Why Do False Memories Occur

False memory has become a very popular topic in the psychological community. False memories occur when you recall an event that did not actually happen. Scientists have been conducting studies to determine whether false memories actually occur and how they occur. In 1995, Henry L. Roediger III and Kathleen McDermott constructed the now widely used Deese–Roediger–McDermott paradigm based on the procedure pioneered psychologist James Deese in 1959. They performed two experiments on 36 Rice University undergraduate students to determine whether false memories actually occur. They tested for false memories through false recall and false recognition experiments. In the first study they presented the students with six lists of twelve words. Each list had a general theme, a critical word that it was associated with, but that critical word was not on the list. For instance, one list contained the words table, sit, seat, legs, desk, arm, rest, stool, cushion, for the critical
Students were presented with 6 lists of 15 words each. After listening to each list we were asked to write down all the words that we remembered. Subsequently, we were given a 36 word recognition test. This test was comprised of 12 correct words, 12 critical non-represented words, and 12 completely unrelated words. Based on the research by Roediger and McDermott I hypothesized that I would find a similarly high percentage of false recall and false recognition items. I expected that at least 30 – 40 percent of my answers would be critical words. However the results were surprising; out of the 15 words on each list, on average I remembered 6.5 correctly, with a high of 10 and a low of 4. However, I did not have any incorrect responses, bringing the percentage of falsely recalled words to 0%. On the false recognition test I had 9/12 correct words, 1/12 critical non-represented words, and 0/12 unrelated words. The full results are shown