Category structure and created memories. Introduction Cued recall of categorized lists was used to examine the effects of category structure on the creation of false memories. The guiding effect of category or other conceptual knowledge can help the retrieval process by providing facilitative cures, but the same guiding knowledge can also lead to systematic errors. In this study, false recall was examined as a function of the category knowledge used to guide the recall process.
Categories tend to have graded structures.
Typical category members have been seen to be recalled better than atypical items from categorized lists that participants had studied. The primary interest in this study was the effects of category knowledge on the creation of false memories. Typical category members should be falsely recalled more frequently than atypical items because they should be more easily accessed during recall. Another measure of item accessibility is output dominance, the frequency with which an item is listed as an instance of a category in a category production norm study. The role of output dominance was examined in the present studies.