In 1995, Roediger and McDermott revived the Deese (1959) paradigm for creating false memories in a laboratory experiment. Using this procedure, Roediger and McDermott showed that subjects will falsely recall and recognize items from a studied word list that were not shown. The false items were induced by lists of words that are strongly associated to the critical item (e.g., falsely recall “sleep” is given “dream”, “bed”, “rest”, “awake”, etc). Subjects will even report an experience of recalling the context with which the critical item appeared (Payne, Ellie, & Blackwell, 1996).

Roediger and McDermott’s (1995) study has ignited a fevered interest in experimentally induced false memory. One issue is if subjects will exhibit implicit false memory. The tasks used in many experimental studies of false memory involve explicit memory. Explicit memory involves intentional retrieval of a past episode. Tasks such as recognition or recall rely on explicit memory because the subject is asked to remember items from a list they studied to perform the task. Conversely, implicit memory does not involve intentional retrieval of an episode. Instead, task performance is influenced by previous episodes automatically. No connection is made for the subject between the task items and previously studied items.

My interest in false memory research focuses on comparing performance on the implicit tasks with performance on comparable explicit memory tasks, developing more critical item lists for more complex studies of false memory, and comparing forgetting for real and false memories.