The Inhibitory Effect Of Imagery Coding On Misleading Information False Memories

There is a phenomenon in daily life called false memory,which refers to the reorganization of recalled events based on personal experience during memory extraction.Researchers have conducted extensive studies to reduce the impact of false memory,and many studies have shown that factors such as the time and method of imagery encoding have an effect on reducing the DRM false memory.However,there are several issues with previous studies:(1)It is uncertain whether the advantage of imagery encoding can also be utilized in event materials in the misinformation paradigm;(2)The image perspective condition is one of the factors that affect imagery encoding,and it is unclear which perspective condition can effectively reduce misinformation false memory;(3)The Retrieval-Enhanced Suggestibility(RES)effect as a new research aspect to suppress false memory,it is unknown whether the way in which imagery encoding under a certain image perspective condition can effectively reduce the false memory caused by misleading information can also be extended to the suppression of RES effect,and provide experimental support for the similarity of the mechanisms of these two effects.This study randomly selected participants from upper-grade elementary students and conducted three experiments to explore the impact of imagery encoding on misleading information interference.In the three experiments,participants watched 13 text descriptions presented in sentence form.Experiment 1 had two conditions,with one group of students using imagery encoding and the other using text encoding.Experiment 2 is designed as a single-factor three-level study,adding the visual perspective condition to the finding of Experiment 1.Experiment 3 further utilized imagery encoding with image perspective conditions and combined it with retrieval practice to explore its impact on final memory performance.The main conclusions of the study are as follows:(1)Compared with text encoding,imagery coding can effectively reduce the interference of misleading information and hence reduce false memory.The imagery coding group had better memory test scores and performance on misleading and consistent items than the text encoding group.(2)The image perspective condition of imagery coding is an important factor that affects the advantage of imagery coding in reducing the misleading effect.The third-person perspective condition of imagery coding can better improve students’ judgment accuracy on the basis of using imagery coding alone,and perform better on misleading and consistent items,indicating that this method helps students better distinguish misleading information from original information,thus exhibiting lower levels of false memory.(3)When combined with retrieval practice,imagery coding can effectively reduce the retrieval enhanced suggestibility effect,thereby proving that learning the specific representation details of the original information is the key to reducing the RES effect.