Phonological false recognition produced by bottom-up automatic activation in young and older people

ABSTRACT

Two experiments explored a new procedure to implicitly induce phonological false memories in young and older people. On the study tasks, half of the words were formed from half of the letters in the alphabet, whereas the remaining words were formed from all the letters in the alphabet. On the recognition tests, there were three types of non-studied new words: critical lures formed from the same half of the letters as the studied words; distractors formed from the other half of the letters not used, and distractors formed from all the letters in the alphabet. In both experiments, the results showed that, in both young and older people, critical lures produced more false recognitions than distractors composed of all the letters in the alphabet, which, in turn, produced more false alarms than distractors composed of the letters not used during the study. These results support the predictions of the activation/monitoring models, which assume that false memories are partly due to activation spreading from items (semantically or phonologically) related to the critical words.

KEYWORDS:

• Memory
• false memory
• phonological false recognition
• aging

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Encarnación Satorres http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8589-8697

Juan C. Meléndez http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6353-6035

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by grant PSI2016-77405-R of the Spanish Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad – Agencia Estatal de Investigación (AEI/FEDER, UE).