False recognition with the Deese-Roediger-McDermott-Reid-Solso procedure: a quantitative summary.

ABSTRACTWe used the Fuzzy-Trace Theory (FTT) perspective to investigate the role of context switching or reinstatement on correct and false recognition in Deese–Roediger–McDermott (DRM) and simple false memory for occurrence (FMO) tasks. In two experiments, participants studied words presented against unique picture backgrounds. The results indicated that providing specific item-context associative information in the reinstated-context test condition enhances verbatim trace retrieval of targets but does not influence their gist retrieval. In the case of false recognitions of related distracters, manipulations of retrieval context resulted in different effects across experiments, putatively because the DRM and FMO tasks involve different latent-processes implied by FTT. The results confirmed the critical role of retrieval conditions for false and correct recognition memory and showed the insights that can be gained from the process-level multinomial modelling analyses of data obtained in particular experimental paradigms.

High-resolution space-borne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images are important sources of information for marine monitoring and target recognition. For inshore port scenes, there is a wide variety of ship targets; moreover, as the scattering intensity of the land background is much higher than that of the sea surface, similar structures on land in SAR images can cause significant interference to the identification of ship targets, resulting in a high false alarm rate and false recognition rate. Therefore, the classification of ship targets in SAR images still requires professional interpretation and correction to eliminate possible false alarms and recognitions. In this paper, by imitating the basic structural requirements for manual discrimination of target categories, a space-borne SAR high-resolution inshore ship classification and correction method of “Pre-recognition – Fine Recognition – Matching Correction” is designed based on the YOLO recognition network. Taking three types of typical ship targets as examples, a high-resolution SAR inshore ship target dataset and a high-resolution SAR ship component architecture dataset are constructed to train the pre-recognition network and the fine recognition network respectively. The latter is based on the former to recognize the component composition of possible targets, and forms a component arrangement architecture vector. The final recognition results are obtained by matching and correcting the similarity distance with the three types of targets. This method can reduce the false alarm rate in ship target recognition in complex inshore port scenes to less than 10% and correct some false recognition results, thereby improving the accuracy of ship target identification and reducing the cost for manual correction.

Older adults are more prone to false recognition than younger adults, particularly when new information is semantically related to old information. Curiosity, which guides information-seeking behavior and has beneficial effects on memory across the life span, may offer protection against false recognition, but this hypothesis has not been tested experimentally to date. The current study investigated the effect of curiosity on correct and false recognition in younger and older adults (total N = 102) using a trivia paradigm. On Day 1 of the study, participants encoded trivia questions and answers while rating their curiosity levels. On Day 2, participants completed a surprise old/new recognition test in which they saw the same trivia questions. Half of the questions were paired with old (correct) answers, and half were paired with new (incorrect) answers. New answers were either semantically related or unrelated to correct answers. For both age groups, curiosity at encoding was positively associated with correct recognition. For older adults, semantically related lures produced more false recognition than unrelated lures. However, this effect was mitigated by curiosity, such that older adults were less likely to endorse semantically related lures for high- versus low-curiosity questions. Overall, these results extend prior findings of curiosity-related memory benefits to the domain of recognition memory, and they provide novel evidence that curiosity may protect against false memory formation in older adults.

When a person processes a list of items in a survival context, true and false memory for the items increase. We propose a theoretical explanation for these findings using fuzzy trace theory (FTT). According to FTT, memories are stored in parallel as verbatim and gist traces where verbatim traces represent surface details and gist traces represent semantic content. Verbatim traces support true memories, while gist traces support both true and false memories. FTT predicts that deep processing creates stronger gist traces than shallow processing. This is because deep processing emphasizes the shared meaning of the items in a list. Hence, survival processing likely strengthens gist traces because it requires meaningful processing of how much items adhere to the shared function of aiding survival. Therefore, that survival processing increases true and false memory is consistent with FTT. We also discuss FTT’s predictions of developmental differences in survival processing.

Age-related changes in neural activity associated with familiarity, recollection and false recognition.

Are children’s memory illusions created differently from those of adults? Evidence from levels-of-processing and divided attention paradigms

Older adults consistently show elevated rates of false recognition of new items that are related to studied items. This finding has been largely attributed to a greater tendency for older adults to rely on conceptual gist during memory recognition tasks. However, perceptual factors may also be implicated considering that related items are not only conceptually but also perceptually similar. While some findings do suggest that age-related increases in false recognitions can be driven by perceptual factors, little is known about the nature and circumstances under which these factors operate. To address this gap, we measured basic visual ability as well as false recognition for four different image categories (upright faces, inverted faces, chairs, houses) in younger (n = 34) and older (n = 34) adults. Each image category represented different levels of variability in perceptual similarity and pre-experimental exposure. Perceptual similarity was objectively defined on the basis of the low-level properties of the images. We found evidence that perceptual similarity can contribute to elevated rates of false recognition in older adults. Our results also suggest that declines in basic visual abilities influence elevated false recognition in older adults for perceptually similar but not perceptually dissimilar items. We conclude that both perceptual and conceptual similarity can drive age-related differences in false recognition.

