Psy1022 - Psychology 1b Research Proposal

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Procedure

Parents of child participants will be fully informed of the experimental procedures and signed the consent form upon arrival at the university laboratory. Adult participants will be required to sign a consent form, which introduces the study as a list-learning task. The study was presented in the same way to child participants but in a developmentally appropriate manner. The procedure that will be used to carry out this experiment will be in line with the Deese–Roediger–McDermott (DRM) paradigm (Roediger & McDermott, 1995).Each participant will be tested individually. Participants will be read aloud the eight lists at a rate of one word every 1.5 seconds, and then given one minute to recall the words out loud, prior to the next list being read. The number of correctly recalled items are counted and recorded for further analysis.

Results

The proportion of correctly recalled items will be calculated for each age group, as a function of list length. These results will then be tabulated and analysed using 2X2 ANOVA. If these results were to support our hypothesized that children will produce more recall errors compared to adults if adults recall a greater proportion of correct words compared to the children.

Discussion

When are results are collated and analysed, it is expected that adults should correctly recall a greater number of words compared to children, and also both children and adults recall a greater proportion of words from the short lists relative to the long lists. If the expected results are obtained it would support our hypothesized that children will produce more recall errors compared to adults. If the was to be the case this study will be in agreement with other studies such as Ghetti et al.’s that conclude that there are significant age differences in recall of information in adults than in young children (2002). Moreover, this would help explain why children are more prone to false memories than adults.

A lack of relationship between age and false memories may be related to how children process information differently from adults. Some studies have shown that children may in fact be less susceptible to errors than adults because they have an underdeveloped gist trace memory (Kaila C. Bruer, 2014). For example in Ghetti et al.’s study (2002), errors were found to be more phonologically related, while in older children errors were likely to be words that shared meaning (Kaila C. Bruer, 2014).

A limitation in this study is the DRM association lists as this list relies on vocabulary to be effective. When testing children, if the word being tested is not on their vocabulary, they are less likely to falsely recall that item (Sugrue & Hayne, 2006).Furthermore, false memories are believed to arise when individuals retrieve gist representations of an event, thus false memories will be more apparent in the long-list relative to the short lists. This reduces the amount of false memories overall.

This study has real life implications as it could lead to fewer children used because they are vulnerable to false memories (Davies & Pezdek, 2010). Finally, this research will set the stage for further studies on the factors that lead to the increase of the formation of false memories in both adults and children.

WORDS: 1420

Works Cited

Davies, G., & Pezdek, K. (2010). Chapter: Children as witnesses. Leicester: Wiley-Blackwell.

Fazio, L. K., Barber, S. J., Rajaram, S., Ornstein, P. A., & Marsh, E. J. (2013). Creating Illusions of Knowledge: Learning Errors That Contradict Prior Knowledge. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 142(1), 1-5.

Ghetti, S., Qin, J., & Goodman, G. S. (2002). False memories in children and adults: Age, distinctiveness, and subjective experience. Developmental Psychology, 38(5), 705-718.

Kaila C. Bruer, J. D. (2014). Familiarity and recall memory for environments: A comparison of children and adults. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, 35(4), 318–325.

Kroes, M. C., & Fernandez, G. (2012). Dynamic neural systems enable adaptive, flexible memories. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 36(7), 1646-1666.

Loftus, E. F., & Pickrell, J. E. (1995). The Formation of False Memories. Psychiatric Annals, 25(12), 720-725.

Lynn, S. J., Lock, T., Loftus, E. F., Krackow, E., & Lilienfeld, S. O. (2003). The remembrance of things past: Problematic memory recovery techniques in psychotherapy. New York: Guilford Press.

McHugh, P. R. (2008). Try to remember: Psychiatry's clsas over meaning, memory, and mind. New York: Dana Press.

Payne, J. D., Schacter, D. L., Propper, R. E., Huang, L.-W., Wamsley, E. J., Tucker, M. A., et al. (2009). The role of sleep in false memory formation. Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, 92(3), 327-334.

Payne, J. D., Schacter, D. L., Propper, R. E., Huang, L.-W., Wamsley, E. J., Tucker, M. A., et al. (2009, October). The role of sleep in false memory formation. Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, 92(3), 327-334.

Roediger, H. L., & McDermott, K. B. (1995). Creating False Memories: Remembering Words Not Presented in Lists. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition,, 21(5), 803-814.

Sugrue, K., & Hayne, H. (2006). False Memories Produced by Children and Adults in the DRM Paradigm. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 20(5), 625-631.