Memoria falsa y efecto del nivel de procesamiento: un estudio potencial relacionado con eventos

Los potenciales relacionados con eventos (ERP) se utilizaron para determinar los efectos del nivel de procesamiento en la memoria verdadera y falsa, utilizando el paradigma Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM). En el paradigma DRM, se estudian listas de palabras altamente asociadas a una sola palabra no presentada (el 'señuelo crítico') y, en una prueba de memoria posterior, los señuelos críticos a menudo se recuerdan falsamente. Aquí se presentaron de forma auditiva listas con tres señuelos críticos por lista a los participantes que las estudiaron con una tarea de procesamiento superficial (indicando si la palabra contenía la letra 'o') o profunda (creando una imagen mental de la palabra). Se utilizó la modalidad de presentación visual en una prueba de reconocimiento final. El verdadero reconocimiento de las palabras estudiadas fue significativamente mayor después de la codificación profunda, mientras que el falso reconocimiento de señuelos críticos no representados fue similar en ambos grupos experimentales.Event-related potentials (ERPs) were used to determine the effects of level of processing on true and false memory, using the Deese–Roediger–McDermott (DRM) paradigm. In the DRM paradigm, lists of words highly associated to a single nonpresented word (the ‘critical lure’) are studied and, in a subsequent memory test, critical lures are often falsely remembered. Lists with three critical lures per list were auditorily presented here to participants who studied them with either a shallow (saying whether the word contained the letter ‘o’) or a deep (creating a mental image of the word) processing task. Visual presentation modality was used on a final recognition test. True recognition of studied words was significantly higher after deep encoding, whereas false recognition of nonpresented critical lures was similar in both experimental groups. At the ERP level, true and false recognition showed similar patterns: no FN400 effect was found, whereas comparable left parietal and late right frontal old/new effects were found for true and false recognition in both experimental conditions. Items studied under shallow encoding conditions elicited more positive ERP than items studied under deep encoding conditions at a 1000–1500ms interval. These ERP results suggest that true and false recognition share some common underlying processes. Differential effects of level of processing on true and false memory were found only at the behavioral level but not at the ERP level