False memory illusions have been widely studied using the Deese/Roediger-McDermott paradigm (DRM). In this paradigm, participants study words semantically related to a single nonpresented critical word. In a memory test critical words are often falsely recalled and recognized. The present study was conducted to measure the levels of false recognition for seventy-five Spanish DRM word lists that have multiple critical words per list. Lists included three critical words (e.g., HELL, LUCEFER, and SATAN) simultaneously associated with six studied words (e.g., devil, demon, fire, red, bad, and evil). Different levels of forward associative strength (FAS) between the critical words and their studied associates were used in the construction of the lists. Specifically, we selected lists with the highest FAS values possible and FAS was continuously decreased in order to obtain the 75 lists. Six words per list, simultaneously associated with three critical words, were sufficient to produce false recognition. Furthermore, there was wide variability in rates of false recognition (e.g., 53% for DUNGEON, PRISON, and GRATES; 1% for BRACKETS, GARMENT, and CLOTHING). Finally, there was no correlation between false recognition and associative strength. False recognition variability could not be attributed to differences in the forward associative strength.

Recent research on item-method directed forgetting demonstrates that forget instructions not only decrease recognition for targets, but also decrease false recognition for foils from the same semantic categories as targets instructed to be forgotten. According to the selective rehearsal account of directed forgetting, this finding suggests that remember instructions may engage elaborative rehearsal of the category-level information of items. In contrast to this explanation, Reid and Jamieson (Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology / Revue canadienne de psychologie expérimentale, 76(2), 75-86, 2022) proposed that the differential rates of false recognition may emerge at retrieval when foils from "remember" and "forget" categories are compared to traces in memory. Using MINERVA S, an instance model of memory based on MINERVA 2 that incorporates structured semantic representations, Reid and Jamieson successfully simulated lower false recognition for foils from "forget" categories without assuming rehearsal of category-level information. In this study, we extend the directed forgetting paradigm to categories consisting of orthographically related nonwords. Presumably participants would have difficulty rehearsing category-level information for these items because they would have no pre-experimental knowledge of these categories. To simulate the findings in MINERVA S, we imported structured orthographic representations rather than semantic representations. The model not only predicted differential rates of false recognition for foils from "remember" and "forget" categories, but also predicted higher rates of false recognition overall than what was observed for semantic categories. The empirical data closely matched these predictions. These data suggest that differential rates of false recognition due to remember and forget instructions emerge at retrieval when participants compare recognition probes to traces stored in memory.

The cognitive neuroscience of memory distortion.

Age differences in hippocampal activation during gist-based false recognition

Dual Task Demands and Gist-Based False Recognition of Pictures in Younger and Older Adults

Older adults show elevated false alarm rates on recognition memory tests involving faces in comparison to younger adults. It has been proposed that this age-related increase in false facial recognition reflects a deficit in recollection and a corresponding increase in the use of familiarity when making memory decisions. To test this hypothesis, we examined the performance of 40 older adults and 40 younger adults on a face recognition memory paradigm involving three different types of lures with varying levels of familiarity. A robust age effect was found, with older adults demonstrating a markedly heightened false alarm rate in comparison to younger adults for "familiarized lures" that were exact repetitions of faces encountered earlier in the experiment, but outside the study list, and therefore required accurate recollection of contextual information to reject. By contrast, there were no age differences in false alarms to "conjunction lures" that recombined parts of study list faces, or to entirely new faces. Overall, the pattern of false recognition errors observed in older adults was consistent with excessive reliance on a familiarity-based response strategy. Specifically, in the absence of recollection older adults appeared to base their memory decisions on item familiarity, as evidenced by a linear increase in false alarm rates with increasing familiarity of the lures. These findings support the notion that automatic memory processes such as familiarity remain invariant with age, while more controlled memory processes such as recollection show age-related decline.

When old/new recognition memory is tested with equal numbers of studied and nonstudied items and no rewards or instructions that favour one response over the other, there is no obvious reason for response bias. In line with this, Canadian undergraduates have shown, on average, a neutral response bias when we tested them on recognition of common English words. By contrast, most subjects we have tested on recognition of richly detailed images have shown a conservative bias: they more often erred by missing a studied image than by judging a nonstudied image as studied. Here, in an effort to better understand these materials-based bias effects (MBBEs), we examined changes in hit and false alarm (FA) rates (and in sensitivity and bias) from the first to fourth quartile of a recognition memory test in eight experiments in which undergraduates studied words and/or images of paintings. Response bias for images tended to increase across quartiles, whereas bias for words showed no consistent pattern across quartiles. This pattern could be described as an increase in the MBBE over the course of the test, but the underlying patterns for hits and FAs are not easily reconciled with this interpretation. Hit rates decreased over the course of the test for both materials types, with that decline tending to be steeper for images than words. For words, FA rates tended to increase across quartiles, whereas for paintings FA rates did not increase across quartiles. We discuss implications of these findings for theoretical accounts of the MBBE.

This article reports two experiments in which the pattern of false recognition is examined following incidental learning involving either semantically or non-semantically oriented processing tasks. Experiment 1 demonstrates that more false recognitions were made to semantic as opposed to non-semantic distractors when the initial orientation was semantic whilst the reverse was found when initial orientation was non-semantic. Experiment 2 replicates this effect and, in addition, shows that false recognition rates to completely unrelated distractors were significantly lower than those made to distractors related to the unspecified dimension in both semantic and non-semantic orienting conditions. The results are seen as supporting the basic assertion of the levels of processing approach by demonstrating that tasks ostensibly addressed to different processing domains give rise to memory traces that differ qualitatively in structure. The results of Expt 2, however, suggest that orienting tasks do not wholly restrict processing to the dimension specified by their overt demands. The failure of some earlier studies to demonstrate a clear relationship between initial orienting task and the pattern of false recognition responses is attributed to methodological problems.