Studies & Findings
- "Lost in the mall" (Loftus and Pickrell)
- Nicholas Spanos at Carleton University
- "Reconstruction of Automobile Destruction" (Loftus and Palmer )
False
Memories
What is are False memories?
- "Psychological phenomenon in which a person recalls a memory that did not actually occur"
How False Memories Form
Manipulation of Memory Recall through Language
- Occur in therapeutic, experimental and social settings
- Memories are more easily modified when the passage of time allows the original memory to fade.
- Demands on individuals to remember
- Corroboration
- actual memories+suggestions from others
- NOT ALL memories that arise after suggestion are false
- words used to phrase a question can heavily influence the response given.
- Article adjustment on eyewitness report
- Adjective implications on eyewitness report
- Can effect children and legal cases
Implications
Related Memory Stuff
"Mental health professionals and others must be aware of how greatly they can influence the recollection of events and of the urgent need for maintaining restraint in situations in which imagination is used as an aid in recovering presumably lost memories."
- Imagination Inflation
- Impossible memories
- Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory (HSAM)
- remember an abnormally vast number of their life experiences
Criticism
- Repressed V.S. never existed
- Loftus and Palmer did not control for outside factors coming from individual participants