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Updated: Jun 6, 2026

Using a Classroom-Based Deese Roediger McDermott Paradigm to Assess the Effects of Imagery on False Memories
Published on: November 14, 2018
Photographs cause false memories for the news
Deryn Strange1, Maryanne Garry, Daniel M Bernstein
1John Jay College of Criminal Justice, New York, NY 10019, USA. dstrange@jjay.cuny.edu
Abstract:
What is the effect on memory when seemingly innocuous photos accompany false reports of the news? We asked people to read news headlines of world events, some of which were false. Half the headlines appeared with photographs that were tangentially related to the event; others were presented without photographs. People saw each headline only once, and indicated whether they remembered the event, knew about it, or neither. Photos led people to immediately and confidently remember false news events. Drawing on the Source Monitoring Framework (Johnson, Hashtroudi, & Lindsay, 1993), we suggest that people often relied on familiarity and other heuristic processes when making their judgments and thus experienced effects of the photos as evidence of memory for the headlines.
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