Deese-Roediger-McDermott Paradigm

The Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm, usually called the DRM paradigm, is a widely used experimental method for reliably producing false memories in a laboratory setting, in which participants study a list of words that are all strongly associated with a single unstudied theme word, called the critical lure, such as bed, rest, awake, tired, dream, and blanket all pointing toward the unpresented word sleep, and participants then very frequently and confidently recall or recognize the critical lure itself as though it had actually been presented on the list. The psychologist James Deese first demonstrated the underlying effect in 1959, but the paradigm remained largely overlooked for decades until the psychologists Henry Roediger and Kathleen McDermott revived, substantially extended, and popularized it in an influential 1995 paper, after which it became one of the most heavily used tools in memory research and came to carry their names alongside Deese's. Researchers explain the effect through associative-activation accounts, in which studying the list of related words automatically activates the related but unstudied critical lure in memory as though it had actually been encoded, and through fuzzy-trace theory, in which a strong gist memory for the list's shared underlying meaning gets mistaken for an accurate detailed memory of the list's literal contents. Because it produces false memories reliably, with high confidence, and even a felt sense of specific sensory detail, in a controlled setting, the DRM paradigm became especially influential during the 1990s memory wars debates over the reliability of recovered traumatic memories, offering concrete experimental evidence that vivid, confident memories can nonetheless be entirely false.