ABSTRACT
We are all baffled by the vivid events in dreams, unconnected to evident stimuli. Readers of this volume may be reminded of the Deese–Roediger–McDermott paradigm, which produces an illusion that a word was presented, when it was not. In the paradigm (Deese, 1959; Roediger & McDermott, 1995), subjects are presented with a list of words such as bed, rest, awake, tired, dream, wake,…. The word sleep is not on the list. Yet recall and recognition for sleep are comparable to that for words actually presented. In their experiments, Roediger and McDermott asked subjects who indicated during recognition that a word had been presented to further indicate whether they had a vivid memory of its presentation (a remember judgment) or whether they were sure the word had been presented, but had no vivid memory of its presentation (a know judgment). The procedure is due to Tulving (1985). The proportion of vivid memories reported for critical nonpresented words was comparable to that for actually presented words. Strong associations in memory, when focused, can produce a false memory, comparable to a real memory.
