False Memory

Memory is one of the most critical parts of cognition. It is important because it is involved in almost every aspect of cognition including problem solving, decision making, attention, and perception. Because of this importance, people rely on one’s memory to make important decisions. The value of one’s memory in this society is so high that it is used as evidence to either save one’s life or kill one’s life during murder trials. But as many of the cognitive psychologists know, human’s memory can cause many errors. One of these errors is false memory which is either remembering events that never happened or remembering events differently from the actual event. This finding of false memory raised big interests among psychologists and general public and many researches were done in order to find more about the false memory. The constructive approach to memory, which states that memory is constructed by person based on what really happened in addition to person’s other knowledge, experiences, and expectations, supports the idea of false memory. Just like what constructive approach to memory states, the false memory can be created by person’s knowledge, common biases, and suggestions. The present study was done in order to demonstrate one methodology that biases people to create and recall false memories. The present study is based on Deese’s experiment in 1959 and also on Roediger and McDermott’s experiment in 1995. The participants will be presented with sequence of words visually, and then they would have to classify a set of words as either in the sequence or not in the sequence. Our hypothesis is that people will create false memories and recall distractor words that are related to the sequence of words presented significantly m...

... middle of paper ...

...re I think if the participants are not aware of it, the false recall rate will increase. And if there are more words presented, my assume is that it will increase the false recall rate.

We can imply this finding of false memory in many ways in our lives. We all should note that our memory cannot be trusted 100% and we should not solely rely on our memory when it comes to making critical decisions. Just like the murder trial example used in earlier, when it comes to eye witnessing, the judge should take possible false memory into account when making the final decisions and try to obtain objective evidence along with the memory of the witness.

Works Cited

Roediger, H. L. III, & McDermott, K. B. (1995). Creating false memories: Remembering words not presented in lists. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 21, 803-814