The 16 participants (11 female, five male; Mage = 21.81, SDage = 2.2, age range: 20-36 years) were undergraduates at the University of California, Los Angeles. They participated as per requirement for their Psychological Research Methods course. All were presumed to have English fluency, normal hearing, and normal or corrected-to-normal vision.
Design
The current study measured the effects of context (context, no-context) and presentation mode (visual, verbal) on false memory recall in a two-way, within-subjects factorial design. Context was operationally defined as the information the participant was given and there were two levels: context and no-context. In the context level, participants would receive a story to remember, and in the no-context level, participants would receive a word-list to remember. The second independent variable was presentation mode, which was operationally defined as the method the participant received the information: visually or verbally. In the visual level, the participant was asked to silently read either the story or word-list on the screen. In the verbal level, the participant
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Thus, we created 16 different PowerPoints that varied in order of the stories and word-lists, and whether those were in either a verbal or visual format. In total, each participant encountered 4 different conditions. After each individual condition, they were given a short distractor task that involved answering three math questions and then were provided with a link to a google form with a memory recall test. Each memory recall test consisted of seven questions which asked if they could recall a particular word from the stimulus they previously encountered. Five questions were critical lure words and the remaining two were thematic words from the previous story or