Associative strength or gist extraction: Which matters when DRM lists have two critical lures?

The Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm is often used in the study of false memories. This paradigm typically uses lists of words associated with one critical lure. The primary objective of our study was to understand the production of false memories using the DRM paradigm when lists of words are associated with two critical lures. Three experiments were performed, and it was observed that the critical lures associated with the first set were significantly more frequently recalled than the critical lures associated with the second set. This result was verified when the words were presented in descending order of association with the critical lure (Experiment 1), when the words of the second set were presented in ascending order of association with the critical lure (Experiment 2), and when all the words in the list had the same associative strength (Experiment 3). Results are explained by the activation/monitoring and fuzzy-trace theories.
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This study was conducted at the Psychology Research Centre (UID/PSI/01662/2013), University of Minho, and supported by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology and the Portuguese Ministry of Science, Technology and Higher Education through national funds. Co-financing was provided by FEDER through COMPETE2020 under the PT2020 Partnership Agreement (POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007653).