Estudo das falsas memórias no Teste Pictórico de Memória (TEPIC-M)

Abstract

The study of memory, for some time, has aroused curiosity and fascination, as an important issue not only for Psychology, but also for other areas of knowledge, such as Philosophy, History, Neurology, Physiology, among others. The activities performed in everyday life are not recorded by our memory as happened. We interpret the events experienced through our own schemes, perceptions, thoughts and reactions. All that we live greatly influences what we remember and can distort the processes of encoding, storing and retrieving that information, creating memories of events that never occurred, or creating distortions on occurred facts. This phenomenon is called false memories, and we define them as memories that people have of facts or events that never actually occurred, illusions or distortions of occurred facts. The present work is a study on the occurrence of false memories in the pictorial recognition memory test (Teste Pictórico de Memória - TEPIC-M), and aimed to manipulate the time variable into three groups (G1-time exposure (TE) 1 min, G2 TE 3 min and G3 TE 5 min) in order to understand whether this variable influences the appearance of false memories. The study gathered 273 college students, 113 males and 160 females. The applications were made collectively in the classrooms, in groups of randomly selected courses. The results of this study showed a significant decrease in the percentage of false answers given the exposure times of G1 to G2 or G3, but no significant difference between exposure times G2 and G3 was found. The results were discussed in terms of the main theories and findings on false memories, theory of the capacity of short-term memory and dual coding theory.