Deck 8: False Memory

Question 1

Hyman and Pentland (1996) conducted a study using the false memory induction procedure.They found that:

A)only 25% of participants wound up elaborating and describing new details to events that never happened.
B)all participants showed some evidence of false memories.
C)only participants with a history of trauma showed false memories.
D)only participants with a history of brain damage showed false memories.

Answer 1

A

Question 2

Memories with strong sensory details and strong emotional characteristics tend to be:

A)auto-associative memories.
B)autobiographical memories.
C)false memories.
D)true memories.

Answer 2

D

Question 3

A researcher repeatedly asks a participant about slipping and breaking his father's computer when the participant was a child.The researcher knows that this event never occurred, having spoken with the participant's father.What technique does this most resemble?

A)The DRM procedure
B)The misinformation effect
C)Imagination inflation
D)False memory induction procedure

Answer 3

D

Question 4

The term "false memory" refers to:

A)perceptual information that is mistaken for lexical memory.
B)memories that people have which do not correspond to events as they actually happened.
C)memories that correspond to encoding rather than retrieval.
D)memories that are inhibited and seldom are retained.

Question 5

In the false memory induction procedure, the experimenters ask participants:

A)to engage in "trance writing."
B)if they have ever experienced known false memories.
C)about their performance on DRM lists.
D)about particular events from their childhood, which in fact, never happened.

Question 6

Suggestibility meAnswer:

A)the ability to convert episodic memories into semantic memories.
B)the inability to report memories accurately in legal settings.
C)the ability to encode new information in an accurate manner.
D)the tendency to incorporate suggestions or post-event information into one's memory of an event.

Question 7

The Deese-Roediger-McDermott procedure (DRM) is considered a method for measuring:

A)false memories in a controlled laboratory setting.
B)individual differences in suggestibility.
C)the misinformation effect.
D)traumatic memories.

Question 8

Which is a valid and often-made criticism of the DRM procedure for inducing critical intrusions?

A)Participants seldom recall the false memory they were asked to produce.
B)The false memories observed may be unlike false memories for real-world trauma.
C)The critical intrusions only occur for items in the recency portion of a serial-position curve.
D)When participants are made aware of the possibility of false memories, there is a slight decrease in the number of intrusions.

Question 9

Gilligan remembers 10 aspects of a witnessed crime, but two of them are false.Maryanne remembers only 5 aspects of the witness crime, but all are correct.Which of these statements is correct?

A)Gilligan recalls a greater amount from memory, but Maryanne's memory is more accurate.
B)Gilligan would make a better witness in court proceedings.
C)Gilligan has a greater correspondence coefficient, but Maryanne is more suggestible.
D)Gilligan probably suffers from post-traumatic syndrome disorder, whereas Maryanne probably did not have a traumatic experience.

Question 10

Correspondence means that:

A)a memory has not been properly encoded.
B)recollective experience matches the actual event that actually occurred in the past.
C)a false memory has occurred.
D)a flashbulb memory is likely to occur.

Question 11

Some psychotherapeutic techniques, such as "guided imagery" may lead to:

A)the formation of flashbulb memories.
B)the induction of childhood amnesia.
C)participants realizing that many of their memories are false.
D)the formation of false memories.

Question 12

In the imagination inflation paradigm, research shows that:

A)in order for a false memory occur, it must be imagined repeatedly.
B)no amount of cueing can induce false memories that concern traumatic events.
C)even imagining an event will increase the likelihood that the event will later be judged to have occurred.
D)false memories occur regardless of economic conditions.

Question 13

The memory researcher, Elizabeth Loftus, has argued that:

A)essentially that almost all memories are fundamentally false.
B)correspondence between an original event and the recollective experience will never match.
C)memory psychologists should not testify in courts of law.
D)most "recovered" repressed memories are actually false.

