7.5: False Memories: When Good Memory Goes Bad

• As infants, we don't have a concept of self, which is a key role in long-term memory.
• Babies can't fully develop in infancy until about 18 months of age.
• We may not have the brain architecture needed to retain memories if we don't have a wel -developed schema of self.

• These experiences will not be remembered.

• We rely on our memories to give us an accurate description of our past.
• Our memories do the job.
• The chapter- opening video reminds us that researchers have shown that our memories can be more fallible than we thought.
• We are often more confident of our recollections than we should be.

• Nadean Cool, a 44-year-old nurse's aide in Wisconsin, won a $2.4 million malpractice settlement in 1997.
• Nadean had mild emotional problems, such as depressed mood and binge eating.
• After five years of treatment, Nadean supposedly "recovered" her memories of being a member of a satanic cult, of being raped, and of witnessing the murder of her childhood friend.
• Her therapist convinced her that she had more than 130 different personality types, including demons, angels, children, and a duck.

• The therapists use hypnotism to return clients to the psychological state of childhood.
• Nadean was subjected to a 15-hour marathon therapy sessions by the therapist.
• She was overwhelmed by the images of terrifying memories that she thought were real.
• Nadean ended treatment when she came to doubt the reality of the memories.

• Cool's story shows that what we take to be memories can be false, although few of us will be subjected to the memory shaping techniques and pressures that Nadean Cool faced.
• When important memories change, so do our identities.
• Nadean believed she was a victim of child abuse.

• It may seem odd that our memories can change.
• Our everyday experience suggests that we can rely on our memories, because they seem to be as crisp as scenes from a movie.

• Many Americans say yes, and some say that they can vividly recall the events surrounding their learning of the shocking deaths.
• The assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963, and the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, are both powerful memories for many older Americans.

• They argued that flashbulb memories do not decay like ordinary memories.

• For many people, this was a tragic and unforgettable event because it was the first time that a non-astronaut had been on a plane.
• Two recollections from a few days after the event.
• While answering a question, dents' stories changed dramatically.

• A group of students were asked to recall the 1995 verdict of the O. J. Simpson murder trial.

• Their initial recollection was only 3 days after the verdict.
• There are substantial kernels of accuracy in flashbulb memories.
• People who learned about the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, were usually correct in their recollection of where they were when they heard about the attacks, but often wrong about what they were doing at the time.

• The recollections of 9/11 survivors were recorded by Dekel and Bonanno.
• People who were resilient in the face of trauma created a more benign memory of the event compared to people who continued to experience distress.

• The research shows that flashbulb and other strong emotional memories are the same as all other memories.
• The rate of forgetting flashbulb memories is similar to ordinary memories.
• Video cameras seem to work like flashbulb memories, but they don't.
• We don't need a new set of explanations to explain what happened.
• The most parsimonious hypothesis is that flashbulb memories are just as intense as other memories.

• Think about a conversation you had with a friend.

• People remember events that they don't think happened to them.

• Students who are fiction undergraduates report experiencing a distinct memory of an event but feeling unsure of whether it actually occurred or was part of a dream.

• Our efforts to identify the origins of a memory are referred to as source monitoring.
• We engage in source monitoring when we try to figure out if a memory really reflects something that happened or if we just imagined it.
• We rely on cues when it comes to how vivid and detailed our memories are.
• All things being equal, memories of our recent past that are more vivid and detailed are more likely to reflect actual events, although as we've learned, even these memories are sometimes inaccurate.
• If our memory of a conversation with a friend is vague and fuzzy, we may wonder if it really happened or if it was just a product of our imagination.

• source monitoring can help us avoid confusing our memo ries with our fantasies.
• This ability allows us to remember if we punched our boss in the nose or if we just fantasized about doing so.
• Source monitoring isn't perfect because of the vividness and detail of memories.
• False memories can be a result of being fooled.

• Some people mistakenly recall that they engaged in an action even though they didn't do it, but instead observed someone else doing it, because of source monitoring failure.
• An example of source monitoring failure can be considered.

