Investigating the phenomenological characteristics of false recognition for categorised words

Abstract

Previous research (Dewhurst & Anderson, 1999) has shown that the presentation of multiple items from the same semantic category leads to the false recognition of previously unstudied category members. The present study explored the characteristics of these illusory memories by asking participants to assign each recognised item to either “remember”, “know”, or “guess” response categories and to give verbal descriptions explaining each response. Descriptions of both correct and false remember responses consisted of detailed accounts of images, thoughts, and memories that participants claimed to have experienced at encoding. These findings illustrate the ease with which detailed illusory memories can be created in the laboratory and the difficulty of differentiating between true recollections of actual events and false recollections of events that did not occur.