan, & Owre, 2002). According to them, elderly people memory would not be necessarily more easily falsifiable.
The present experiment aims to emphasises that the production of false memories with aging depends on the paradigm used. Thus, we recruited 64 individuals from 70 to 89 years old, without objectively cognitives deficits, without neurological backgrounds that could induce cognitives deficits, and who are retired. This present study was conducted by using the DRM paradigm (Roediger, & Mc Dermott, 1995), and Misinformation paradigm (Loftus, Miller, & Burns, 1978) which are the two commonly used paradigms in false memories study. We also used a paradigm which has been recently developed, the predictive Inferences paradigm (Gras, Tardieu, & Nicolas, 2008).
Our experiment exhibits that elderly people product more false memories and are more confident in their false memories with the DRM paradigm than with Misinformation and predictive Inferences paradigms. Besides, our research shows that the rate of false memory and the degree of certitude associated with the DRM paradigm is correlated with the rate of false memory and the degree of certitude associated with predictive Inferences paradigm, but not with those made with the Misinformation paradigm. So, according to our results, it suggests that cognitives processes which underlie false memories production with predictive Inferences paradigm would be close to those which underlie false memories production with DRM paradigm.
As a conclusion, our study suggests the existence of two kinds of false memories: false memories from Misinformation paradigm which are due to suggestion, and false memories from DRM and predictive Inferences paradigms which are based on errors of memory’s reconstruction. Somehow, our research also suggests that elderly people are more prone to produce false memory with paradigm which induced false memories by error of memory’s reconstruction than by misinformation. Otherwise, it would be relevant to replicate this research on youngerly people in order to determine if those results are particularly caused by aging or not.
Words I have learnt: to highlight = mettre en avant; to rely on = reposer sur; backgrounds = antécédents; to underlie = sous-tendre; to be prone to = être disposé à
References
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