Question 14

In the DRM procedure, a typical finding is that:

A)false memories occur only for the first item in the list.
B)more recently studied lists yield fewer false memories than lists encoded using the false memory induction.
C)alerting participants to the possibility of false memories increases the likelihood of critical intrusions.
D)longer lists lead to more critical intrusions than shorter lists.

Question 15

Fuzzy-trace theory explains critical intrusions in the DRM method in which way?

A)Items in the DRM method are not encoded in a non-veridical format, leaving them vulnerable to suggestibility.
B)We encode the gist of the list, which includes the critical intrusion, which is then mistaken for a true memory at the time of recall.
C)False memories are the inevitable result of correspondence problems.
D)Suggestibility occurs for all items, but especially for critical intrusions.

Question 16

Mazzoni and Memon (2003) asked participants to imagine plausible events, such as finding money on the seat in a taxicab.When participants returned a week later, they were:

A)more likely to report having experienced false memories during that week.
B)unable to recall imagining the events a week prior.
C)more likely to believe that the event had actually happened to them.
D)unable to shake the feeling of déjà vu.

Question 17

A participant is given a list of word "web, insect, bug, fright, fly, arachnid, crawl, tarantula, poison, bite, creepy, animal, ugly, feelers, small." The participants are then asked to recall the words from the list.Which of the following statements is true?

A)Because the words are emotional, false memories are unlikely to occur.
B)There are so few words that false memories will only occur in amnesiacs.
C)False memories will occur for several of the words.
D)The word "spider" could be considered a critical intrusion.

Question 18

If you false report a memory of an imagined event as really happening, your false memory has arisen because of:

A)source-monitoring problems.
B)suggestibility issues.
C)the correspondence problem.
D)associative structures.

Question 19

Elizabeth Loftus developed the false memory induction procedure because:

A)she was interested in working memory.
B)she knew that people would criticize her misinformation paradigm for its limited ecological validity.
C)she was interested with devising an experimental model for real-world false memories.
D)she wanted to prove that repressed memories really do exist.

Question 20

The term "critical intrusion" refers to:

A)items for which false memories never occur.
B)when participants have reality monitoring errors, they often confuse sensory and perceptual details.
C)the first item on a list, which is more likely to be mistaken for false memories.
D)false memories created by a list in which all of the words are related or associated with an absent but suggested word.

Question 21

One of the advantages of hypnosis is that:

A)it can lead to a reduction in pain in people suffering from chronic pain.
B)it makes more suggestible people less suggestible.
C)it increases the threshold for false memories.
D)it reactivates repressed memories.

Question 22

Williams (1995) tracked women who had been abused and hospitalized as children.She found that:

A)a percentage of those women no longer remembered the abuse.
B)all of the women suffered from repression.
C)with the use of appropriate retrieval techniques, the women recovered their memories.
D)recovery of memories that had been repressed was impossible.

Question 23

Loftus and Zanni (1975) showed a film of an auto accident.They found that:

A)older adults showed higher accuracy in eyewitness memory.
B)failure to retrieve categories resulted in increased false memories.
C)more participants reported a broken headlight when the question was phrased with a "the" than an "a."
D)the memory for the auto accident did not correlate with real-world false memories.

Question 24

Anderson and Green (2001) were interested in repression that could be simulated in the laboratory and modeled on retrieval active suppression.They trained participants on simple word pairs.When the participants had mastered a list of forty word pairs (i.e., improved to the point where they could recall all the target words when given the cue word), they were given what Anderson and Green called a "think/no think" procedure.They found that:

A)the participants showed a rebound effect; they recognized more "no think" items in a memory test one week later.
B)there was a lower false memory rate for suppressed items.
C)the suppressed items were recalled much worse than control items.
D)there was a higher false memory rate for suppressed items.

Question 25

The failure-to-rehearse mechanism for repression means that:

A)painful events are not attended to.
B)painful events, once encoded, are not consciously rehearsed.
C)painful events are rehearsed so much that they lose their connection to retrieval cues.
D)actors will forget their lines if they have not memorized them.

