ENACTMENT AND IMAGINATION ENCODING CREATE FALSE MEMORIES OF SCRIPTED ACTIONS

Abstract

"The present study aims to extend our knowledge about the false memories from an adaptation of the DRM paradigm (Roediger & McDermott, 1995) in order to generate memory errors for everyday life action lists. In this perspective, the standard DRM task has been adapted, replacing the associated word lists with thematically related action lists. Each action list refers to a temporally connected action routine, i.e. a script. The sentences describing actions automatically involve visual and motor simulation of the scene. Therefore, the issue is to know whether the encoding conditions of enactment and motor imagery compared to verbal encoding (as control) impact false memories. Compared to the numerous studies on imagination effects on false memories, the enactment effect on the production of false memories of thematically related actions has not yet been tested. Therefore, we compared three experimental conditions: (1) a control condition, in which participants were asked to hear all lists attentively; (2) an imagery condition, where participants were instructed to visualize themselves performing each action, presented orally; (3) an enactment condition, participants had to mime each action heard as if they really were performing it. Then, without having been warned beforehand, all participants carried out a recognition test. The results confirmed the creation of false memories for associated action lists (scripted actions) and therefore valid this new version of the DRM task. However, false memories were of the same magnitude under all encoding conditions. These findings ask into question the classical models of memory, which assume that enactment and visual imagery should favour distinctive conceptual processing with the consequence of reducing false recognition. However, the field of embodied cognition might provide an alternative hypothesis that merit to be discussed and explored."