Hands-on false memories: a combined study with distributional semantics and mouse-tracking

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Neuroscience
• Computational Linguistics

Background:

• Mouse-tracking offers real-time insights into decision-making.
• Understanding decision processes in memory retrieval, especially false memories, is limited.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate decision-making processes in veridical and false memory retrieval using mouse-tracking.
• To predict task performance using distributional semantic models.

Main Methods:

• A mouse-tracking version of the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) task was employed.
• Participants studied word lists and performed a recognition task using mouse movements.
• Distributional semantic models were used to analyze word associations and predict behavior.

Main Results:

• Mouse trajectories were significantly affected by semantic similarity between studied and presented words.
• Increased semantic similarity led to greater choice conflict and trajectory irregularity when rejecting false memories.
• Semantic similarity influenced temporal measures of online decision processes.

Conclusions:

• Semantic similarity impacts human behavior at the motor control level, influencing online decision-making.
• Findings support the role of semantic memory structure in decision-making components.
• The study provides insights into the mechanisms underlying false memory formation and retrieval.