Question 26

Smith and Moynan (2008) were interested in testing the failure-to-rehearse hypothesis.They asked participants to study some neutral categories and some emotional ones.They found that:

A)in the "forget" condition, participants were unable to inhibit category names and their recall was successful.
B)in the "control" condition, the instructions did not lead to better recall of category names.
C)recall of category names was lower in the "forget" condition than in the control condition, especially for emotional categories.
D)repression occurred only when the participants were subjected to traumatic conditions.

Question 27

Scoboria, Mazzoni, and Josee (2008) suggested to participants that they had gotten sick eating peach yogurt as a child.When participants returned the lab one week later, the researchers found that:

A)participants falsely recalled the earlier event.
B)participants expressed an aversion to peach yogurt.
C)participants requested peach yogurt.
D)participants could not remember the hypnotized event.

Question 28

In the misinformation effect, participants witness a simulated crime.Later they receive misinformation about some items, but not others.The general pattern of results is that:

A)participants show reduced memory accuracy for those items that they received misinformation.
B)participants show enhanced memory accuracy for those items that they received misinformation.
C)participants show reduced memory accuracy for control items.
D)people fail to rehearse the misinformation.

Question 29

Anderson et al. (2004) examined retrieval active suppression using an fMRI scanner.They found that:

A)retrieval active suppression did not occur when participants felt ill at ease in the scanner.
B)retrieval suppression was associated with regions in the occipital lobe.
C)retrieval suppression was associated with a decrease in activity in the hippocampus.
D)retrieval suppression was associated with an increase in activity in the hippocampus.

Question 30

In the trace-impairment view of the misinformation effect,

A)the misinformation creates a second memory and participants have source-monitoring difficulties.
B)the misinformation is detected and removed by retrieval active suppression.
C)fuzzy-trace models provide a means for improving memory performance.
D)the misinformation replaces the memory for the original event.

Question 31

After a film, participants were asked one of five questions.The five questions were: -How fast were the cars going when they smashed each other?
-How fast were the cars going when they collided with each other?
-How fast were the cars going when they bumped each other?
-How fast were the cars going when they hit each other?
-How fast were the cars going when they contacted each other?
They found that:

A)estimates of speed were affected by word choice.
B)when the words "smashed" or "collided" were used, participants had more false memories.
C)when the words "hit" or "contacted" were used, participants had fewer false memories.
D)participants were so rattled by the film that most reported no memory of the accident.

Question 32

Smith and Moynan (2008) found that when they supplied the category names to participants at time of test:

A)participants could recall items from categories they had not recalled earlier.
B)participants could not recall the items in a category if they had not recalled the category earlier.
C)participants could only recall categories-the items were all repressed.
D)participants had many false memories for the emotional categories.

Question 33

In the coexistence view of the misinformation effect,

A)the misinformation replaces the memory for the original event.
B)hypnosis renders the memory untraceable.
C)retrieval active suppression is inevitable.
D)the misinformation creates a second memory and participants have source-monitoring difficulties.

Question 34

Repression can be defined as the:

A)the inhibition of retrieval.
B)the process whereby hypnotic suggestions are made during recovery.
C)the recovery of false memories during psychotherapy.
D)forgetting of highly emotional memories, usually from childhood.

Question 35

Research on hypnosis and memory suggests that:

A)under hypnosis, memory is 100% accurate.
B)hypnosis increases the likelihood of false memories.
C)there is no relation between the amount of recalled material and hypnosis.
D)when done properly, hypnosis eliminates childhood amnesia.

Question 36

What factor is considered a factor in both false memories and in failures of eyewitness memory?

A)suggestibility
B)retrieval active suppression
C)fuzzy-trace memories
D)hypnotic suggestions

Question 37

Retrieval Active suppression means that:

A)people fail to rehearse painful items.
B)people may deliberately force themselves to not remember the item.
C)hypnotic suggestions are used to induce false memories.
D)the false memory induction procedure will be unable to work.

