Title of the study: The effect of gender differences in implanting false memories
Hypothesis: The number of false memory items recalled is higher in the male population
IV = gender
DV = number of false items recalled
Design = independent measures/between-groups
The study would be based on the James Deese (1959) article on verbal intrusions on immediate recall. You can access this article in Library Plus. The subjects will be presented with 6 x lists of semantically related words of 12 words at encoding. The 6 lists that had the highest intrusion rates were chair, mountain, needle, rough, sleep and sweet. As you’ve probably seen in Bob’s reply, he doesn’t see the problem with ‘false’ memory conditions as long as we don’t use ‘problematic’ words like murder, suicide, etc. Please review the lists and let me know if you think any of the 6 above are problematic (e.g. syringe could have a trigger warning? We can replace it with another word if you think necessary).
After a delay (what should the delay be? 2 minutes?), subjects will be asked to recognize the words. In the recognition task, subjects will be asked if they remember previously presented words, as well as the additional related words that weren’t presented to them (a total of 16 words; 12 presented + 4-word associations that were not presented).
The word lists would either be presented visually or recorded in descending strength of association, at a rate of one word every two seconds. Which one do we think would be easier to execute? Presumably presenting words PowerPoint-style in Qualtrics might be easier than the editing of a sound recording itself.
At the end of each list there would be a 12s of silence/nothing, followed by a tone and 2s of silence announcing the next list and so on (to allow participants to parse the individual lists).
The participants would not be aware that we are testing how many ‘false’ memories we can implant, but rather think it’s a word recall test.
Reading on the topic:
1. Original article: James Deese (1959): On the prediction of occurrence of particular verbal intrusions in immediate recall
2. Roediger & McDermott (1995) Creating false memories
3. Inspiration for the test (with a video!) can be found here, under protocol.
Instructions to participants, Stimuli/experimental materials, Debrief information
Section ofthe ethics form as it is group work and the other members of the group need to do the remaining sections
