The effect of limited attention and delay on negative arousing false memories

ABSTRACT

Previous research has shown that, in comparison to neutral stimuli, false memories for high arousing negative stimuli are greater after very fast presentation and limited attention at study. However, full compared to limited attention conditions still produce comparably more false memories for all stimuli types. Research has also shown that emotional stimuli benefit from a period of consolidation. What effect would such consolidation have on false memory formation even when attention is limited at study? The aim of the present study was to investigate the effect of fast presentation on false memory production for negatively-arousing and neutral items over time using the DRM paradigm. Sixty-eight participants studied Negative and neutral DRM lists with fast or slow presentation conditions. Half completed a recognition test immediately and half completed a recognition test after one-week. Results revealed that, for fast presentation, negative critical lures increased after one week and were comparable to negative critical lures in the slow presentation encoding conditions. Neutral critical lures in the fast presentation condition did not change and remained lower compared to the slow presentation condition. These findings are the first demonstration that arousing negative false memories can increase over time when attention at encoding is limited.

KEYWORDS:

• DRM paradigm
• attention
• false memory
• emotion
• delay

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The analysis of remember (R), know (K), and guess (G) responses, and the signal detection measures, discrimination (d’) and response bias (C) were calculated and analysed to measure recognition decision accuracy. As this is a brief report, they are not summarised in this article. The analyses of RKG responses and signal detection measures did not significantly deviate from the findings in the old responses. For those interested in these findings, see the supplementary materials that contains a summary of the RKG results and Signal Detection analysis.

2 Due to the small male participant sample in this study, an exploratory analysis which included Gender as a between-subjects factor was conducted on old responses to corrects items, critical lures, weak-related and unrelated filler items. This analysis confirmed that there were no significant main effects of Gender and no significant interactions with this factor. There were approximately equal number of males and females in the Time of Test conditions. That is, there were 24 and 23 females in the immediate and 1-week conditions respectively, and 10 and 11 males in the immediate and 1-week conditions respectively.