The impact of instructional presentation modalities on false memory susceptibility among high school learners

The present investigation examined the impact of instructional presentation modalities (written text, auditory lecture, and multimedia presentation) on false memory susceptibility among high school learners, while exploring the moderating roles of working memory capacity and prior domain knowledge. Employing a 3 × 2 mixed factorial design, the final analytical sample comprised 165 female 11th-grade students randomly allocated across three experimental conditions ( n = 55 per group). The Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm was adapted to educationally relevant content, and stimulus exposure was rigorously controlled using PsychoPy. Following a computerized distractor task, participants completed a randomized recognition test. Data were analyzed using Signal Detection Theory metrics: sensitivity ( d ʹ) and response criterion ( C ). A one-way ANOVA revealed a significant main effect of modality on sensitivity and criterion. Bonferroni post-hoc comparisons indicated that the auditory lecture condition yielded lower sensitivity and a more liberal response bias compared to both written text and multimedia conditions, which did not significantly differ from each other. Supplementary ANCOVAs indicated that working memory capacity and prior domain knowledge were significant covariates predicting memory discriminability. The sample comprised female 11th-grade students; findings are therefore restricted to this population. The fixed- versus self-paced confound is also acknowledged. The study concludes that the transient nature of spoken information depletes working memory resources, driving reliance on gist-based processing and exacerbating false recognition. Actionable pedagogical recommendations emphasize supplementing verbal discourse with external textual anchors to safeguard knowledge veridicality.