The Difference Between True and False Memories In Contexts

Journal of Psychological Science ›› 2013, Vol. 36 ›› Issue (3) : 600-605.

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Journal of Psychological Science ›› 2013, Vol. 36 ›› Issue (3) : 600-605.

The Difference Between True and False Memories In Contexts

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Abstract

The current study investigated the cognitive and neural electrophysiological processes of true as well as the false memories in story contexts. The results from studies of human memory suggested that recognition memory performance reflected two distinct memory processes: familiarity and recollection. Familiarity was to assess the overall similarity between test items and all study items during 300-500ms.FN400 ERP was related to familiarity. Recollection involved the retrieval of special details of the study items during 400-800ms.LPC was related to recollection. Moreover, an additional old/new ERP (800-1100ms) tended to be most prominent over frontal scalp sites, which was considered to be related to post-retrieval processing, such as evaluation of the products of retrieval for source and specific item features. This study chose four story contexts as the material and adopted the learning and testing experimental paradigm. In the studying phase, participants were asked to remember story context which appeared on the computer screen. Then, the participants were required to do an old/new recognition test. There were three types of target words during the testing stage including old words, critical words and new words. Critical words were new and highly associated with the story contexts, in addition new words were unassociated with the contexts. Event-related potential(ERPs)and RT were measured when 22 healthy right-handed undergraduates did an old/new recognition test. None of them had history of mental illness or brain disease. After the experiment, we gave certain degree of compensation to subjects. Two subjects were rejected because of the lack of the number of artifact-free trials. The instrument for the statistical analysis used in the experiment is SPSS15.0. The results showed that(1)The critical items produced high rate of false memory. Moreover, false recognition demanded more RT than true recognition.(2)The FN400 which reflects familiarity-based process revealed no significant differences between true and false recognition, but there were more negative than Correct-Rejection recognition.(3)During the recollection-based process(400-800ms),the amplitude of LPC elicited by false recognition and true recognition was not different, while there were more positive than Correct-Rejection recognition. (4)During the post-retrieval process(800-1110ms),the difference among the ERPs amplitude elicited by recognition about three target words got remarkably significant difference. The amplitude of LSW elicited by false recognition was greater than true recognition and Correct-Rejection recognition. In conclusion, the results demonstrated that true and false memories had showed the same information processing models in story contextual cuing effect during recollection-based process and familiarity-based process. However the information processing models changed during the post-retrieval process: false memory needed much more information process than that of true memory for retrieval and comparing, so it took longer time to recognize. This study provided a new evidence for the Source – Monitoring Framework.

Key words

False Memory / Story Contexts / FN400 / LPC / LSW

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The Difference Between True and False Memories In Contexts[J]. Journal of Psychological Science. 2013, 36(3): 600-605

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