Roediger and McDermott have done seminal research with the creation of their Deese/Roediger and McDermott paradigm (DRM) for creating false memories. This paradigm uses lure word lists, made up of 16 associate words, to obtain the response of a critical word that is also an associate word from the word lists but is not present in the list of words. This is an example of the lure word associate list: thread, pin, eye, sewing, sharp, point, prick, thimble, haystack, thorn, hurt, injection, syringe, cloth, knitting. The critical word, needle, would be the falsely recalled word from this list. The number of times the critical word was remembered was significant and the subjects reported high levels of confidence when remembering the critical word (Roediger & McDermott, 1995). .
Gallo, Roberts & Seamon (1997) used a variation of the Deese/Roediger and McDermott paradigm to try to "avoid" creating false memories in their participants. In this study they wanted to see if informing subjects about false memories to varying degrees would affect how many times they remembered the critical word. They used the DRM word list, and created three groups, a control (who was not informed of false memories), a partially informed group (who were told to be careful), and an informed group (who were told of false memories and critical words). The groups were all given a questionnaire at the end to discuss the tactics they employed to remember the words. The results showed that although the three groups all employed different tactics to list the words, the informed group did not have significantly fewer false memories. The only strategic difference was that while listening to the list, the informed group was looking for the critical word (Gallo, Roberts, & Seamon, 1997!.
). This shows that even if people are made aware of the occurrence of false memories, they could still be susceptible to them. This could apply to the occurrence of false child sexual abuse accounts.