The effects of diurnal variability and modality on false memories formation

ABSTRACT

The main objective of the current study was to investigate the effect of time of day on visual and auditory, short-term memory (STM), and long-term memory (LTM) distortions using a hybrid Deese-Roediger-McDermott procedure. In Experiment 1, we used semantically related words, whereas in Experiment 2 – words were characterized by phonological similarity. The results showed a relationship between modality and types of stimuli. In STM, more semantic errors were found in the evening for items presented visually and more errors following auditory presentation for phonologically similar words. In LTM, the analysis revealed a higher rate of semantic distortions in the evening hours for auditorily presented words. For words with phonological similarity, we observed more errors in the evening without the effect of modality. The results support the hypothesis that more reliance is placed on elaborative processing in the evening and more on maintenance processing in the morning; however, this is not modality invariant.

KEYWORDS:

• Diurnal variability
• short-term memory
• long-term memory
• false memories
• auditory modality
• visual modality

Acknowledgments

The researchers would like to thank Deanna Luttenberger for her help with data collection. Additionally, we would like to thank Bernadette Woldt for her expertise on the topic of neighborhood density. Finally, we are extremely grateful to Dr. Christopher Groves for his comments on results’ presentation.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in the OSF repository at https://osf.io/k9xwj/?view_only=998b3fc70e244aa1bcdae25e1f6869bc

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported that there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.