In a DRM experiment, participants study 'bed, rest, awake, tired, dream, slumber, nap, yawn' but never the word 'sleep.' At test, many confidently recognize 'sleep' as having been on the list. What is the best mechanistic explanation?
AParticipants guessed 'sleep' because it fit the obvious theme of the list
BParticipants confused the word 'sleep' with a visually similar word they did study
CEach studied word activated 'sleep' in the semantic network; this repeated activation generated genuine familiarity that the memory system could not distinguish from a real memory trace
DParticipants are deliberately confabulating to appear attentive
The DRM effect exploits spreading activation: every word on the list is an associate of 'sleep,' so each one automatically activates the concept. Repeated activation builds genuine familiarity — the feeling of prior contact — even though no trace of the actual word exists in episodic memory. Option A (guessing) cannot explain the high confidence and vivid 'recollection' reports participants give. Option B is implausible given the phonological and visual distance of the words. The critical insight is that familiarity is a real, measurable signal created by indirect routes — it is not a deliberate choice.
Question 2 Multiple Choice
An eyewitness to a robbery confidently reports that the getaway car was red. Video evidence shows it was blue. During the post-event investigation, a detective casually mentioned 'the red car.' This discrepancy is best explained as:
AA deliberate lie — the witness wants to appear cooperative and adopts the detective's description
BSource misattribution — the witness remembers 'red car' from the detective's question but attributes it to the original witnessed event
CA failure of basic visual perception — the witness simply could not distinguish red from blue under stress
DMotivated forgetting — the witness unconsciously replaced the correct detail to reduce cognitive dissonance
Source misattribution means the content ('red car') is intact in memory — it really was encountered — but its origin is incorrectly labeled as the original event rather than the investigator's question. This is the misinformation effect: post-event information becomes integrated into the original memory trace because source information (where and when an experience occurred) is encoded separately from content and is more vulnerable to interference. Option A (lying) cannot explain the fact that witnesses subjectively believe their false reports.
Question 3 True / False
False memories produced in DRM paradigms typically feel weaker and less vivid than true memories, making them easy for participants to detect and discard.
TTrue
FFalse
Answer: False
This is the central clinical and legal danger of false memories. Participants in DRM studies often report false memories with the same high confidence and subjective vividness as true memories — sometimes even higher. The subjective experience of familiarity and 'recollection' is generated by the same cognitive mechanisms whether or not the event actually occurred. This is why eyewitness confidence is a poor predictor of eyewitness accuracy: confidence reflects the strength of the familiarity signal, not its actual source.
Question 4 True / False
Source misattribution involves remembering the content of an experience correctly but assigning it to the wrong origin.
TTrue
FFalse
Answer: True
This is the defining feature of source misattribution: the error is in the source tag, not the content itself. The witness genuinely did encounter 'red car' — from the detective — so the content is accurate. But the brain labels this memory as coming from the original event rather than from the subsequent questioning. Source information (who said it, when, in what context) is encoded separately from content information and is more susceptible to loss and interference, making this type of error common and often undetectable from the inside.
Question 5 Short Answer
Why is eyewitness confidence an unreliable indicator of eyewitness accuracy, particularly when the witness has been exposed to post-event information?
Think about your answer, then reveal below.
Model answer: Confidence reflects the strength of the familiarity signal — how strongly a memory 'feels' like a prior experience — but familiarity can be generated by indirect routes such as post-event suggestion, without any genuine episodic trace. When a witness hears 'red car' during questioning, this creates a real familiarity for 'red car' that is later misattributed to the original event. The witness is not lying; they genuinely experience strong recognition. Because familiarity is dissociable from source-tagged recollection, high confidence indicates only that something was encountered somewhere — not that it was encountered in the way or place the witness believes.
The key distinction is between familiarity (a general sense of prior contact, easily inflated by repetition or suggestion) and recollection (specific, contextually detailed, source-tagged recall). Courts and intuition treat confidence as a proxy for accuracy, but the cognitive systems that generate confidence and the systems that generate accuracy can be decoupled. Post-event information exploits this by creating strong familiarity for false details, which then feel like genuine memories to the witness.