The Effect of Context Reinstatement on the Deese/Roediger-McDermott (DRM): False Memory Task

Author

Asia Bayoud

Document Type

Honors Thesis

Date of Award

Fall 12-4-2024

Abstract

Reinstatement of the external context present at study can later facilitate the retrieval of the encoded information at test. According to the contextual distortion hypothesis, however, context reinstatement can also contribute to false recognition of non-studied items when (i) those items are conceptually related to the target items (also known as lures) and (ii) the presentation of the lure in the reinstated context drives the recognition based on the conceptual resemblance of that lure with the studied list and background scene (Doss et al., 2018). The current study implemented the Deese/Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm to study the effect of context reinstatement on recognition. Consistent with the contextual distortion hypothesis, we found an increased rate of hits to targets (correct recognition of studied items) as well as an increased rate of false alarms to lures (mistaken recognition of non-studied items) when the context was reinstated rather than when it was switched. We also found that false alarms to critical lures (lures that are the most similar to targets) were accompanied by “recollect” judgments at a rate almost identical to “recollect” judgments for hits.

Advisor

Benton Pierce

Keywords

context reinstatement; DRM; contextual distortion hypothesis

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