Imagination Reduces False Memories for Everyday Action Sentences: Evidence From Pragmatic Inferences.

ABSTRACT: Human memory can be unreliable, and when reading a sentence with a pragmatic implication, such as "the karate champion hit the cinder block," people often falsely remember that the karate champion "broke" the cinder block. Yet, research has shown that encoding instructions affect the false memories we form. On the one hand, instructing participants to imagine themselves manipulating the to-be-recalled items increase false memories (imagination inflation effect). But on the other hand, instructions to imagine have reduced false memories in the DRM paradigm (imagination facilitation effect). Here, we explored the effect of imaginal encoding with pragmatic inferences, a way to study false memories for information about everyday actions. Across two experiments, we manipulated ima

SUBMITTER: Maraver MJ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8417559 | biostudies-literature | 2021

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature