AS Level Psychology (9990) Case Studies Practice Exam 2026 – The Complete All-in-One Guide to Master Your Exam Success!

In false memory research, what the experimenter changes to see its effect on false memories is the way information is encoded or the type of lure used on the test. This deliberate manipulation—altering encoding conditions (for example, depth of processing or generation tasks) or the nature of the lures (such as critical lures that weren’t studied but are semantically related)—is what drives differences in false memory rates. The outcome you measure is how often people falsely remember or recognize these lures, which is the dependent variable. Factors like ambient music, time of day, or weather are not typically the main manipulations in these studies; they’re considered extraneous variables that researchers try to control so they don’t confound the results.