Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm
The Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm ( DRM for short ) is a paradigm from cognitive psychology . The findings of the DRM are based on laboratory experiments on the subject of cognitive distortion in memory and have established themselves in memory research.
James Deese
The American psychologist James Deese developed a memory experiment in 1959 in which test subjects were read out word lists with 12 different words each. These lists contained words (so-called "present words" or "items") such as "injection", "pointed" and "pain", but not the connotative word "needle" (so-called "critical lures") or critical words). After giving the list, the participants had to remember as many words as possible. They were given a new list with now more than 12 words and had the task of marking those words that they were sure they had heard before. The words actually present as well as the critical words appeared in this new list.
The analysis of the results showed that 44% of the words that were not read out were mentioned as remembered. One speaks here of a so-called intrusion error. Deese concluded from this that the critical words triggered an activation of the associative memory and resulted from the close semantic association of the present and non-present words. One speaks here of a memory falsification .
Henry L. Roediger and Kathleen B. McDermott
The findings from Deese's experiment, however, met with little social interest in his time. It wasn't until the American psychologists Henry L. Roediger and Kathleen B. McDermott took up and modified the experiments in 1995 that the breakthrough came. They selected 6 word lists from Deese's previous experiment and then developed another experiment with the same focus.
During the first round, 6 word lists with 12 words each were read out to the participants. As with Deese, these words were semantically similar (example: “bed”, “pillow”, “blanket”, but not the word “sleep”). The participants were advised to memorize as many words as possible and the word lists were again presented orally.
Immediately afterwards, the participants were asked to take a recognition test. In this test, all the words in the word list were listed, as well as the non-present words. The task was to evaluate the list. If, for example, the word "bed" was on the list, the participants had to express their conviction in points ("1 = I am sure the word was not spoken before" to "4 = I am sure the word was spoken") ).
Again, 40% of the critical, non-present words were erroneously remembered by the test subjects and they were convinced that they had heard these words beforehand.
In the second experiment, Roediger and McDermott created 16 lists of their own with now 15 words per list.
While they were listening to the words, a noise (e.g., a knock or a sound) followed. This sound always appeared in a random order and meant that, depending on the sound, the participants either had to remember and write down what they had heard or solve a math problem.
This procedure was followed by a “remember-know-judgment test”.
The participants were asked whether they really remember the words they remembered and can reconstruct the moment they heard them, or whether they just think they can remember and can no longer reconstruct the situation.
In 55% of the lists, the critical words were incorrectly remembered.
Conclusions
Deese, Roediger and McDermott demonstrated high rates of intrusions and false recognition with a high degree of subjective certainty. It reinforces the belief that associations in memory lead to memory errors when learning words. The more the normal words resemble the critical words, the higher the chance that the critical word will be mistakenly mentioned as remembered. This creates an illusion of memory. One model that is used to explain these results is the activation monitoring theory. It is assumed that an automatic activation spread takes place in the semantic network and spreads to nodes with related content (e.g. words). Since the similarity of the present words and the non-present words is strong, the node of the target concept is falsely activated in the memory. Precisely because the participants were asked to rate their convictions on a scale at the end and still insist on what they said, this model of memory research is particularly important for law .
See also
literature
- James Deese: The Structure of Associations in Language and Thought Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore 1965
- Henry L. Roediger, Kathleen B. McDermott: Creating False Memories: Remembering words not presented in Lists. In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition. , 1995
- Jason M. Watson, Kathleen B. McDermott, David A. Batola: Attempting to avoid false memories in the Deese / Roediger — McDermott paradigm: Assessing the combined influence of practice and warnings in young and old adults., In: Memory and Cognition, 2004
- Henry L. Roediger, Kathleen B. McDermott: Norms for word lists that create false memories., In: Memory and Cognition, 1999
Individual evidence
- ↑ May / June - Association for Psychological Science. Retrieved June 21, 2017 (American English).