Citation

Clancy SA, Schacter DL, McNally RJ, Pitman RK. Psychol. Sci. 2000; 11(1): 26-31.

Affiliation

Department of Psychology, Harvard University, 33 Kirkland St. Cambridge, MA 02138 USA.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2000, Association for Psychological Science, Publisher John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

11228839

Abstract

False recognition--the mistaken belief that one has previously encountered a novel item--was examined in four groups of subjects: women reporting recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse, women who believe that they were sexually abused as children but who cannot recall this abuse (the "repressed" group), women who were sexually abused as children and always remembered the abuse, and women with no history of childhood sexual abuse. Subjects were administered a Deese/Roediger-McDermott paradigm. The results suggest that the recovered-memory group was more prone to false recognition than the other groups. In addition, women reporting recovered and repressed memories showed greater reduction in false recognition across study trials than did other subjects, perhaps reflecting strategic changes in performance.

Language: en