Abstract
Psychologists are interested in studying culture because it impacts people’s cognition. Located in the geographical center of Europe, Belarus was exposed to both Western and Eastern cultures making it an interesting country to study. In our study, we examined how the acculturation of Belarusian immigrants in the US affected false memories, building on prior work by Wang et al. (2021). Their study showed that Westerners had more false recognitions of categorically related unpresented items (“lures”) than Easterners and claimed to remember more clearly details of falsely recognized pictures compared to Easterners. We recruited Belarusian immigrants in the US on Facebook, and our final sample included 35 participants. Using the Deese Roediger McDermott false memory paradigm with pictures, participants were presented and directed to memorize a series of categorically related images. Participants were questioned on the vividness of their memory for images that they identified as seen before at the retrieval stage of the experiment. Our hypotheses were tested with a general linear model. Our first hypothesis that the number of vivid experiences of falsely recognized lure pictures would increase in Belarusian immigrants as a function of how much time they have lived in the US, controlling for participants’ age, was not supported by our data. While our second hypothesis that having more social support from Americans will be associated with an increase in the number of vivid experiences of lure images in Belarusian immigrants, controlling for participants’ age, was not supported by our data, we observed a trend in the increase of vivid recognitions of lure items with the increase of the level of social support. More participants should be recruited to obtain statistically reliable results.