Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) Paradigm

Discuss About The Simple Cognitive Paradigm Investigate False.

There are two different types of imagining events. These are of autobiographical nature and of different actions performed in previous times. Imagining that a child will be getting lost is an example of autobiographical nature and breaking a pen is an example of actions that are performed in the lab (Pardilla-Delgado & Payne, 2017). These are all examples of false memories. This type of effect is also known as imagination inflation. False memory is defined as an experience of the mind that is considered mistakenly as an event from the past of a person. There are minor false relativityof the memories such as imagining that the keys were last seen in the bedroom whereas it was actually last seen in the drawing room. An example of major false relativity in which the implications fall on the person as well as on others around the person can be said as believing mistakenly that an important idea has originated from him (Thakral et al., 2018).

There is a difference between false memory and memory fallibility. Memory of an individual is storage of experiences in life. This storage is imperfect as not everything can be recollected when necessary (Read, 1996). False memory indicates recollection of certain events which have never actually occurred to the person in life. Whereas, memory fallibility is forgetting or mixing up some previously occurred incidents. Thus, it can be understood that false memory is a very serious problem in individuals (Baugerud et al., 2016).

There has been extensive researches performed on the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm. According to the researches, it has been suggested that false memories may be reduced effectively with the help of visual imagery for a list of words. In this paradigm, the participants are usually asked to read a list of words and remember them. At the time of the memory test, it has been observed among 80 percent of the participants that they forget some of the existing words from the list and remember some of the words which does not even exist on the list. This is an indication of false memory (Nielson & Correro II, 2017).

In some studies, the DRM findings are explained with the model known as the Activation Monitoring Framework. Two different processes of activation and monitoring have been used to attribute the false memories from DRM approach. People tend to recollect names of items that have close perception with the listed items and forget the original ones. This is known as activation. Thus, this recollection is termed as “mentally experienced” as the list of the words are framed according to their strength of association and recollecting names close in strength to the listed items shows associative strength of the mind. At the time of monitoring the memory test, it has been observed that the actual listed words are mistaken with the activated words of close perception (Jou et al., 2016).

Activation Monitoring Framework

According to some recent studies, this aforesaid method of DRM paradigm has been expanded. This has been done in order to understand the reasons behind the causes of the false memories (Oliver, Bays & Zabrucky, 2016). According to these expanded tests, the participants are also provided with the list of words like the last method. The participants were divided into two different groups. One group was asked to visualize the items whereas the other group was asked to think about the functionality of the item at the time of studying the items. It has been observed from the study that the participants who were asked to visualize the items have shown false memory for only 10 percent. On the other hand, the participants who were asked to describe the functionality of the listed items have shown false memory in 61 percent of the cases (Oliver, Bays & Zabrucky, 2016). Thus, it has been revealed that visual imagery is a better approach to reduce false memory among people. Thus, it can be said that the paradigm of DRM has been an effective and useful approach to assess the neurocognitive underpinnings of the memory that is reconstructive in nature (Finley et al., 2017).

There have been some other studies also in which other than the imagery vison, sound has been given utter importance. In this case, the list of words presented sound similar to one particular word. From this test, there has been observed that the rate of false memory has been found higher in similar sounding words (Prohaska et al., 2016).

No study has been performed in the visual imagery taking into consideration the exposure times such as fast exposure, medium exposure and slow exposure. In this study, the efficiency of this visual imagery approach will be tested on some participants. Instead of two groups, the participants in this study have been divided into three groups such as fast exposure, medium exposure and slow exposure. The main aim of this study will be to investigate the differences in the false memory rates of a person belonging to each of the groups with the use of the technique of imagery. Thus, to test the subject of interest, the following null and alternate hypothesis can be stated:

Null Hypothesis (H₀): There is no significant difference between the three exposure times to use the technique of imagery.

Alternate Hypothesis (H_A): There are significant differences between the three exposure times to use the technique of imagery.

Expanding DRM Paradigm With Visual Imagery

The methods that will be used to analyze the data and test the above mentioned hypothesis will be discussed in the following sections along with the results of the analysis.

Participants were 306 students from Deakin University enrolled in HPS203/773 The Human Mind in Trimester 1, 2018. Participants were not asked to disclose their age or gender as part of the study.

Participants were asked to complete an online experiment so that the data could be used for their assignments. Data were gathered through an online survey (Qualtrics) and participants were randomly allocated to one of three conditions (“fast exposure”, “moderate exposure” or “slow exposure”). This resulted in 118 participants in the fast exposure condition, 101 in the moderate exposure condition and 87 in the slow exposure condition.

Participants were told, “In this study we are going to test your memory by presenting you with some words (one at a time) and later asking you to recognise them from a list. But there is something special we would like you to do to remember the words. When each word is presented, visually imagine it and then picture something that could be done with that item. For example, if the word is “fox” first visually imagine a fox and then imagine it doing something such as running under a fence.”

Participants in the fast exposure condition were then told, “You will be presented with 5 word lists, each list will contain 8 words (40 words total). They will be presented at a rate of 1.5 seconds per word. Between word lists you will have 3 seconds before the next list starts.When you are ready to begin, please click the button below. Words will then change automatically until the list is complete.”

Participants in the moderate and slow exposure conditions were given the same instructions, except that they were told that the words would be presented at a rate of 5 seconds per word or 10 seconds per word respectively.

