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False memory following rapidly presented lists: the element of surprise

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Abstract

This article examines a false memory phenomenon, the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) effect, consisting of high false alarms for a prototype word (e.g., SLEEP) following a study list consisting of its associates (NIGHT, DREAM, etc.). This false recognition is thought to occur because prototypes, although not presented within a study list, are highly activated by their semantic association with words that are in the list. The authors present an alternative explanation of the effect, based on the discrepancy-attribution hypothesis. According to that account, false (and true) familiarity results when a comparison between expectations and outcomes within a processing episode causes surprise. Experiment 1 replicates the DRM effect. Experiment 2 shows that a similar effect can occur when participants are shown lists of unrelated words and are then surprised by a recognition target. Experiments 3 and 4 show that the DRM effect itself is abolished when participants are prevented from being surprised by prototypes presented as recognition targets. It is proposed that the DRM effect is best understood through the principles of construction, evaluation, and attribution.

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Notes

  1. Not all surprises cause this misattribution, even when regarded as funny. For example, Whittlesea and Williams (2001b) presented test words as the last word of familiar phrases. They compared claims of recognition for words presented as clang associations (e.g., Row, row row your GOAT) with words presented in their original context (e.g., Row, row row your BOAT) or words simply mismatching the context (e.g., Row, row row your SHEEP). The participants laughed at many of the clangs, but that manipulation had no observable effect on claims of remembering. The difference between the two cases of surprise appears to be that when dealing with items like PHRAUG, people interpret their subsequent processing as matching well, although surprisingly so, with earlier processing, whereas presentations such as GOAT seem to be surprisingly wrong.

  2. The rate of false alarms for prototypes might be expected to be equal in this case to those for nonprototoype items, but it is actually less. We suspect that the difference occurred because the prototypes actually did summarize the lists satisfactorily, whereas the nonprototoype words the participant generated were much less representative. Generating a prototype would thus give the participant a sense of having produced a word totally under control of the attempt to summarize, and so would be attributed only to that source. In contrast, because generated nonprototype words were less representative of the list, they would not so clearly appear to be a product of a summarization process, so that the participants could not as definitely attribute their occurrence in mind to that source.

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by grants from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada to B.W.A.W. and M.E.J.M.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada, V5A 1S6

    Bruce W. A. Whittlesea & Andrea D. Hughes

  2. University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada

    Michael E. J. Masson

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  1. Bruce W. A. Whittlesea
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  3. Andrea D. Hughes
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Correspondence to Bruce W. A. Whittlesea.

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Whittlesea, B.W.A., Masson, M.E.J. & Hughes, A.D. False memory following rapidly presented lists: the element of surprise. Psychological Research 69, 420–430 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-005-0213-1

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