Computational simulation of False recall

Rishabh Nigam
10598

Motivation

False recall is one of the most interesting areas in the field of memory research. We define false recall as having false memory for an event that never happened. One of the early work in this field was done by Deese-Roedifer-McDermott where they came up with the famous DRM paradigm which focussed on word association and gist. Later in around 2002 Brainerd and Reyna came up with a Fuzzy Trace theory which classified the memory process as verbatim and gist. The verbatim traces is characterized by use of contextual features of the events in the past wheres gist processes have representations of the semantic features of the events of the past rather than contexual features. There have been attempts in this area using feature based coding schemes.

Example: Consider the list1 (nurse,sick, medicine, health, hospital, ...), list2 (queen, crown, prince, George, throne, ... ). Now when people are asked if they read Doctor in the list they will say yes, similarly for list 2 people agreed listening to the word king. However the false recall in the case of Doctor will be far more than in the case of King.

Proposal

I plan to build a probabilistic model for estimating the probability of false recall of any word based on the word list of 15 words.Motivation s to be drawn from the computational fSAM Model of False Recall. This model was proposed by Kimball and Smith in 2007. fSAM stands for the framework of the search of associative memory. It uses semantic distances between the words to build a probabilistic model of False recall. Later on I plan to test the results of this model on the 24 word list of size 15 given by Roediger and McDermott.

References:

¹[Daniel R. Kimball, Troy A. Smith, Michael J. kahana] "The fSAM Model of False Recall",Psychological Review 2007 Pg 954-993 Link

²[Henry L Roediger, kathleen B. McDermott] "Creating False Memories: Remembering Words not presented in Lists ", Journal of Experimental Pscychology, Learning Memory and Cognition, 1995 pg 803-814 Link

³[David R.Cann, Ken McRae, Albert N Katz] "False recall in the Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm: The roles of gist and associative strength", Q J Exp Psychol (Hove) 2011 pg 1515-42 Link