Memory is one of the most critical parts of cognition. It is important because it is involved in almost all aspects of cognition, including problem solving, decision making, attention and perception. Because of this importance, people rely on their memory to make important decisions. The value of one's memory in this society is so high that it is used as evidence to save one's life or kill it during murder trials. But as many cognitive psychologists know, human memory can cause many errors. One of these errors is false memory which consists of remembering events that never happened or remembering events differently from the real event. This discovery of false memory has sparked great interest among psychologists and the general public, and a lot of research has been conducted to find out more about false memory. The constructive approach to memory, which states that memory is constructed by the person based on what actually happened plus the person's other knowledge, experiences, and expectations, supports the idea of false memory. Just like the constructive approach to memory, false memory can be created by the person's knowledge, common prejudices, and suggestions. The present study was conducted to demonstrate a methodology that causes people to create and remember false memories. The present study is based on Deese's 1959 experiment and also Roediger and McDermott's 1995 experiment. Participants will be visually presented with a sequence of words and then will have to classify a set of words as being in the sequence or not in the sequence. Our hypothesis is that people will create false memories and recall distracting words related to the sequence of words presented meaningfully in the center of the paper… I think that if participants are not aware of this, the rate of false recall will increase. And if more words are presented, I assume that this will increase the rate of false memories. We can implicate this discovery of false memories in many ways in our lives. We should all note that our memory cannot be trusted 100% and we should not rely solely on it when it comes to making critical decisions. Just as in the murder trial example used above, when it comes to eyewitness testimony, the judge should take any false memories into account when making final decisions and try to obtain objective evidence along with the witness's memory. Works Cited Roediger, H.L. III, & McDermott, K.B. (1995). Creating false memories: remembering words not presented in lists. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 21, 803-814
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