• Participants were asked to build LEGO vehicles and to complete some but not all of the steps in constructing them.
• The experimenter completed the steps the participants hadn't done.
• Participants remembered having completed steps they hadn't done when they were tested the next day.
• Participants filled in the actions related to the missing steps, but later confused what had happened with their real actions.

• Some people are receptive to false memories because of a source monitoring perspective.
• According to some studies, people who are fantasy-prone are more likely to experience memory illusions.
• About 20 percent of undergraduates recall events that they don't believe happened to them.
• People reject these memories because they were told that the events hadn't happened or that they had happened to someone else.
• The nonbelieved memories were equally vivid and detailed as believed memories.
• Belief in the reality of an event can happen on its own.

• All of these groups of people, as well as young children, are likely to confuse their imaginations with reality.

• There are many other memory errors.
• Some cases of plagiarism may have started with someone else.
• The melody of the song "My Sweet Lord" was almost identical to that of the song "He's So Fine" by the Chiffons.
• After the copyright owners of the Chiffons' song sued Harrison, he used a legal defense, arguing that he mistakenly believed he'd invented the melody himself.
• The judge ruled that Harrison probably didn't plagiarize, but he did award money to the owners of the original song.

• Maybe you thought your roommate told you a story about a friend, when in fact it was the friend who told you the story.
• If you've had this experience, tell us about it here.

• Four decades ago, psychologist Elizabeth Loftus opened researchers' eyes to the dramatic effects of misleading suggestions on both everyday memories and reports.
• The recall memories that may or may not occur in 2015, are often created by procedures that strongly encourage people to recall procedure that encourages patients to memories.
• Her classic work showed that our memories are not static.

• The study showed participants brief clips of traffic accidents and asked them to estimate the speed of the vehicles involved.
• Participants reported higher speeds when the word suggested more contact between the cars.

• People were asked questions about the event.
• Some of the questions asked about the creation of fake memories.
• The sign at the intersection was misleading in the slide sequence.
• Participants who received the misleading questions were more likely to say that the sign was a stop sign.

Can the results be duplicated in other places?

• The famous "lost in the mall study" demonstrates that we can create elaborate memories of things that never happened.

• The relatives of 24 participants were asked to describe events that they had experienced in childhood.
• They presented participants with a booklet containing the details of three events the relatives reported, and a fourth event that the relatives verified had never happened: being lost in a shopping mall as a child.
• The participants wrote about their memories.
• A quarter of participants claimed to remember being lost in the mall as a child.
• Some people gave detailed accounts of the event.

• Many investigators followed the path of the ground breaking work.
• Researchers have successfully implanted memories of a wide variety of events in about 20 to 25 percent of college students, ranging from accidentally spilling a bowl of punch on the parents of the bride at a wedding reception to surviving a serious animal attack.

• Many people still insist that the memories are genuine, despite the 1978 study by Loftus and her col implanting the memories.

Can the results be duplicated in support of the claim that memory is damaged?

• I remember seeing the stop sign.

• There are limits to how far we can go in implanting false memories.
• It's easier to remember something that's plausible than it is to remember something that isn't plausible.
• It's easier to create a fake memory of an event from the distant past for which we have no recollection than it is to create a fake memory of an event from the recent past.

• People with better autobiographical memories are not immune to false memories.
• A.J.
• was identified by Patihis and colleagues as a participant with extraordinary memories.
• People who were selected for their perfectly normal memories were more likely to produce false memories thanmemory athletes.

• Most of the studies we've reviewed are open to criticism.
• It is possible that participants actually experienced the suggested event, such as being lost in a mall, but forgot about it.
• The Ruling Out Rival Hypotheses alternative hypothesis is not supported by studies of impossible or highly implausible memories.

• Provide participants with information that increases the event's plausibility.
• There are some "memorable" examples here.

• In one study, investigators showed participants ads for Disneyland that featured Bugs Bunny and asked them if they ever saw him at Disneyland as a child.
• The memories must have been false because Bugs Bunny is not a Disney character.

