False recalls for people's names in the Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm

The present study investigated whether encoding manipulations which were supposed to make source monitoring of critical lures difficult could alter the levels of false recall for people’s names used as lures in the Deese-Roediger-McDermott list learning paradigm. The results demonstrated that most of manipulations used in the present experiments failed to increase the levels of false recall for the critical lures that were people’s names as it is assumed that, at the same time, the manipulations attenuated semantic encoding around the critical lures, and consequently lowered their activation levels, which is assumed to be essential to obtain high false recall of critical lures. On the other hand, manipulations which resulted in keeping participants from realizing the nature of the list organization, at least, hindered the decrease of false recall level. The question of why false recall for people’s names is rarely elicited in general was discussed.