Self-reference Effect In False Memory And Its Mechanism

Eyewitness testimony based on false memory would put innocent people into prison. False memory has great influence on people’s daily life. Since Roediger and McDermott established DRM paradigm in 1995, a lot of research focused on the mechanisms of false memory. After reviewing the literature, we found that false memory and true memory are co-variant under certain conditions. For instance, after manipulating levels of processing, it can be observed that the deeper level of processing is, the higher level of both true and false memory are. It can also be observed in people with highly superior autobiographical memory that they achieve not only high rate of true recognition but also high rate of false recognition in the misinformation paradigm. The co-variation of false and true memory suggests that there are shared mechanisms at some point under false and true memory.An extensive literature has demonstrated that encoding information in a self-referential manner enhances subsequent memory performance. This self-reference effect is generally elicited in multiple paradigms. Klein and Loftus (1988) developed a dual-processing explanation of self-referent encoding. They emphasized that both elaborative and organizational processes are involved in the self-referential facilitation in true memories. However, a number of prior research has demonstrated that organizational processes could induce high level of false memories. It is possible that self-referencing makes people not only better remember what have happened but also creates more illusions that never happen. To our knowledge, almost no research has studied SRE on false memory so far. Hence, the present study tries to answer the two following questions with two experiments:Is there a self-reference effect (SRE) in false memory? If there is, what are the mechanisms under SRE in false memory?Across two experiments, participants were instructed to remember lists of words and complete a following recognition test immediately. In experiment 1, participants viewed DRM lists in blocked order or random order, with one third of DRM lists paired with participants’ own name (self-referential condition), another one third of DRM lists paired with the name of a well-known individual (other-referential condition), and the last paired with a colored block (neutral condition). Participants were told to remember both the words and cues. In test phase, participants were asked to make judgments on whether or not the test items were presented before and a R/K judgment on each test item. The results showed that, when studied in a self-referential manner, the list words were better remembered than in other-referential and neutral conditions. Most importantly, the false recognitions of critical lures were higher in self-referential condition than other-referential and neutral conditions. When list words were presented in a random order, self-referential effect in false memory decreased significantly. In other words, disrupting organizational process reduced false memories cross all conditions, but self-referential effect in false memory did reliably exist.In experiment 2, we manipulated processing task (organizational process vs. elaborative process vs. self-reference) and list type (related vs. unrelated). The results showed that the mechanism of SRE in false memory included both organizational process and elaborative process, in which the former facilitated false memory whereas the latter inhibit false memory. The results from experiment 1 and 2 demonstrate that self-reference could facilitate both true memory and false memory. The influence of self-reference on false memory could be interpreted through the promoted organizational process and elaborative process. The dissociation between recollection and familiarity suggests that recollection and familiarity are two independent systems, and recollection might play a more important role in self-reference processing than familiarity. The present research provides essential new evidence for the adaptive perspective on constructive memory.