Debriefing
In this experiment, you were shown lists of words followed by a recognition task. Some of the items you had to choose from in the recognition task were from the list you saw, some were random, unrelated words, and one was related to the theme of the word list but not actually presented.
Note that a typical participant will not report many items which were not on the list and were not related to the theme of the original list, but that a large percentage of related items are reported. Reporting related items not on the study list is known as the false memory effect. This effect may occur because the related word was activated when the list was presented, or because it was activated when the test words were presented, or both. The false memory effect is found even when participants are confident that they have not made any errors in their recognition task.