The words were taken from past research by Oliver et al. (2016). The five lists each contained eight words, which were all semantically related to a non-presented “critical lure word”. After the presentation of the word listsa recognition test containing 40 words was presented. Of these, five were critical lure words (one from each list), 20were distractor words (that did not appear on the list, and were not semantically related to the lists during encoding) and the remaining 15 were true words (the 1^st, 3^rd and 7^th word on each list that appeared during encoding with the exception of one which was left out due to human error). Words were presented in random order on the recognition test.

Impact of Sound on DRM

Results were analysed using SPSS statistics version 25 for Mac. Descriptive statistics demonstrated that the average number of DRM false memories (from five critical lure words) was 2.00 (SD = 1.62) (40%) in the current sample

A one-way ANOVA was conducted to test if there was a significant difference between the three exposure times to use the technique of imagery. Results showed that there was a significant difference in number of critical lures words dependent on condition F(2, 303) = 8.85, p< .05. Results of Tukey’s HSD post hoc tests showed that participants in the 1.5 second condition recognised significantly more critical lure words (M = 2.48, SD = 1.84) than those in the 5 second (M = 1.76, SD = 1.43) or 10 second condition (M = 1.64, SD = 1.36). There was no significant difference between the 5 second and 10 second exposure time.

The results of the analysis have shown that there are significant differences in the false memories between the three different exposure times with the use of the imagery technique. Differences in the recollecting power have been observed especially between the fast exposure groups with all other groups. The recollecting power is significantly less in the fast exposure group. There has been no difference in the recollecting capability of the medium and the slow exposure group. This indicates that the problem of false memory exists mostly in cases where the reactions are taken rapidly.

According to the discussed literatures, it has been seen that according to the previous researches, the percentage of people having false memory is reduced in the visual imagery approach (Jou et al., 2017). According to this study, it has been observed that the more time is given to the participants to visualize the matters, the less percentage of people are showing false memories. This problem increases when the participants are given little time to visualize the items. Thus, this result is in line to the past literatures that visual imagery reduced the false memory tendencies in people.

It has to be kept in mind that with the increase in the number of related words in the list to recall, the rate of false memory increases. Further, by decreasing the number of words to recall, the effect of false memory cannot be understood clearly and the result will be providing with unreliable results. Thus, if the number of words to recall has to be decreased, the words to recall has to be critical and not simple so that the effect of false memory remains the same. This is because the list of critical words has a higher rate of false alarm than the list of words to remember which are of normal standard.

Study Objectives and Hypothesis

However, there are also certain limitations to this DRM paradigm. Some researchers say that as the tasks performed to test false memory in the DRM paradigm are based on the errors which are gisted, these activates the networks of the semantic memory. These might not be comparable anymore to the autobiographical false memories. There has been a question which has always been of special interest. The aspects of DRM illusion which are relevant to the autobiographical memories are of the interest. Not all illusions are relevant. The question always arises which illusions are relevant. This puts the researchers always in a state of dilemma. As a result of this dilemma, the results that have been obtained from the present research can give interpretations which are ambiguous as several activation and monitoring tasks also will provide with the same results that are gist based.

References

Baugerud, G. A., Howe, M. L., Magnussen, S., & Melinder, A. (2016). Maltreated and non-maltreated children’s true and false memories of neutral and emotional word lists in the Deese/Roediger–McDermott task. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 143, 102-110.

Finley, J. R., Sungkhasettee, V. W., Roediger III, H. L., & Balota, D. A. (2017). Relative contributions of semantic and phonological associates to over-additive false recall in hybrid DRM lists. Journal of Memory and Language, 93, 154-168.

Jou, J., Arredondo, M. L., Li, C., Escamilla, E. E., & Zuniga, R. (2017). The effects of increasing semantic-associate list length on the Deese–Roediger–McDermott false recognition memory: Dual false-memory process in retrieval from sub-and supraspan lists. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 70(10), 2076-2093.

Jou, J., Escamilla, E. E., Arredondo, M. L., Pena, L., Zuniga, R., Perez, M., & Garcia, C. (2016). The role of decision criterion in the Deese–Roediger–McDermott (DRM) false recognition memory: False memory falls and rises as a function of restriction on criterion setting. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 1-26.

Nielson, K. A., & Correro II, A. N. (2017). Post-learning arousal enhances veridical memory and reduces false memory in the Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm. Neurobiology of learning and memory, 144, 198-207.

Oliver, M. C., Bays, R. B., & Zabrucky, K. M. (2016). False memories and the DRM paradigm: effects of imagery, list, and test type. The Journal of general psychology, 143(1), 33-48.

Pardilla-Delgado, E., & Payne, J. D. (2017). The Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) Task: A Simple Cognitive Paradigm to Investigate False Memories in the Laboratory. Journal of visualized experiments: JoVE, (119).

Prohaska, V., DelValle, D., Toglia, M. P., & Pittman, A. E. (2016). Reported serial positions of true and illusory memories in the Deese/Roediger/McDermott paradigm. Memory, 24(7), 865-883.

Read, J. D. (1996). From a passing thought to a false memory in 2 minutes: Confusing real and illusory events. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 3(1), 105-111.

Thakral, P., Madore, K., Devitt, A., & Schacter, D. (2018). Adaptive constructive processes: An episodic specificity induction impacts false recall in the Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm.