Posted: December 27th, 2015

False Memory Illusions

Your paper should have the following sections/subsections. Any line that is italicized contains a task you need to complete (and which you will be scored for according to the rubric).

Discussion

Explanation of Recall and Recognition Results

Relation to Prior Work

Limitations/Caveats

Implications for future work

References

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A break-down of how to complete each section:

Discussion

Explanation of Recall and Recognition Results

              Start with this restatement of our hypothesis. Starting your discussion section with a restatement of your hypothesis helps remind readers what the “goal” of the experiment was to begin with.

“In this experiment, we investigated whether previous participation in a DRM experiment plus full knowledge of the DRM paradigm would lead to reduced rates of false alarms at second test.”

From here describe you will want to re-cap the following results but with an emphasis on description rather than numbers (remember, the Results section is for numbers)

Recall

Results of t-test comparing CLs for Exp 1 and Exp 2

T-test comparing studied words between experiments

You will probably want to relate our results to Roediger & McDermott (1995):

Roediger and McDermott only did one experiment in the style of Experiment 1 (also called Experiment 1 in their paper), so you can only compare to the results of one experiment. However, the comparison is valuable to show that we both replicated (Experiment 1) and extended (Experiment 2).

What critical lure (aka critical intrusion) rate did they find for recall in their Exp 1?

                            What was their mean for recall for presented words?

How did our Experiment 1 compare to their Experiment 1 in terms of CLs and Presented words for Recall? (Report our means from your Results section or the Results instructions).

Recognition

T-test comparing proportions of recognition test results for Old (marked 3 or 4) Critical Lures for Exp 1 and Exp 2    

T-test comparing proportions of recognition test results for Old Presented words

Again, refer back to the R&M 1995 paper: How did their subjects do in these comparisons? What were their proportions in comparison to ours?

Relation to Prior Work

              Because part of our hypothesis is an attempt to reduce Critical Lures by the subjects having knowledge of and many weeks to study the DRM paradigm, we are also interested in how our research compares to the other studies we used in the introduction.

              How are our data similar to those of:

Gallo et al (1997)

McCabe et al (2002)

Neuschatz et al (2003)

For each of these papers you will need to:

-briefly re-describe their experiment (i.e. what were their different manipulations/groups?)

              -the Critical Lure and Presented word rate from each of their groups

-describe how our appropriate statistic (either recall or recognition means) compares to their outcomes. Don’t forget to mention any significance on either our or their statistics.

Limitations/Caveats:

              You should address all of the following:  

-Subjects were not formally trained (as in other experiments) to avoid critical lures, therefore all subjects received uneven exposures to the DRM paradigm. (Because while I did describe the experiment to everyone in class, you all had different amounts of personal interaction with the journal articles, therefore we cannot conclusively state how much exposure to DRM any one subject had).

              -Because subjects were reading about the DRM paradigm, they had multiple opportunities to              be exposed to not only the theory of DRM but all the word lists used in both experiments and         it is impossible to say the exact level of prior exposure before Experiment 2.

              -If you come up with other ideas for limitations and caveats, don’t be afraid to write them in this section, this is not a comprehensive list.

-Another common inclusion for a limitations section is to include suggestions on how to correct   the mentioned limitations in the future.

Implications for future work

You should address all of the following:

How would you conduct this study if you were doing it “for real” on a university campus? What controls would you put in place? What things might you do to be more certain of exposure levels to the DRM paradigm between testing?

If you come up with other ideas for implications, don’t be afraid to write them in this section,      this is not a comprehensive list.