A Study On False Memory From The Life-span Perspective

False memory is a psychological phenomenon that the individual memory is diverged from the memory facts. It’s normal in our daily life. Among all the factors that influence false memory, few studies have been made concerning about the effect of presentation modality and item-specific processing. Besides, most existing researches mainly focus on younger adults and little attention has been paid to children and the elderly. This thesis mainly aims to offer a study on the role of presentation modality and item-specific processing in children, younger adults and the old people’s false memory in the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm.In Experiment1, we administer a recognition task to test the presentation modality effect on children (N=30,10-12years), younger adults (N=30,19-26years) and older adults (N=30,60-83years). Experiment2is based on Experiment1, aiming to examine the influence of item-specific processing on false memory, as well as the functional mechanism. In addition, we also test the interaction of the modality effect and the item-specific processing. The results of the two experiments can be summarized as follows.(1) The rate of false recognition of children is significantly lower than that of adults, but no remarkable difference is seen between younger and older adults.(2) Auditory study leads to more false recognition than visual in children and younger adults, but the difference is not significant in older adults.(3) Item-specific processing raises both correct and false memory in younger adults, and the effect is smaller in children and older adults.(4) There is no interaction between modality effect and the item-specific processing.(5) Both encoding and activation process contribute to the item-specific processing effect.