No effect of stress on false recognition

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Neuroscience
• Stress Research

Background:

• The Deese/Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm demonstrates false recognition, where participants falsely recall non-presented critical lures associated with studied word lists.
• Understanding factors influencing false memory is crucial for cognitive science and legal applications.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the impact of acute psychosocial stress on false recognition within the DRM paradigm.
• To determine if stress levels influence memory errors, specifically false recall of critical lures.
• To examine this effect across different levels of information processing during encoding.

Main Methods:

• Two experiments were conducted, randomly assigning participants to a stress group (Trier Social Stress Test) or a control group.
• Experiment 1 utilized deep encoding (visual imagery), while Experiment 2 used shallow encoding (letter detection).
• Physiological and self-reported stress measures (heart rate, STAI-S) were recorded to confirm stress induction.

Main Results:

• Stress induction was confirmed in the stress group, evidenced by increased heart rate and STAI-S scores.
• Despite successful stress induction, no significant difference in false recognition rates was observed between the stress and control groups.
• The level of processing at encoding (deep vs. shallow) did not alter the relationship between stress and false recognition.

Conclusions:

• Acute psychosocial stress does not appear to heighten susceptibility to DRM false recognition.
• The findings suggest that stress does not impair memory discrimination in this specific false memory paradigm.
• The results hold true irrespective of the depth of information processing during the initial learning phase.