Keywords : false memory, prior task success, aging, DRM
Background. Several researches on aging have shown that most of cognitive functions deteriorate across lifespan. The first aspect that the elderly complain about is their memory. This complaint is in adequacy with many studies on the subject. However the memory includes multiple concepts and we are going to lean on four of them: reproductive memory and reconstructive memory, episodic memory and semantic memory. First we thought that memory worked like a computer and as soon as it registered something it would remember it exactly like when it had been registered, that’s the reproductive memory. Afterwards, some psychologists envisioned that memories could contain some errors due to many intrusions by several piece of information. That is how reconstructive memory would works. Thus, remembering a memory is not that easy and is not as reliable as we think. This is why numerous researchers had investigated the phenomenon of false memories after the very first study of Bartlett in 1932 where his findings had shown that participants added more and more intrusions across time while trying to remember a studied story. False memories can be distorted from a real life event but it can also be a memory about something that never happened. The act of remembering activates the episodic memory where temporal and contextual information are stored and the semantic memory where decontextualized information is stored. At first Deese, (1959) and then Roediger and McDermott (1995) conceived a paradigm to specifically study the production of false memories. Thus, through many studies comparing young and older adults show that the elderly tend to produce more false memories than younger adults. These findings are explained by the impact of aging on episodic memory leading to impoverishment of contextual information and the impact on the semantic memory leading to difficulties to access to the storage of decontextualized information. Lately some researches have conceived a method to eventually enhance older adults’ performances and so decrease the gap of abilities between young adults and the elderly. Thus, Geraci and Miller, (2013) have created the prior task success where participants took an easy task before completed a more complex task. Their findings were encouraging since older adults shown better abilities in memory task after completed successfully an easy task previously.
Present study. In the light of what we know about the impact of aging on memory performances, more specifically on the production of false memories and the potential of the prior task success we have decided to test its potential effect on the production of false memory on a DRM task. We have compared performances on a DRM task between young and older adults in the production of false memories before and after taking a prior task success. Results. We’ve found that after a prior task success contrary to the group of young adults, the group of older people produced less false memory than before having the prior task success. Thus, the gap of performances between age groups decreased. Discussion. We’ll discuss on the potential processes that could benefit from the prior task success and the possibilities offered by this method for future studies.
Words that I’ve learnt : afterwards = plus tard ; envisioned = envisage ; impoverishment = appauvrissement