By Léna Heuzé
False memories are phenomena of mnesic distortion that refer to the recall or recognition of events that never took place (Guyard & Piolino, 2006). The entire population seems to be subject to these memory errors. Thus, in order to better understand the formation of false memories in participants, three experimental paradigms were employed : the DRM paradigm (Deese, 1959 ; Roediger & McDermott, 1995), the misinformation paradigm (Loftus et al., 1978) and the predictive inference paradigm (Gras et al., 2008 ; Gras et al., 2011). We compared the production of these memory errors with respect to ageing, i.e. between young and old participants, while assuming that these older adults are more sensitive to the production of false memories as a function of advancing age.
To this end, 35 young and 64 older adults took part in our study. The participants began by performing the misinformation paradigm. They watched a short film and then answered a questionnaire containing misleading information. After a 45-minute delay, they performed a recognition task. They were then presented with the predictive inference paradigm. They were asked to read short sentences in small texts before performing a recognition task in which the predictive inferences that allowed them to create false memories were included. Finally, the test was concluded with the DRM paradigm. Participants were asked to read aloud lists of words before answering questions from the experimenter. The results partially validate our hypotheses since an age effect is found for two experimental paradigms, the DRM paradigm and the predictive inference paradigm, but not for the misinformation paradigm. Furthermore, correlations were found for the DRM and predictive inference paradigms, as well as for the DRM and misinformation paradigms for young adults.
The difference in the production of false memories between young and old participants can mainly be explained by a lack of monitoring for older adults. Numerous studies have shown that source control processes are less effective with advancing age (Gallo & Roediger, 2003 ; Dehon & Brédart, 2004). This prevents them from accessing distinct encoded information when retrieving information. Older adults prefer to rely on a sense of familiarity to retrieve information, which then allows them to produce false memories. Other difficulties were encountered for this population and may also explain the difference in false memory production between young and old participants. Indeed, it appears that difficulties in initiating and using effective strategies (Gallo, 2006) as well as a high level of semantic knowledge (McGillivray & Castel, 2017) are parameters that influence older people and allow them to produce more false memories.
Conversely, an equal rate of production of these memory errors between young and old participants for the misinformation paradigm can be explained by the recognition task. Indeed, studies have shown that a recognition task requires fewer cognitive processes, compared to a recall task (free or cueing) which requires many cognitive costs (Tulving, 1995 ; Froeger et al., 2014). But other explanations can be put forward such as the motivational degree of the task where the more participants judge the task as interesting and/or useful for them, the more they will be able to concentrate and thus produce fewer false memories (Auslander et al., 2017).
However, some limitations can be exposed such as the level of confidence adults have in their responses. Where numerous studies have shown that the more confident people, in this case older people, were in their responses, the more false memories they produced (Mueller et al., 2004 ; Dodson & Krueger, 2006). Thus, the objective of future studies will be to take this factor into account in order to observe a potential correlation between these two variables.
In conclusion, this study shows that an age effect varies between experimental paradigms, being more pronounced for a DRM paradigm and a predictive inference paradigm, compared to a misinformation paradigm. It would therefore seem that the ecological nature of the task allows older adults to have correct monitoring processes that allow them to create fewer false memories than younger adults.
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