Creating False Memories with Phonologically-related Words under Focused and Divided Attention Conditions

Three experiments investigated the possibility of creating false memories using lists of phonologically-related Farsi words and under conditions of focused and divided attention(at retrieval). In Experiments 1 and 2 with normal children and adults as participants, considerable rates of false recall and false recognition were observed under both focused and divided attention conditions. In Experiment 3 with 12 amnesic elderly participants, false memories were low under focused and moderate under divided attention. The results indicate that phonologically associated words like semantically associated ones may lead to false memories. The findings are discussed in terms of the activation models.