DRM Story Format Associations (Study 2)
Creators: name: Crozier, William
name: Strange, Deryn
Publisher: name: OSF Registries
Year: 2016

description: Given the contrived nature of a list of words, we aim to increase the applicability of our guilty associations test to a method more in line with how people normally encounter information. One way to accomplish this is to present the DRM words in a story structure, thus allowing us to test whether some forms of evidence show greater association with guilt than others in a more context-rich paradigm. By presenting a DRM Story instead of a DRM list, we hypothesize the context provided by the Story format will increase the association between the list words and the critical lure (Dewhurst, Pursglove, &amp; Lewis, 2007). Instead of having the “guilty” list words presented one a time, participants will read a paragraph containing these words. For example, participants would read: “A jury is a group of citizens that reviews information in a case to determine whether a crime has been committed. The judge provides order...” (See Appendix C for a full sample Guilty DRM Story). Such a format provides a story that, by its context of explaining a trial, makes the connection between the words easier to detect. We believe that adding this context will produce a deeper semantic processing of the words – a process that, compared to shallow processing, produces more false alarms to the critical lure (Toglia, Neuschatz, &amp; Goodwin, 1999; Thapar &amp; McDermott, 2001). It is likely that when people read about information for a criminal investigation, they automatically consider the evidence present to determine guilt. An automatic evaluation of the story presented (with a focus on evaluating evidence) is, to our knowledge, unique to our DRM list and should result in a deeper semantic connection to “guilty.” In turn, the more strongly a piece of evidence indicates guilt, the stronger the activation of the concept of guilt. As a result, we expect that participants in the Confession Story and DNA Story conditions will false alarm to the critical lure more than participants in the other groups, enhanced by the context and deeper semantic processing of the evidence in the Story.
Alternatively, it is possible that a DRM Story would actually decrease false alarm rates to the critical lure. Previous research has found that ease of theme identifiability is an important predictor for false recall of the critical lure: when a theme is highly identifiable, (as in a DRM Story, the very reason it was developed to be used with child participants), adults show a decreased false alarm rate for the critical lure (Carneiro, Fernandez, &amp; Dias, 2009). This seemingly counter-intuitive finding is due to adults’ use of an “identify-to-reject” strategy: if a participant is able to identify the theme of a list (the critical lure) and notice that specific word is missing, they will not show the DRM effect (Carneiro et al., 2012). Therefore, if our DRM Story makes the theme of “guilty” highly identifiable, it could lead to a decrease in false alarms. Furthermore, if this increase in theme identifiability occurs, we could have an effect opposite of what we predict for our evidence forms: by removing an associated word and including a weakly-associated type of evidence, “guilty” could be less identifiable, thereby increasing false alarms for the critical lure.