False Recognition: Revisiting the Account for Pictorial Encoding

Abstract

False recognition is an inaccurate claim of having previously encountered a non-presented test item. Exceptionally high levels of false recognition are observed when participants are exposed to lists of semantically related words. Israel and Schacter (1997) showed that presenting pictures of items with their auditory label during the encoding phase significantly reduced false recognition relative to presenting only words with their auditory label. The current study excluded the auditory labels and instead investigated whether presenting pictures of items along with words during encoding would also reduce false recognition relative to presenting the written words only. The results provided no evidence to support reduced rates of false recognition in the picture encoding condition [t(48) = 0.42, p > .05]. Olszewska et al. (2015) suggested that auditory traces persist more distinctively in memory than visual traces, hence, the discrepancy in results between the core literature and the present study can possibly be attributed to the exclusion of auditory labels. Future research should focus on providing a detailed account of the role of auditory labels in reducing false recognition.