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Four experiments examined subjective experience during retrieval in the DRM false memory paradigm [Deese, J. (1959). On the prediction of occurrence of particular verbal intrusions in immediate recall. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 58 , 17–22; Roediger, H. L., & McDermott, K. B. (1995). Creating false memories: Remembering words not presented in lists. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 21 , 803–814]. Subjects studied lists of related words that were associated with critical non-presented words and then took a recognition test in which they made judgments about their experience of each test item. We tested the prediction from [Whittlesea, B. W. A. (2002). False memory and the discrepancy–attribution hypothesis: The prototype-familiarity illusion. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 131 , 96–115] discrepancy–attribution hypothesis that subjects experience critical lures as surprising, and that the experience of surprise leads them to call the lures old. We found that subjects were not surprised when they encountered critical lures on a recognition test and, in fact, they reported that they expected to see critical lures more than they expected to see words that they had actually studied. When subjects did experience words as surprising, they called the words new, not old. The results support the idea that false memories in the DRM paradigm occur when critical lures are activated in memory and fluently processed on a test, leading subjects to experience critical lures in much the same way that they experience words they actually studied. The results do not support the idea that false memories are surprising, as stated by the discrepancy–attribution hypothesis.

The current study examined delayed recall of items that had been processed during simple and complex span tasks. Three experiments were reported showing that despite more items being recalled initially from a simple span task (i.e., word span) than a complex span task (i.e., operation span), on a delayed recall test more items were recalled that had initially been processed during the complex span task. This delayed recall advantage for items processed during complex span tasks persisted when subjects were encouraged to process the items deeply during the initial span task (Experiment 2), and when initial recall during the span task was precluded (Experiment 3). The covert retrieval model explains these data as being the result of subjects maintaining items in working memory during complex span tasks by covertly retrieving them during the processing phases of the tasks. These covert retrieval attempts provide distributed practice retrieving items from long-term memory, creating effective retrieval cues for later delayed recall that are not created during simple span tasks. The covert retrieval model was supported by data showing that words presented in earlier serial positions during operation span, which had the greatest likelihood of being covertly retrieved, were most likely to be recalled on the delayed recall test. These data support the notion that complex working memory span tasks share considerable processing overlap with episodic memory tasks.