In the past couple of decades a very interesting topic has come into the spotlight, the existence and creation of false memories. False memories have been defined as “either remembering events that never happened, or remembering them quite differently from the way they happened” (Roediger & Mc Dermot, 1995, p.803). This topic opens many doors for research and raises questions about the reliability and susceptibility of people’s memory.

One area where the possibility of false memories has been raised is in child sexual abuse cases (CSA). Now that there is evidence that memories can seem real to the individual despite being are false, caused by other factors such as suggestibility, there is a considerable debate about the reliability of people’s accounts of CSA. There have been many cases where people who have claimed to be abused sexually, by parents or others, have been led to their beliefs by a therapist or other factors such as coping or defense mechanisms. For example, Kaplan and Manicavasagar have reported on three specific cases where people were falsely led to believe, by their therapist, they were sexually abused as children or as adults. This was

done using leading questioning during hypnosis, posing hypothetical situations to their patients and insisting that their patients think about the abuse until they believe that it is real, or until they have a memory of the abuse (Kaplan & Manicavasagar, 2001).

This leads to the present study in which I would like to see if there is a significant difference between recall of critical words from the lists in the DRM paradigm when the words are read to the participants at the rate of one word every 1.5 seconds, or when the lists are presented visually on an overhead projector, making the lists available to the participants for exactly 24 seconds (this allows 1.5 seconds of reading time for each word). The purpose of this study is to determine if reading versus speaking the lists creates higher amounts of recall of the critical word from the Deese/Roediger and McDermott paradigm. Since there is a correlation between BAS and connectivity in the recall of words form the DRM paradigm, I choose the same lists for both the visual and the auditory groups that have relatively equal and average BAS scores, as suggested by Roediger and McDermott (2001). The lists in this study also have relatively same word lengths for all of the words including the critical word, which is recalled by the participants. The hope was for a significant difference in the two groups in this study, to determine which method provided more false recall. The hypothesis of this study is that if the list used in the presentation of the DRM paradigm are relatively equal in word length and mean Bas scores, and are presented with equal amounts of time for each word, then there still should be a significant difference in the number of times the critical word is remembered when the list are presented visually or read to the participants to the participants. The design of this experiment has one independent variable presented in two levels and is a completely between subject design. I am testing two different levels and will use different groups for the levels.

The study of false memories is particularly important because these false accusations based on false memories could lead to many problems in court cases, and problems with the reliability of witnesses. It is important to understand how to question someone without leading them or eliciting a false response. Therefore, considerable research has been done with word associations, word lists, and various other paradigms to find the prevalence of false memories and the extent to which people are suggestible.

After the presentation of each list, the participants were asked to write the words they recalled on a blank sheet of paper, provided for them when they entered the room. They were also asked not to put their names any where on these pages. This was also done for the sake of anonymity. This process was repeated for both groups. The responses were then put into a scale which ranged from 0-4; a zero score means one of he critical words form the lists were remembered, and one point for every critical word that is remembered, if the participants received a four, they recalled all of the possible critical words. These results were analyzed for significance using paired t-tests from the SPSS computer program provided by UNC Charlotte.

Some topics in this essay:
Charlotte Results, Roediger McDermott, Carolina Charlotte, Deese/Roediger McDermott, Jacoby McDermott, Kaplan Manicavasagar, Mc Dermot, Roberts Seamon, Paradigm Visually, critical word, false memories, Method Participants, drm paradigm, critical words, roediger mcdermott, significant difference, false memory, word lists, recall critical, false memory production, psychology department, deese/roediger mcdermott paradigm, roediger mcdermott 2001, recall critical word, critical word remembered,