| CLE
| Long-Term Memory
| Deese–Roediger–McDermott False Memory Experiment
In this experiment, you will get the opportunity to experience a common memory error. At this point, the experiment is in a draft form. You will be presented a list of words to recall. At the end of the list of words, you will then be asked to recognize the words in the midst of a list of distracters. The distracters will be of two types, regular distracters and a distracter that is related semantically, linguistically, or conceptually to all of the words on the list. The experiment will be most interested in which type of distracter you recall the most.
The experiment as a simpler structure than many of the others. You will select how many trials you wich to run
and the dependent measure will be the percent chosen for each type of word: in list, distractor, and special distractor.
This experiments is based on:
Roediger, H. L., & McDermott, K. B. (1995). Creating false memories: Remembering words not presented in lists.
Journal of experimental psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 21(4), 803-814.
You can adjust several parameters to design your own version of the experments. The settings are discussed below.
The stimulus settings include the following:
New Study: when the study has been finished, you can press this button to
start a new experiment.
Reset Stimulus: press this button to reset to the default conditions.
Font Size: the size of the letters or numerals.
Background Gray Level: the brightness the background behind the word
from back to white.
Word Position Horizontal (relative): The left/right position of the word relative to the screen
width. The lower the value, the more towards the left.
Word Position Vertical (relative): The up/down position of the word relative to the screen
height. The lower the value the more towards the top.
Word Position Random: The position of the word randomly varies from trial to trial.
The extent of the variation is determined by the Word Position variable above.
Fixation Duration (ms): The duration of the fixation mark.
Trial Delay before Fixation (ms): The duration delay before the fixation mark
and between the words.
Duration of Stimulus (ms): How long each item is shown, or of the items are
shown all at once, the duration of the total item is this value times the number of items in the the
list.
New Study: when the study has been finished, you can press this button to
start a new experiment.
Reset Method: press this button to reset to the default conditions.
Num of Items in List (5-11): Select how many words will be presented to be rememebered.
Num Items during Recognition (6-20): How many items will be presented during
recognition. The original list will make up half of the items.
Number of Trials: How many lists you will you have to remember.
How present list: Should the list be presented one at a time or all at onece.
Number Repeats for List: How many times should you get a list length correct
to be deteremined to be the memory span for that item.
Change the settings below to alter the stimulus parameters in this experiment.
Change the settings below to alter the parameters of the experimental method.
Below, press the spacebar or the Open Experiment Window button on the screen to open the window where the experiment will run. When this screen opens, press the spacebar or click the "Start" button to begin the experiment. There are instructions above the "Start" button. Read them to know how to perform the experiment.
Your data will be presented on the results tab. The x-axis will have the type of item. The y axis is the percentage you recognized of each type of word presented in the recognition phase of the experiment. The x-axis inidicates the type of word presented. To download your trial-by-trial, press the Show Data link. To download the summary data press the Show Summary link. This data will be stored in a csv format readable by most spreadsheet and statistical programs.