Providing information about diagnostic features at retrieval reduces false recognition

Abstract

In the following study, participants encoded blocked DRM word lists and we varied whether they received information before test about the utility of mnemonic features that potentially discriminate between veridical and false memories. The results of three experiments revealed that this manipulation successfully reduced false recognition of critical theme words. We also found that this manipulation was effective for younger but not older adults. Furthermore, calling attention to the features in test instructions alone was sufficient for reducing false recognition and its effectiveness was not enhanced by also asking participants to rate their phenomenal experience. We argue that providing diagnostic information before test allows participants to establish more accurate expectations about the task and thus improves the efficacy of retrieval and monitoring processes that are subsequently engaged.

Keywords:

• False memory
• Retrieval processes
• Metamemory

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Bret Blackmon, Andrea Castillo, Robin Cilluffa, Cori Davis, Melisa Finch, Kristen Fish-Warner, Kelly Fleming, Nicolle Giangregorio, Valerie MacNeill, David Marshall, Brent Nobles, Carla Martinelli, Shelby Morita, Sonya Padgett, Julie Preau, Natalie Reeves, Doris Trachtman, Julie Vincent, and Erin Warnick for their invaluable help collecting the data. The first author gratefully acknowledges the support of Grant# LEQSF(2004–07)-RD-A-12 from the State of Louisiana Board of Regents.

Notes

¹Note that recall of studied words and critical theme words are reported in terms of proportions, while intrusions of non-list words are reported in frequencies.

²In Experiments 2 and 3 we used the Window, Rough, Sleep, Chair, Mountain, Needle, River, Bread, and Foot lists (Roediger & McDermott, 1995), which were a subset of the larger set of 12 lists used in Experiment 1. Overall recognition rates for studied and critical theme words (taken from Stadler, Roediger, & McDermott, 1999) for the subset and the larger set were highly similar.

³Watson et al. (2005) studied this question in the context of the utilisation of pre-encoding warnings in the DRM paradigm.

⁴In the course of streamlining the procedure in Experiment 3 we decided to omit critical theme control items on the final recognition test because performance on these items did not significantly differ between Feature and Standard instruction conditions in previous experiments and because these items are not needed for calculating signal detection measures.

⁵We also analysed our recognition data with these participants removed. The same pattern of results was obtained and thus we report data from all participants in the results section of Experiment 3.