Since a scandal in the United States in the late 1990s, many researchers have been interested in false memories. A false memory is a memory of an event that is believed to be real when it is not. Studies have shown that it is possible to induce false memories in the laboratory. Thus, it is possible to generate them artificially to better understand their functioning and their consequences.
Among the researchers, Deese, then Roediger and Mc Dermott have created a paradigm, called DRM (of the authors’ names) which creates false memories in the laboratory. The principle is to enunciate lists of 12 words all semantically linked to another word which is not enunciated. The last word will constitute the false memory, which we call the critical lure. The subject is then asked to recall as many words as he can remember, and we observe whether he recalls the critical lure, which was not expected at the time of recall. The various studies conducted on this paradigm have shown that young adults recall critical lures, thus producing false memories.
Some authors wanted to focus on the functioning of false memories during aging. It has been shown that an elderly population, compared to a young adult population, recalled more critical lures and was therefore more sensitive to false memories.
The originality of our study lies in the presentation of the critical lure in half of the DRM lists. This means that the critical lure, associated with all the other words in the list, will also be presented in the sixth position (in order to avoid serial position effects). This type of research has, for the moment, only been conducted with a young population (McDermott, 1997; Miller and Wolford, 1999) and showed an increase in the number of critical lures produced when the critical lure is presented in the list, compared to a classical condition where the critical lure is only suggested by the words in the list, by semantic association. Thus, in this study, we are interested in exploring what happens in the elderly during normal aging.
Our results showed that indeed, both young people and old people produced false memories in the DRM paradigm. The elderly tend to produce more false memories than the young. These observations are consistent with the previously published literature on the subject. Furthermore, when the critical lure is presented within half of the DRM lists, there is an increase in the proportion of critical lures produced, as well as an increase in the number of correctly recalled words, in both of our participant groups. Thus, the difference in the production of false memories is eliminated between our two groups.
If we compare the production of the presented critical lure (item 6) with the other words in the list, we see that it is recalled more than all the other words in the list (despite serial position effects). Thus, young people recall the critical lure more than the items benefiting from the primacy effect, which are more recalled than the items benefiting from the recency effect, which themselves are more recalled than the items in the middle of the list. In the elderly, we find a similar curve, except that there is no difference between the recall of words benefiting from the primacy effect and words benefiting from the recency effect.
Comparing the results of the whole data set (classic DRM condition and critical lure condition presented), older people produce more false memories than younger people, but it is mainly a significant difference in the number of correctly recalled words that calls for our attention. This could be explained by processes that become deleterious during normal aging. Unfortunately, a significant difference in the level of education between our two groups could also act on this phenomenon and therefore does not allow us to ensure that it is only due to aging.