The Influence Of Attention And Warning On High School Students’ False Memory In The DRM Paradigm

Human memory is a dynamic system of changes,not only in the amount of memory,but also in the content of the memory distortion.False Memory,as opposed to correct Memory,is when an individual mistakenly recalls words(events)that did not appear.With the development of cognitive psychology,the phenomenon of false memory has attracted extensive attention of researchers.Therefore,a series of research paradigms applied to laboratory conditions have been developed.Among them,DRM paradigm is a word-based research paradigm,in which the correlation between lexical items and key decoys is a key factor for the occurrence of false memory.At present,researches on false memory using DRM paradigm mainly focus on two aspects: one is the influencing factors of false memory and the other is the generation mechanism of false memory.From the perspective of research objects,it has expanded from college students in the early stage to young children,the elderly,patients with brain injury and other groups(Hao xingchang,2013).However,there are few domestic and foreign literatures to study the false memory of high school students.High school students are at the peak of memory development,and intentional memorization gradually takes the leading role.Previous studies with college students as subjects have mostly concluded the automatic processing characteristics of false memories,that is,the generation of false memories is unconscious.Generally speaking,individuals’ memory of emotional information is better than that of non-emotional information,and focusing on emotional information has stronger biological adaptability for individuals(Bradley &Lang,2007;Lang,2010).Therefore,this paper adopts the classic DRM research paradigm,takes high school students as the research object,adds emotional DRM word list,and discusses whether the false memory of high school students also depends on consciousness processing.Two experiments were conducted to examine the influence factors of false memory and to try to reduce the false memory of high school students from the monitoring aspect.In Experiment 1,using 2(attention state: full attention,divided attention)×3(emotional valence: positive,neutral and negative)of the two factors mixed experimental design,and exploring how emotional words affect false memories under different attention conditions,and whether distraction increases or decreases false memories in high school students,mood word whether have higher false recognitionthan neutral ones.The attention state is the inter-subject variable and the emotional valence is the in-subject variable.The dependent variables are the right recognition rate of learning words and the false recognition rate of critical lure.The results show that the distraction effectively reduces the high school students’ recognition of thecritical lure.The influence of different emotional words on false memory does not change with the change of attention state.With concentrated attention and scattered attention,the false recognition rate of negative words is always the highest.In experiment 2,an early warning was added on the basis of experiment 1,using 2(attention state: full attention,divided attention)×2(warning types: learning phase early warning,the recognition test stage before the warning)× 3(emotional valence: positive,neutral,negative)mixed experimental design of three factors,which pay attention to status and early-warning prompt type for variables between subjects,emotion potency for variables in the subjects.The dependent variable is the same as experiment 1.The results show that the main effect of warning prompt is significant.The warning prompt has a certain monitoring effect on the false memory of high school students.Different from experiment 1,the effect of attention state on false memory was reversed by the addition of warning.For warning information before the learning stage,high school students in the state of full attention would reduce the false recognition of critical lure.The results of this study support the activation monitoring theory.Through the above two experiments,the following conclusions are drawn in this study:(1)The false memories of high school students are caused by associative activation.By distracting their attention in the coding stage,the false recognition of critical lure can be significantly reduced,indicating that the false memories of high school students need more conscious efforts.(2)Regardless of concentration or distraction,the false recognition rate of the negative critical lure always maintained the highest level,but for the positive critical lure and the neutral critical lure,the falserecognition rate of the two was not much different.(3)The influence of attention state on false memory will change according to the change of warning prompt.Under the condition of warning before learning,divided attention will increase the false recognition of critical lure;the opposite is true in the pre-test warning condition.(4)The monitoring effect of warning on the false memory of high school students is only effective under the condition of focused attention;In the case of distraction,even the provision of warning information could not improve the false memory.