Honors Theses
Date of Award
Spring 5-8-2020
Document Type
Undergraduate Thesis
Department
Psychology
First Advisor
Matthew Reysen
Second Advisor
Stefan Schulenberg
Third Advisor
Rebekah Smith
Relational Format
Dissertation/Thesis
Abstract
The purpose of this study is to test whether false memory intrusions occur at a greater rate when participants encode words in a narrative processing scenario, as compared to a survival scenario or a pleasantness condition. In each condition, the participants were presented with one list of words related to an unlisted critical word adapted from Stadler, Roediger, and McDermott’s (1999) norms. For each condition (narrative, survival, and pleasantness), participants read a set of instructions and processed words by writing things related to the condition (i.e., writing a story line using the word, listing how the word would be used to survive, and listing pleasant/unpleasant attributes, respectively). After completing this activity for each scenario with the word lists, they were given an incidental recall test in which they typed out as many words from each list as they could remember. Participants showed no significant differences in either true or false memory across conditions, contrary to our predictions. This result could be due to the relatively small size of the set of usable data attained in the study and would likely have yielded different results had a larger participant pool been used.
Recommended Citation
Spears, Calista, "The Effects of Narrative Processing on False Recall" (2020). Honors Theses. 1413.
https://egrove.olemiss.edu/hon_thesis/1413
Accessibility Status
Searchable text