Misremembering story material

Purpose. In this research we assessed whether after a subtle suggestion, participants could be led to falsely remember that they had experienced certain items on a key list, when in fact those items were taken from stories they had constructed. Method. In three experiments 78 participants created a story either about themselves (Expts 1 and 2) or about their partner (Expt 3). In Session 1 they brought their stories to the experimental session and were presented with a list of words. The next day, in Session 2, they received a subtle suggestion that some 'story' words were on the presented List. One day later, in Session 3, they had a recognition task where list words were mixed with story words, and they tried to recognize the list words. In addition, for each 'recognized' word they gave a remember/know response. Results. In all three experiments when participants falsely recognized their story words and claimed they were list items, they also reported that they genuinely 'remembered' the story items from the list, as opposed to simply 'knowing' that they had been previously presented on the list. These special false alarms occurred not only when participants had generated a story about themselves, but also when they read a story about themselves, or generated a story about another person. Discussion. These findings indicate that self-generation and self-referencing are factors that modify the memory quality of false recognition, so that false recognition has a recollective quality that is as strong as the recollective quality of correct recognitions.