By Kelly Bauer, Lindsay Marsh, and Jackie Martin
What are false memories?
 False memories occur when a person believes they saw
something that was never presented to them.
 Types of distracters- normal versus special
 Schemas contribute to false memories
 Prototype study with images of faces(Solso and
McCarthy, 1981)
Hypothesis
 We expected participants would have more false
memories when recalling words than when recalling
images.
 Participants will select more special distracters in the
word condition than the image condition.
Method
Participants
 20 participants from Hanover College
12 Females and 8 Males
 Ethnicity
 19 Caucasians
 1 African American
 Age Range
 19-22

Method
Equipment and Stimuli
 Gateway computers in the Psychology laboratory
 False Memory program written in Java (Krantz, 2010)
 11 Images and words in each of 6 trials
 Special distracter and normal distracters in each set
Method
Procedure
 Informed Consent
 Demographic Questionnaire
 We alternated the order that they completed the
conditions
 Debriefed and dismissed
Results
 We ran 2 x 3 ANOVA with repeated measures
 Main effect for stimulus type, p < .05
 Main effect for distracters (normal and special)versus items
in the sequence, p < .001
 Significant interaction, p < .001
 Post Hoc t-test with Bonferroni Correction
Results
1
0.9
Mean Recognition
0.8
0.7
0.6
0.5
Images
Words
0.4
0.3
0.2
0.1
0
-0.1
On List
Normal Distractors Special Distractors
Discussion
 We expected that participants would have more false
memories with words than images.
 Our hypothesis was supported
 Schemas developed for both words and images– fell for
special distracters in both
 Images -less special distracters in recall because visual
cues help memory
Future Directions
 Limitations
 Some participants complained about the small size of the
images in the recall stage.
 With images, we only studied objects, not other forms of
images.
 Future study
 Make images larger in recall portion
 Study other images, such as faces, to see the difference in
false memories
Questions?