Question

Cognitive Psychology- false memory

What is a “critical lure”? What effect does a lure word have on the type of words you reported as being on the second list?

Answer 1

In several memory experiments, researchers present a set of words that are all associated to a single, target word. This is known as ‘critical lure’ and is not presented to the participants. For example, a set of words such as “fly”, “feather”, “beaks” are associated with the word, “bird”. Thus, “bird” becomes the critical lure. A reason why it is called a ‘lure’ is because leads to participants (including myself) recalling it from a list when it was never even presented to them, proving a strong evidence as to how false memory works.