2004 Team 5

THE EFFECTS OF STUDY AND TEST VARIABLES ON MEMORY

Leslie Bilello, Christina Cordeiro, Michael Flores, Pam Freed, Gregory Kranz, Michael Levin, Julius Li, Aakash Madhu, Leslie O’Mahony, Mara Villanueva, Justine Wu

Advisor: Dr. Patrick Dolan
Assistant: Jennifer Sissman

ABSTRACT

Do different conditions and methods of presentation affect the likelihood of eliciting false memories? We divided subjects into groups of three to eight and presented them with lists of associated words. We tested them to observe how accurately they could recall the studied words, and how often they recalled related but not studied words (“false memories”). Half of the groups were tested individually, and the other half was tested collaboratively. All groups were presented with the same four lists, but with different rates and modalities. In our collected data, we found that all four of our variables (sex, rate, modality, and testing conditions) affected false memories. The results were analyzed in regards to reducing false memory in real life.