| Abstract | We cannot always rely on our memory to be accurate, it may sometimes be false. False memory is when a person remembers an event differently from the actual event or they remember something that never happened (Roediger III & Marsh, 2009). In the present study, we investigate the effect of the instruction to “imagine” on reducing false memory. Eighty university students will be assigned randomly to one of four conditions with a specific instruction (“memorize” or “imagine”) followed by one of the two filler tasks (a blank screen to allow consolidation or a math problem to inhibit consolidation). Each participant will read a series of forty action sentences (a sentence with a subject, verb, and object) in their assigned condition. After all 40 sentences have been presented, participants will have to perform a recall test where they will fill in the missing critical words, i.e. the verb of each sentence. Overall, we expect that our findings will provide evidence that imagining during encoding, especially when given time to consolidate (i.e., the imagine+blank screen condition), improves memory as it enhances item-specific processing.
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