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Deese-Roediger-McDermott Paradigm Page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deese-Roediger-McDermott-Paradigm

Example of the Deese-Roediger-McDermott Paradigm
The Deese-Roediger-McDermott Paradigm, more frequently called the DRM Paradigm is widely used in the cognitive psychology field as a form of measurement to test human’s memory capabilities. The DRM paradigm has been used to help understand the limits and capabilities of the human memory and has helped accuracy information in hundreds of court cases and eyewitness events. This paradigm in memory accuracy involves the use of word lists to elicit memory inaccuracy. The word lists are comprised of a set of words that are all associated by a theme word which is not represented, this word is referred to as the critical lure. For example a DRM list would contain the following words: door, glass, pane, shade, ledge, glass, house, these words converge on a central theme word: window, which is the critical lure, that is not presented. The memory inaccuracies that these word lists are trying to bring out in people are having the participants write down all the words on the lists. After the participants have written down the words they then check to see if they wrote down the critical lure which was never presented.

Age and the Deese-Roediger-McDermott Paradigm
The Deese-Roediger-McDermott Paradigm is the most utilized test used in testing memory accuracy in the cognitive psychology field The implications of the DRM Paradigm and memory testing has shown that children and young adults are far less likely to create false memories than adults. Memory inaccuracy in the DRM paradigm have shown negative correlations with age, where children are less likely than adults to recall the critical lures in the word lists.

Adult-Normed and Child-Normed Lists
The implications of false memory testing generally supports the idea that adults create more false memories than children do when using the DRM Paradigm. It is most common for the DRM word lists to use adult-normed lists. These lists have been tested to see if the common findings of age and false memories were impacted because of the use of adult-normed lists. This was tested by Metzger and his colleagues and after using both child-normed and adult-normed lists the results still showed that on recall and recognition adults were still more likely than children to produce false memories. The patterns were found were important in showing that the type of tests or word lists used in the DRM Paradigm does not affect children or adults falsely recognizing and recalling the critical lures used in the DRM word lists. Generally supporting the notion that human memories are created with what people thought they experienced as opposed to what they actually did experience.

Audio and the Deese-Roediger-McDermott Paradigm
Recent studies have also used the DRM Paradigm in a more unique way. Instead of trying to elicit a critical lure from the participant, word lists were read aloud by either a man or woman. The purpose was to see if the participants were able to recall if the word they recognized was spoken by either a man or a woman. It has been shown that qualitative detail has increased with age. . More research is currently being done on these new findings to see what new information can be added to the DRM phenomenon and our understanding of the memory capacities of the human race.

Emotion and Memory Page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotion_and_memory

Aging and Emotional Memory (Cont)
Research has been done that has shown that aging has an effect on how different kinds of emotions can bring up different aspects of a person’s memory. This research that has been done shows us that a person’s mood can affect their memory ability. Findings have shown that people who pessimistically viewed their memory have more cognitive failures and consequently people who viewed their memory ability in an optimistic light had better objective memory performance. It has also been shown that attempts in adults to regulate their emotions influence their performance on cognitive tasks. Findings have shown that adults show more memory in positive autobiographical events as well as better working memory for positive images. In contrast to this children and younger adults have shown better memory for negative images and events than to positive images and material. The same findings can be true of memory recall in adults and positive images. These findings generally support the idea that false memories show biases towards positive information, especially in adults, compared to children.