Question 38

In McCloskey and Zaragoza (1985), the misinformation effect did not occur because:

A)the distractors in a recognition test did not include the misinformation.
B)the researchers used neutral words instead of emotional words.
C)the participants were warned about the possibility of misinformation.
D)blending of the original event and the misinformation occurred.

Question 39

Geraerts, Raymaekers, and Merckelbach (2008) found that spontaneous sudden memories are:

A)more likely to be correlated with documented histories of abuse.
B)less likely to be correlated with documented histories of abuse.
C)more likely to be false memories than those recovered gradually during therapy.
D)sometimes associated with hypnotic induction.

Question 40

In the misinformation effect, post-event information can:

A)lead to greater accuracy in recall.
B)mislead or distort the memory of the original event.
C)reduce categorization errors in participants.
D)lead to false memories of items not in the category.

Question 41

McCloskey and Zaragoza presented two choices, an object seen in the original event (i.e., a Coke can) and the object suggested in the misinformation (i.e., a Budweiser can).In the second condition, McCloskey and Zaragoza presented the object from the original event (i.e., the Coke can) with a distractor that was not part of the misinformation (i.e., a 7-Up can).They found that:

A)people got thirsty during the experiment.
B)false memories occurred only for the imagination inflation items.
C)when the recognition test did not include the misinformation item, participants were equally accurate as when no misinformation was presented.
D)when the recognition test did not include enough distractors, accuracy decreased dramatically.

Question 42

If you false report a memory of an imagined event as really happening, your false memory has arisen because of Source-monitoring problems.

Question 43

The Deese-Roediger-McDermott procedure (DRM) is considered a method for measuring false memories in a controlled laboratory setting.

Question 44

Wade, Green, and Nash (2010) showed that after having viewed fabricated videotapes:

A)participants were more likely to sign documents claiming they had witnessed a behavior (cheating) that they actually did not see
B)participants were less likely to sign documents claiming they had witnessed a behavior (cheating) that they actually did not see
C)participants were less likely to alert authorities that they had witnessed a behavior (cheating) that they actually did not see.
D)participants were more likely to ask for high-calorie foods than participants who had not seen fabricated videotapes.

Question 45

Geraerts, Raymaekers, and Merckelbach (2008) found that spontaneous sudden memories are more likely to be correlated with documented histories of abuse.

Question 46

Betty remembers the time that the Hulk rescued New York City from aliens.It was a scary experience for her, and she is glad the Hulk is out there.Which of the following statement about her memory is likely to be true?

A)Betty incorrectly remembers the Hulk's skin color.
B)Betty is highly suggestible and may have source-monitoring problems.
C)Betty is someone for whom the cognitive interview might not work.
D)Betty would likely have few critical intrusions on the DRM procedure.

Question 47

The cognitive interview finds that closed questions lead to high accuracy and lots of information recalled.

Question 48

Which of these are problems in conducting cognitive interviews?

A)the methods used in cognitive interviews lower the accuracy of recall
B)the cognitive interview is only useful when interrogating suspects
C)the cognitive interview requires the monitoring of brain waves to ensure honesty
D)many police officers interrupted and asked more directed questions while trying to use the cognitive interview

Question 49

Research shows that the cognitive interview:

A)can bias witness reports in such a way as to guarantee accurate line-up performance.
B)is an effective method for creating false memories.
C)leads to increased accuracy, although the amount does not increase.
D)boosts the amount recalled by a willing eyewitness by about 30%

Question 50

Smith and Moynan (2008) found that when they supplied the category names to participants at time of test, participants forgot a great number of items from categories they had not recalled earlier.

