Effects of survival processing and retention interval on true and false recognition in the DRM and category repetition paradigms

ABSTRACT

Two experiments examined the effects of survival processing and delay on true and related false recognition. Experiment 1 used the Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm and found survival processing to increase true and related false recognition. Extending the delay from 5-mins to 1-day reduced true, but not false memory. Measures of the characteristics of true and false memories showed survival processing increased “remember” and “know” responses for related false memory, “know” responses for true memory and gist processing. Experiment 2 made use of the category repetition procedure and found a broadly similar pattern of results for true memory. However, related false memory was decreased by survival processing. Except for one result, no interactions were found between encoding task and delay. Overall, survival processing produced similar or different effects on true/false memory depending on the nature of the list. The mechanisms that might underpin these are evaluated and considered in relation to future work.

KEYWORDS:

• Survival processing
• false memory
• DRM paradigm
• category repetition paradigm
• remember-know procedure

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Ryan Simpson, Ryan Phips, Philip Butler and Vydune Zlabyte for assistance with piloting and the collection of data for the experiments reported here.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 See section 1 of the supplementary materials in which these calculations are described.

2 The subject form on which biographical information was collected differed from Experiment 1. In this instance, individuals were required to tick a box to indicate their age cohort.

3 Another interesting possibility, suggested by a reviewer, is that remember/recollection responses to critical lures come about because they receive more item-specific processing, in contrast to the more usual explanation that lures are dependent on relational processing (Burns, Jenkins, & Dean, 2007; Burns, Martens, Bertoni, Sweeney, & Lividini, 2006). An example provided is that the critical lure “cold” might initially receive activation form associated list words. The lure could in turn activate related concepts such as “beer” that are not associated with the list. Consequently, the lure is processed more distinctively by this unique association. Later, during testing, the lure is reactivated together with its item-specific association and thus receives a remember response. To contextualise, survival processing could lead to more widespread activations that encompass such unique associations and thus bring about greater false recollection.