The procedure was pioneered by James Deese in 1959, but it was not until Henry L. Roediger III and Kathleen McDermott extended the line of research in 1995 that the paradigm became popular.
Frederic Bartlett famously pioneered this area of research with his studies on remembering using the Indian folktale 'The war of the ghosts'.
Roediger and McDermott predicted that subjects were recalling an absent word because of a high sense of familiarity induced through the presented lists, and as such they would predominantly judge 'old' critical lures as being 'known' rather than 'remembered'.
Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, the experiments were able to show that subjects not only confidently recognised the absent word, but that they consciously remembered this lure appearing on the list, rather than relying on some feeling of familiarity to make an 'old' judgement.
To supplement the idea of an associative model, Roediger and McDermott suggest that retrieval processes might play an important role in explaining the DRM phenomenon.
However, further research showed that retrieval processes could not account for the findings without also including encoding processes – Roediger and his colleagues later found that providing subjects with a warning about developing false memories had no effect if it was presented before the recall phase of the experiment, but it did reduce false memories if it was presented before the lists were read to subjects.
[1] Critics, however, have argued that the DRM paradigm does not reflect real life events because of the nature of the stimuli and the setting in which the study is conducted.
Critics like Kathy Pezdek and Shirley Lam have suggested that it is inappropriate to compare the recognition of a word with the implantation of a memory for an entire childhood event.
[13] Roediger and McDermott maintain that their use of college students in a laboratory setting with mundane stimuli only strengthens their point, because these conditions should promote the most accurate remembering, and yet false memories are still formed.
The overall ecological validity of these experiments is very low due to the specific nature of the replication task making it is difficult to generalize the findings.
Researchers have also proposed the use of DRM lists in investigating the controversial issue of recovered memories for childhood sexual abuse.
Rather, studies found that fantasy proneness as scored by the Dissociative Experiences Scale (DES) is the main factor rather than self-reported traumatization.
[17] A similar study found that individuals with higher PTSD scores and greater fearful-avoidant attachment tendencies showed less proficient memory monitoring for childhood sexual abuse word lists, and future research should approach this topic with caution.
In a five experiment study using different examples of the DRM paradigms from previous work, researchers recorded data consistent with the dual-retrieval processes of free recall.
Studies show that younger children have lower rates of false recall and recognition, likely due to a less developed semantic memory and therefore lacking the ability to make connections outside of the word lists given.