Part I. Experimental Studies: 2. Experiment in psychology 3. Experiments on perceiving III Experiments on imaging 4-8. Experiments on remembering: (a) The method of description (b) The method of repeated reproduction (c) The method of picture writing (d) The method of serial reproduction (e) The method of serial reproduction picture material 9. Perceiving, recognizing, remembering 10. A theory of remembering 11. Images and their functions 12. Meaning Part II. Remembering as a Study in Social Psychology: 13. Social psychology 14. Social psychology and the matter of recall 15. Social psychology and the manner of recall 16. Conventionalism 17. The notion of a collective unconscious 18. The basis of social recall 19. A summary and some conclusions.

Remembering. A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology, Cambridge (University Press) 1964.

In the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm, subjects study lists of words that are designed to elicit the recall of an associatively related critical item. The 55 lists we have developed provide levels of false recall ranging from .01 to .65, and understanding this variability should provide a key to understanding this memory illusion. Using a simultaneous multiple regression analysis, we assessed the contribution of seven factors in creating false recall of critical items in the DRM paradigm. This analysis accounted for approximately 68% of the variance in false recall, with two main predictors: associative connections from the study words to the critical item (r = +.73; semipartial r = +.60) and recallability of the lists (r = -.43; semipartial r = -.34). Taken together, the variance in false recall captured by these predictors accounted for 84% of the variance that can be explained, given the reliability of the false recall measures (r = .90). Therefore, the results of this analysis strongly constrain theories of false memory in this paradigm, suggesting that at least two factors determine the propensity of DRM lists to elicit false recall. The results fit well within the theoretical framework postulating that both semantic activation of the critical item and strategic monitoring processes influence the probability of false recall and false recognition in this paradigm.

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Factors that determine false recall: a multiple regression analysis.

A key problem confronting theories of false memory is that false-memory phenomena are so diverse: Some are characteristic of controlled laboratory tasks, others of everyday life; some occur for traumatic events with legal consequences, others for innocuous events; some are characteristic of one developmental level, others of another developmental level. Fuzzy-trace theory explains false memories via a small set of principles that implement a single representational distinction. Those principles generate new predictions, some of which are counterintuitive.

Fuzzy-Trace Theory and False Memory

This article reviews research using the Deese/Roediger-McDermott (DRM) associative memory illusion, whereby people falsely remember words that were not presented. This illusion has broadly influenced basic theories of memory in cognitive psychology and neuroscience and naturally raises the question as to how these theories apply to more complex autobiographical memories. Some applicability is evident from research linking individual differences in the DRM illusion to false autobiographical memories (e.g., misremembering public events) and fantastic autobiographical beliefs (e.g., memories from past lives). But which aspects generalize? Here it is argued that a process-oriented approach is needed in order to answer this question. Many productive years of DRM research indicate that multiple and often opposing psychological processes cause even the most basic false memories. In light of these discoveries, more researchers need to use methods that isolate these component processes if the goal is to understand false memories both in the lab and in life.

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False memories and fantastic beliefs: 15 years of the DRM illusion

This chapter traces the development of the problem of consciousness in Western philosophy from the time of the ancient Greeks to the middle of the 20th century. The core problem of consciousness focuses on the nature of subjectivity. The chapter focuses on what has become the central issue in consciousness studies, which is the problem of integrating subjectivity into the scientific view of the world. The mainstream view has not long been mainstream, for the problem of consciousness cannot strike one at all until a fairly advanced scientific understanding of the world permits development of the materialism presupposed by the mainstream view. It was the scientific revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries that forced the problem of the Christian dogma into prominence. In philosophy, the 1950s saw the beginning of a self-conscious effort to understand the mind and, eventually, consciousness as physical through and through in essentially scientific terms.

Metacognition and consciousness.

Mechanisms for editing false events out of memory reports have fundamental implications for theories of false memory and for best practice in applied domains in which false reports must be minimized (e.g., forensic psychological interviews, sworn testimony). A mechanism posited in fuzzy-trace theory, recollection rejection, is considered. A process analysis of false-memory editing is presented, which assumes that false-but-gist-consistent events (e.g., the word SOFA, when the word COUCH was experienced) sometimes cue the retrieval of verbatim traces of the corresponding true events (COUCH), generating mismatches that counteract the high familiarity of false-but-gist-consistent events. Empirical support comes from 2 qualitative phenomena: recollective suppression of semantic false memory and inverted-U relations between retrieval time and semantic false memory. Further support comes from 2 quantitative methodologies: conjoint recognition and receiver operating characteristics. The analysis also predicts a novel false-memory phenomenon (erroneous recollection rejection), in which true events are inappropriately edited out of memory reports.

Recollection rejection: False-memory editing in children and adults

A new methodology for measuring illusory conscious experience of the "presentation" of unstudied material (phantom recollection) is evaluated that extracts measurements directly from recognition responses, rather than indirectly from introspective reports. Application of this methodology in the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm (Experiments 1 and 2) and in a more conventional paradigm (Experiment 3) showed that 2 processes (phantom recollection and familiarity) contribute to false recognition of semantically related distractors. Phantom recollection was the larger contributor to false recognition of critical distractors in the DRM paradigm, but surprisingly, it was also the larger contributor to false recognition of other types of distractors. Variability in false recognition was tied to variability in phantom recollection. Experimental control of phantom recollection was achieved with manipulations that were motivated by fuzzy-trace theory's hypothesis that the phenomenon is gist-based.

A. H. Mojardin

Papers

Recollection rejection: False-memory editing in children and adults

Conjoint recognition and phantom recollection.