False memories

Memory

Hey all,

Welcome to Human Nature, the illustrated psychology newsletter.

We’re back after a short break to continue our series on memory. Today’s topic is false memories.

False memories

What it is: False memories are partially or entirely erroneous recollections of past events. Due to the malleability of memory, we can easily be made to believe we had experiences that never occurred, and even go on to form detailed accounts of them.

How it was discovered: In a famous study in 1993, Loftus and Coan demonstrated people’s suggestibility to false memories. They paired participants with a close family member and got their family member to tell them a made up story of the time they got lost in the mall at the age of five. A few days later, participants could give a detailed account of the event, down to the clothes worn by the person who found them and how scared they had felt at the time.

In a later study, researchers showed participants Photoshopped images of them and their family in a hot air balloon ride. Fifty percent of participants reported they remembered going on the balloon ride, with some going on to form vivid memories of the event.

How it works: Unlike a filing cabinet that allows us to store and access data, keeping it safe and intact, human memory is fluid and easily manipulable through suggestion. Episodic memories are especially prone to distortion because they are representational and formed through a constructive process involving multiple pieces of information. False memories can result from an error in any given stage of memory processing: encoding, consolidation or retrieval.

Thank you for reading, see you next time!

Sources:

The construction of childhood memories (Loftus and Coan, in press, as cited in The Reality of Repressed Memories, p. 532, Loftus, 1993).

A picture is worth a thousand lies: Using false photographs to create false childhood memories. (Wade, Garry, Read & Lindsay, 2002).

An overview of the neuro-cognitive processes involved in the encoding, consolidation, and retrieval of true and false memories. (Straube, 2012).

In cognitive psychology, memory refers to the processes involved in the encoding, storage and retrieval of information. Memory is central to our understanding of the world. Without a recollection of the past, we can’t make sense of the present or make decisions about the future.