Abstract
Recent studies show that sleep influences the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) false memory effect. However most of these studies used a procedure in which participants sleep over night or are awake during the day, thus introducing a time-of-day confound. For this reason the experiments in this thesis investigated how daytime naps influence the DRM false memory effect. Moreover, since the wake group in a nap study typically engages in a more passive retention interval task (e.g., watching television) than the wake group in a sleep study (e.g., everyday activity), we investigated the effect of different types of retention interval tasks on the DRM effect. In two experiments we employed the DRM paradigm under recognition testing conditions, with four groups of participants in each. The groups differed in the task the participant engaged in during the retention interval. In the first experiment, a 0 –minute control, 20-minute game playing, 20-minute TV watching was compared to a 20 minute nap. The probability of false recognition of critical lures was higher in the TV-watching and Nap groups than in the control and game-playing groups but the differences were not statistically significant. There were, however, significant differences in accuracy with the Nap group achieving higher corrected hit rates than the other groups. In the second experiment the effects of watching TV or playing a game for 60 minutes were compared to either game playing or TV watching for 20 minutes followed by a 40-minute nap. The findings from Experiment 2 indicate that overall, participants in nap conditions falsely recognized less critical lures than the participants in wake conditions. These results indicate napping may enhance the accuracy of memories in comparison to an equivalent period of wakefulness. The findings from Experiment 2 also indicate that overall, participants in game conditions falsely recognized more critical lures than participants in watch conditions. Moreover, participants in the Watch60 group falsely recognized more critical lures than participants in the Game60 group. These results indicate that false memory rates can depend on the task the participants engage in during the retention interval.