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Abstract:
Dodhia and Metcalfe (1999) demonstrated inhibition of the
false memory effect, in which a highly related but unpresented
critical item is misremembered as having occurred in a list of
related words, when the critical item of the to-be-remembered list
was actually presented in a second list. This finding of inhibition
is in opposition to the Composite Holographic Associative
Recognition Model (CHARM), as well as other memory models, that
predict that presentation of an item, if anything, should enhance
rather than inhibit false memories. We hypothesized that the
inhibition may have occurred because participants used an exclusion
rule. Because no items repeated from list to list, when an item,
ostensibly from list 1, was presented in list 2, participants might
have inferred that it could not have been present in the first
list. To test this explanation, we manipulated repetition of list
items and placement of critical items in two-list trials. In two
experiments, participants learned two lists and were given
recognition tests. If items from the first list repeated in the
second, an exclusion rule could not be used, and participants were
not able to inhibit false alarms to the list one critical item.
Insofar as this rule is a straightforward addition to models of
memory, such as CHARM, which predict that presentation of the
critical item should result in more false memories, the original
inhibition results are not threatening.
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