False memories across the lifespan – FALSELIFE

There are two types of experiments in this project, the first ones are conducted with children and the second ones are comparisons between young adults and older adults.

In the first part of the project, brief activities implying memory are offered to 4 and 10 years old children. A set of images and words from themes that are known by children (e.g., circus, farm) are visually or orally presented. The children have to maintain them to recognize or recall them a few seconds later. Several studies are conducted with the same kind of task in which the instructions given to the children, the presence or absence of a concurrent task during the retention interval or between the presentation of each memory items, the kind of link between the memory items, the presentation mode of memory items, are varied.

In the second part of the project, tasks requiring to maintain and recall several items while performing a concurrent task are proposed to young adults (18-30 years old) and older adults (60-75 years old). Memory items are semantically related words or images. Several studies are conducted using the same kind of task in which the instructions given to the participants, the level of difficulty of the concurrent task during the retention interval or the possibility to maintain memory items in the phonological loop, are varied.

We are interested in false memories, namely false recognitions or recalls of items semantically related to the memory items but that have never been presented.

In the first part of the project, we expect that children from 4 to 6 years old make more short-term false memories than children from 8 to 10 years old because of the increase of the use of maintenance mechanisms in WM in older children. By contrast, older children should make more long-term false memories than younger children because the first ones have more knowledge and use more working memory maintenance strategies that allow them to maintain the general meaning that links memory items.

In the second part of the project, we expect that short-term false memories do not increase as age increases because some short-term maintenance strategies are preserved during aging. By contrast, we expect that long-term false memories increase with age because of the greater propensity of older adults to use general meaning that links memory items rather than the detail of each of them, to retrieve them in memory.

FALSELIFE has the potential to offer new methods to help people at all stages in childhood and adulthood to resist memory distortions by improving WM maintenance and maximizing verbatim accessibility.

in progress

FALSELIFE addresses what is often described as one of the most fundamental issues in cognitive psychology, namely the relations between working memory (WM) and long-term memory (LTM). The WM-LTM relations are at the heart of human cognition because they sustain how we are able to learn new knowledge and skills, to use previously acquired knowledge, and to maintain autonomous daily life functioning. FALSELIFE addresses this challenge from an innovative perspective by examining the role of WM in the formation of false memories. False memory is well-established LTM phenomenon in which semantically related associates are confidently and falsely remembered as studied items (e.g., Roediger & McDermott, 1995). However, this false memory effect was observed at short delays as well (e.g., Atkins & Reuter-Lorenz, 2008). Recently, we put forward a new theoretical account emphasizing the crucial role of WM maintenance in the emergence of short and long-term false memories (Abadie & Camos, 2018). FALSELIFE’s objective is to better understand the mechanisms underlying false memories by examining how they change across the lifespan. Drawing on our theoretical account, I propose an ambitious and original programme of lifespan studies investigating the role of WM maintenance mechanisms in short and long term false memories. FALSELIFE’s first aim is to examine the formation of false memories from a developmental perspective by comparing false memories in older children that spontaneously use WM maintenance mechanisms and younger children that do not yet use any maintenance strategies (Work Package 1). FALSELIFE’s second aim is to investigate the effect of age-related decline in WM maintenance on the occurrence of false memories (Work Package 2). FALSELIFE has the potential to offer new methods to help people at all stages in childhood and adulthood to resist memory distortions by improving WM maintenance and maximizing verbatim accessibility.