Do typical conditions of short-term false recognition experiments yield degraded confusable perceptual representations?
Frederik Aust · OSF Preprints (OSF Preprints) · 2015
In false old-new recognition studies, participants first study a list of items, presented for several seconds at a time, and are then probed with either studied items (targets), stimuli that are similar to the studied items (lures), or stimuli that are dissimilar to the studied items (new distractors). False memory is observed when lures are endorsed as old more frequently than new distractors; this effect has been obtained not only in long-term but also in short-term memory. Note that, when false-recognition effects are studied in short-term memory, much shorter presentation durations (i.e., < 1 s) are typically realized; this raises the question whether such brief durations are sufficient to fully encode stimuli at a perceptual level. In other words, interpreting short-term memory confusions as memory failure assumes that the initial perceptual representations are accurate enough to allow for the discrimination of targets and lures. However, the brief presentation durations in short-term memory studies may instead lead to degraded perceptual representations that render target-lure discrimination difficult even if the memory process proceeds error-free. To investigate this possiblity of confusion at the perceptual level, we tested whether similar lures elicit a stronger sense of identicalness than new distractors when study items are presented for durations typical in previous studies but short-term memory demands are minimal (i.e., the retention interval is less than one second).