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Related Concept Videos

False Memories01:18

False Memories

False memories represent a cognitive distortion in which individuals recall events that did not happen, or remember them in an altered form. This phenomenon highlights the brain's constructive nature in processing and recalling memories, emphasizing that memory is not a perfect representation of past events but rather a dynamic reconstruction influenced by various factors.
One primary source of false memories is misattribution, where individuals incorrectly associate external information with...
Prosopagnosia01:24

Prosopagnosia

Prosopagnosia, also known as face blindness, is the inability to recognize faces. In severe cases, individuals with prosopagnosia may not recognize close family members, including parents and spouses, by their faces. For instance, someone with prosopagnosia might walk past their child in a crowd, only realizing their mistake upon noticing their child's distinctive backpack or favorite jacket. Prosopagnosia specifically impairs facial recognition, while the recognition of other objects or...
Visual Agnosia01:12

Visual Agnosia

Visual agnosia is a condition characterized by the inability to recognize visually presented objects despite having normal vision. For instance, a person with visual agnosia can describe the shape and color of an object but cannot identify or name it. This impairment does not affect their visual field, acuity, color vision, brightness discrimination, language, or memory. An example of this condition in a social setting is someone at a dinner party asking for "that silver thing with a round end"...
Interference and Decay01:16

Interference and Decay

Forgetting is a complex cognitive phenomenon influenced by several factors, among which interference and decay are particularly prominent. These processes explain why individuals often struggle to retrieve specific information from memory, leading to lapses in recall that can be observed in everyday situations.
Interference occurs when competing memories hinder the retrieval of particular information. It can be classified into two types: proactive and retroactive interference. Proactive...
Eyewitness Memory01:22

Eyewitness Memory

Eyewitness memory refers to the recollection of events by someone who has directly witnessed them, often serving as critical evidence in legal settings. This type of memory is commonly used in criminal cases where a witness describes details like a suspect's appearance, clothing, or behavior during a crime. However, despite its perceived reliability, eyewitness memory is prone to significant errors.
One such error is memory distortion, which occurs because human memory does not function like a...
Forgetting01:21

Forgetting

Forgetting is an intrinsic aspect of human memory, characterized by the gradual loss or inaccessibility of information over time. Hermann Ebbinghaus, a pioneering psychologist, extensively studied this phenomenon and formulated the forgetting curve. This curve illustrates that memory loss occurs rapidly immediately after learning and then decelerates over time. Several mechanisms contribute to forgetting, including encoding failure, storage decay, retrieval failure, and interference.
Encoding...

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Related Experiment Video

Updated: May 8, 2026

The Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) Task: A Simple Cognitive Paradigm to Investigate False Memories in the Laboratory
07:26

The Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) Task: A Simple Cognitive Paradigm to Investigate False Memories in the Laboratory

Published on: January 31, 2017

Recognition memory impairments caused by false recognition of novel objects.

Lok-Kin Yeung1, Jennifer D Ryan, Rosemary A Cowell

  • 1Department of Psychology, University of Toronto.

Journal of Experimental Psychology. General
|August 14, 2013
PubMed
Summary

Memory impairments in older adults may not be due to forgetting, but rather a failure to distinguish similar objects. Novel items are falsely recognized as familiar, especially under high interference conditions.

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The Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) Task: A Simple Cognitive Paradigm to Investigate False Memories in the Laboratory
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Using a Classroom-Based Deese Roediger McDermott Paradigm to Assess the Effects of Imagery on False Memories
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Area of Science:

  • Neuroscience
  • Cognitive Psychology

Background:

  • Amnesia theories often assume memory loss or inaccessibility.
  • Rodent studies suggest interference causes novel information to seem familiar.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To differentiate between forgetting and false recognition in memory impairments.
  • To investigate recognition memory deficits in older adults at risk for mild cognitive impairment (MCI).

Main Methods:

  • Developed an indirect, eyetracking-based passive viewing object recognition task.
  • Distinguished between novel items treated as old versus old items treated as new.
  • Used items with varying degrees of feature overlap (interference levels).

Main Results:

  • Older adults at risk for MCI exhibited false recognition for high-interference novel items.
  • Normal novelty responses were observed for low-interference novel items.
  • Indirect task minimized response bias and decision-making effects.

Conclusions:

  • Recognition memory impairments in this population are driven by a failure to differentiate similar objects.
  • Novel objects are falsely recognized as familiar, not due to forgetting.
  • Findings challenge traditional amnesia theories by highlighting perceptual confusion over memory loss.