Incidental versus intentional encoding in the Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm: does amnesic patients' implicit false memory depend on conscious activation of the lure?

In two experiments, implicit false memory was investigated in Korsakoff patients and controls following incidental and intentional encoding in the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm. Participants were asked to think aloud, to investigate whether conscious lure activation occurs equally often in both groups under both types of instructions, and whether this influences the likelihood of later false memory. Results revealed normal priming for critical lures in amnesia following both types of encoding. Korsakoff patients did verbalize fewer lures than did controls during intentional encoding and showed impaired recognition performance. Lure verbalization was shown to contribute to explicit false memory, but had no clear effect on implicit memory. Together, results point to the conclusion that amnesic patients' encoding abilities are sufficient to obtain normal priming for critical lure words, and that conscious lure activation during study is not required to do so.