Why do pictures, but not visual words, reduce older adults' false memories?

Prior work shows that false memories resulting from the study of associatively related lists are reduced for both young and older adults when the auditory presentation of study list words is accompanied by related pictures relative to when auditory word presentation is combined with visual presentation of the word. In contrast, young adults, but not older adults, show a reduction in false memories when presented with the visual word along with the auditory word relative to hearing the word only. In both cases of pictures relative to visual words and visual words relative to auditory words alone, the benefit of picture and visual words in reducing false memories has been explained in terms of monitoring for perceptual information. In our first experiment, we provide the first simultaneous comparison of all 3 study presentation modalities (auditory only, auditory plus visual word, and auditory plus picture). Young and older adults show a reduction in false memories in the auditory plus picture condition, but only young adults show a reduction in the visual word condition relative to the auditory only condition. A second experiment investigates whether older adults fail to show a reduction in false memory in the visual word condition because they do not encode perceptual information in the visual word condition. In addition, the second experiment provides evidence that the failure of older adults to show the benefits of visual word presentation is related to reduced cognitive resources. (PsycINFO Database Record

How Does Distinctive Processing Reduce False Recall?

False memories arising from associatively related lists are a robust phenomenon that resists many efforts to prevent it. However, a few variables have been shown to reduce this form of false memory. Explanations for how the reduction is accomplished have focused on either output monitoring processes or constraints on access, but neither idea alone is sufficient to explain extant data. Our research was driven by a framework that distinguishes item-based and event-based distinctive processing to account for the effects of different variables on both correct recall of study list items and false recall. We report the results of three experiments examining the effect of a deep orienting task and the effect of visual presentation of study items, both of which have been shown to reduce false recall. The experiments replicate those previous findings and add important new information about the effect of the variables on a recall test that eliminates the need for monitoring. The results clearly indicate that both post-access monitoring and constraints on access contribute to reductions in false memories. The results also showed that the manipulations of study modality and orienting task had different effects on correct and false recall, a pattern that was predicted by the item-based/event-based distinctive processing framework.

Nursing students apply evidence-based research principles in primary burn prevention projects.

The purpose of this project was for registered nursing students in a baccalaureate nursing program to look at different prevention strategies that could be utilized in the community to impact change in a family's burn prevention knowledge. The prevention strategies and their corresponding interventions were written in a narrative form, and then a poster was created to serve as a supplemental visual aid for the information. Firefighters from a local fire department evaluated posters and their abstracts based on criteria developed by the students. Five posters were revised and submitted to a national burn prevention contest. Students gained valuable experience in developing and revising evidence-based research (EBR) projects to promote community education in primary burn prevention with firefighter collaboration.