Question 51

The cognitive interview finds that:

A)open-ended questions lead to high accuracy and lots of information recalled.
B)biased questions reduce accuracy without compromising the amount of information.
C)retrieval conditions do not matter for eyewitness situations.
D)repressed memories will be recovered most often during cognitive interviews.

Question 52

One of the advantages of hypnosis is that it can lead to a reduction in pain in people suffering from chronic pain.

Question 53

In the misinformation effect, participants witness a simulated crime.Later they receive misinformation about some items, but not others.The general pattern of results is that participants show greater memory accuracy for those items that they received misinformation.

Question 54

In McCloskey and Zaragoza (1985), the misinformation effect did not occur because the distractors in a recognition test did not include the misinformation.

Question 55

Which of these variables lowers but does not eliminate critical intrusions in the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) procedure?

A)encoding instructions that focus on distinctiveness
B)presenting longer lists.
C)presenting pictures instead of words.
D)both (b) and (c) are correct.

Question 56

Clancy (1995) found that people who believed that they were abducted by space aliens:

A)were suffering from severe psychiatric problems, such as schizophrenia.
B)were actually less likely to have false memories in the DRM paradigm than other participants.
C)came to believe that sleep-paralysis experiences were not dreams, but had really happened.
D)invariably lying to get media attention.

Question 57

Suggestibility is never considered a factor both in false memories and in failures of eyewitness memory.

Question 58

Which of the following statements concerning Susan Clancy's (1995) research on people who remember being abducted by space aliens is false?

A)Abductees insisted that their memories are true.
B)Abductees have similar psychological profiles to normal controls, and that they do not have a higher rate of psychiatric illness than does a control population.
C)Abductees were more likely to show memory illusions than control populations.
D)Abductees show very low scores on scales used to measure susceptibility relative to controls.

Question 59

Williams (1995) tracked women who had been abused and hospitalized as children.She found that a percentage of those women easily remembered the abuse for a long period of time.

Question 60

Which of the following is not used in the cognitive interview?

A)hypnosis
B)context reinstatement
C)open-ended questions
D)different temporal patterns

Question 61

One of the advantages of ______ is that it can lead to a reduction in pain in people suffering from chronic pain.

Question 62

A researcher repeatedly asks a participant about slipping and breaking his father's computer when the participant was a child.The researcher knows that this event never occurred, having spoken with the participant's father resembles the false memory induction procedure.

Question 63

Elizabeth Loftus developed the false memory ______ procedure because she was interested with devising an experimental model for real-world false memories.

Question 64

Research shows that the ______ interview can boost the amount recalled by a willing eyewitness.

Question 65

Describe the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) procedure.

Question 66

Repression can be defined as the forgetting of highly emotional memories, usually from childhood.

Question 67

Wade, Green, and Nash (2010) showed that after having viewed fabricated videotapes participants were less likely to sign documents claiming they had witnessed a behavior (cheating) that they actually did not see.

Question 68

The trace ______ view is also a theory that explains the misinformation effect.

Question 69

If you false report a memory of an imagined event as really happening, your false memory has arisen because of ______ monitoring problems.

Question 70

Explain the "Fuzzy-Trace" theory.

Question 71

Hypnosis is always best used in the cognitive interview.

Question 72

Anderson et al. (2004) examined ______ suppression using an fMRI scanner.They found that retrieval suppression was associated with a decrease in activity in the hippocampus.

Question 73

Retrieval active ______ means that people may deliberately force themselves to not remember the item.

Question 74

A valid and often-made criticism of the DRM procedure for inducing critical intrusions is that false memories ______ may be unlike false memories for real-world trauma.

Question 75

Retrieval Active suppression means that people may deliberately force themselves to not remember the item.

Question 76

Describe critical intrusion.

Question 77

Describe the false memory induction procedure.

Question 78

The ______ hypothesis is a theory that explains the misinformation effect.

Question 79

Failure to rehearse is a theory is a theory that explains ______.

Question 80

Explain active suppression and what action it deliberately forces.