Investigating the Relations Among Different Measures of False Memory

Researchers have used the term false memory to describe various memory errors, including the incorporation of erroneous information into a memory, misremembering a word presented as a picture, and the construction of a detailed memory of an event that did not occur. Whether such diverse manifestations of false memory are assessing the same construct has not been evaluated. The purpose of this study is to examine the relations among a set of variables that have been used in the literature to measure false memory. The sample consisted of 112 college students who completed four false memory measures, including the commonly used Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) and the misinformation tasks. Zero-order correlations indicated that there are little to no associations between false memories in the DRM and the misinformation tasks, as well as the other false memory tasks. A confirmatory factor analysis of the DRM and misinformation variables further suggested that the false memory variables share little variance in common and may not be represented by a unitary factor. Thus, the results of the current study suggest that tasks intended to measure false memory may be measuring different types of memory errors.