Westerberg Carmen E, Marsolek Chad J
Department of Psychology, University of Minnesota, MN, USA.
J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn. 2003 Sep;29(5):747-59. doi: 10.1037/0278-7393.29.5.747.
Signal detection analyses of recognition memory indicate that a bias to respond "old" is large for critical words that are centrally related with previously encoded word lists, is small for words that are less related, and is not observed for unrelated words. Also, recognition sensitivity has not been previously shown to differ between those conditions, which has focused debate over how to explain false recognition on the bias differences. In 3 experiments, critical-word sensitivity was lower than sensitivity for other word types, but related-word sensitivity was not lower than sensitivity for unrelated words. Extant models that predict reduced critical-word sensitivity also predict lower sensitivity for related words than for unrelated words. These results provide crucial new constraints on theoretical explanations of false memories.
识别记忆的信号检测分析表明，对于与先前编码的单词列表核心相关的关键单词，做出“旧的”反应的偏差很大；对于相关性较小的单词，偏差较小；而对于不相关的单词，则没有观察到偏差。此外，之前尚未表明在这些条件下识别敏感性存在差异，这引发了关于如何根据偏差差异来解释错误识别的争论。在3个实验中，关键单词的敏感性低于其他单词类型的敏感性，但相关单词的敏感性并不低于不相关单词的敏感性。预测关键单词敏感性降低的现有模型也预测相关单词的敏感性低于不相关单词的敏感性。这些结果为错误记忆的理论解释提供了至关重要的新限制。
