Abstract
Recently there has been considerable interest in the idea of false memories or memories for events that never actually happened. One recently paradigm for false memory research was developed by Roediger & McDermott (1995), based on earlier research by Deese (1959), and is known as the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm. In this DRM paradigm, participants are asked to learn lists of words that are all semantically associated with the same critical non-presented word. Each list was composed of 15 list words related to one critical non-presented word. An example of a list for the critical non-presented word 'sleep' is: bed, rest, awake, tired, dream, wake, night, blanket, doze, slumber, sonore, pillow, peace, yawn, drowsy. Their experiments revealed remarkable levels of false recall and false recognition in participants tested individually. In the present article, I briefly review the experiments with manipulations of encoding, materials, participants, and tests, and how they influence false recall and false recognition in the DRM paradigm. Then I introduce two types of experiments, that is, one attempted to determine the effect of negative mood on false memories of negative-toned words, the other was to investigate whether collaborative remembering creates false memories relative to individual recollection.
