Adaptive false memories. Investigating the effect of future planning on false memory: Experimental data

The data consist of SPSS files from eight experiments. Each file includes scores for correct memory, false memory, study ratings, and demographics such as participants' age and gender.

The idea that a person can have a memory of an event that never occurred seems surprising, yet false memories can easily be created by presenting people with information that hints at related information that is not actually presented. For example, participants might falsely believe they saw the word 'sleep' after studying related words such 'bed', 'dream', 'wake', 'snore' etc.

The aim of the proposed research is to explore the possibility that false memories serve a useful function by guiding future behaviour. Participants will be presented with lists of words and asked to rate them in a number of ways, including their relevance to a past event, relevance to a planned future event, or how pleasant they are (control condition). The lists will be structured in such a way as to produce high levels of false memories (based on previous research). The hypothesis is that thinking about a planned future event activates related information that might be useful in terms of planning the activity. If this is the case then rating words for their relevance to a planned future event will increase the numbers of false memories for related words.