Individual differences in false memories in the Deese–Roediger–McDermott Paradigm: An attention control account

Abstract

This study examined the underlying mechanisms of false memories observed in the Deese–Roediger–McDermott (DRM) paradigm. Previous work indicates that greater working memory capacity (WMC) and inhibition are associated with lower susceptibility to such false memories. We hypothesized that this may be, due to the closely related construct of attention control. We examined if individual differences in attention control accounted for variance in susceptibility to false memories, above and beyond inhibition and WMC alone. Using a standard DRM procedure in an individual differences approach to examine how WMC, inhibition, and attention control contribute to false word recognition on the DRM task. Our results indicate that attention control accounts for unique variance in susceptibility to the false memories above and beyond that of WMC and inhibition, suggesting that attention control may be more directly related to the true underlying mechanisms behind false memories.