Adaptive false memories: Investigating the effect of future planning on false memory

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The idea that a person can have a memory of an event that never in fact occurred seems surprising, yet false memories can easily be created by presenting people with information that hints at related information that is not actually presented. This has been demonstrated by research in which participants are led to believe they saw a non-presented word after studying lists of words that are associated with it (for example, participants might falsely believe they saw the word sleep after seeing or hearing related words such as bed, dream, wake, snore etc). Early theories of memory dismissed such errors as a consequence of an inaccurate memory system. However, evidence is emerging that certain types of false memory can serve a useful role in everyday thinking. For example, rating words for how relevant they are to a survival situation (such as being lost in the grasslands of a foreign country) increases false memories for new words associated with those that were rated. One possible explanation for this is that rating words for their relevance to our survival activates related knowledge that might also be useful in such a situation. The proposed research will explore whether a similar advantage occurs when people think about the relevance of words to a situation involving the planning of a future activity. Participants in the research will be presented with lists of words and asked to rate them in a number of ways, including their relevance to a past event, relevance to a planned future event, and whether they are pleasant or unpleasant (which will act as a control condition). The word lists will be structured in such a way as to produce high levels of false memories (based on previous research). The hypothesis is that thinking about a planned future event activates related information that might be useful in terms of planning the activity. If that is the case then rating words for their relevance to a planned future event will increase the likelihood of falsely remembering related words. Seven experiments will investigate the role of future planning on false memory and will manipulate variables such as the type of memory test (recall versus recognition, conscious versus unconscious memory), the interval between learning and testing, and the type of study materials. The overall aim is to test the view that one of the main functions of human memory, including false memory, is to guide our future behaviour.