• In a 2001 study, researchers gave Italian undergraduate students false newspaper articles implying that demonic possession was more common in their culture than previously thought, increasing the plausibility of such an event.
• 18 percent of the students came to believe that they probably witnessed a demonic possession after receiving this fictional information.

• We can "rewrite" parts of people's participant to attempt to recall the procedure if we use fake photographs.
• Five percent of individuals who both participated in the group and the guided imagery were shown a fake exercise that reported a false memory of an event that was not a photograph of a hot-air balloon.

• Her members confirmed that the hot-air balloon "therapist" made such events seem plausible by using the participant and relative.
• Cool eventually came to believe that they did not ride.
• Fifty percent of participants ended up calling.
• Consider that many therapists who treat patients with suspected sexual activity often prescribe "survivor books", self-help books that often contain checklists to remember vivid details, such as seeing a telltale symptom of past sexual abuse, such as fears of sex, low.

• The research shows that most of these symptoms are so vague and general that they can apply to virtually everyone, raising the possibility that consumers of such books might wrongly conclude that their personality characteristics are indicative of a history of sexual abuse.

• Our preferences and behaviors can be affected by suggestions.

• The "asparagus study" is what it is known as.
• Participants were told that they loved to eat asparagus when they were children.

• The participants who received this suggestion were more confident in their asparagus tastes than the participants who did not.
• Participants reported an increased liking for asparagus, a greater desire to eat asparagus in a restaurant, and a willingness to pay more for asparagus in the grocery store after they acquired these false beliefs.
• Some participants in a study were told that they would become ill if they ate egg salad in childhood.
• The participants who received this suggestion at a later time ate less egg salad sandwiches.

• Children are vulnerable to suggestions to recall events that didn't happen because they often confuse fantasy with reality.
• In one study, researchers implanted memories in children of having been kidnapped by aliens by giving them newspaper articles suggesting that such experiences are common.
• Younger children were more likely to have "memories" of being kidnapped than older children.
• Stephen Ceci and his colleagues asked preschool children to imagine events.
• Once a week for 7 to 10 interviews, they told children to think hard about whether the events had happened.
• They asked the children to try to remember what happened when they went to the hospital with a mousetrap on their fingers.
• Fifty-eight percent of children created stories about these events.
• About a quarter of the children continued to insist that their memories were real even though their parents and the experimenter assured them that the events never happened.
• Many social workers and police officers suspect that a child was abused and question him or her about it.
• Children may give investigators the answers they're looking for even if they're wrong.
• When questioning children, psychologists and other healthcare workers should use less suggestive procedures.

• It is difficult to determine if we can implant memories of sexual and physical abuse inside or outside the laboratory because of ethical limitations.
• It is possible that memory errors can have important implications for real-world situations.

• Over 300 prisoners have been acquitted of a crime and released because their genetic material didn't match that of the perpetrators.
• The former prisoners have served over 4,000 years.

• Gene Bibbons was sentenced to life imprisonment for the sexual assault of a 16-year-old girl.
• The victim said that the man with long curly hair was wearing jeans, even though he had short hair.
• She named Bibbons as the attacker.
• After years of searching, investigators found a biological specimen, and genetic testing confirmed that there wasn't a match to the crime scene.

• He was wrongly identified as guilty in 1995.
• He didn't commit a crime.

• Attorneys and judges are influenced by confident yet inaccurate testimony.
• The correlation between witnesses' confidence and the accuracy of their testimony is often modest.
• When it's assessed at the time of the initial identification, the accuracy of the identification is considerably higher.

• Inter isn't accurate when these optimal conditions aren't met.
• When people talk to other people who are different from them, witness testimony is less likely to be accurate.

• The teller's memory of the criminal's face is likely to be impaired by weapon focus, even though she may have a good look at his face.

• People tend to focus on the weapon rather than the person who is committing the crime.
• In order to better weigh the evidence, jurors should be educated about the science of eyewitness recall.

• One of the most divisive issues in psychology is the idea that memories of child abuse can be shaped by suggestive techniques in therapy.
• The debates about false memories became so bitter that some writers referred to them as the "memory wars".
• The fires of the war have waned since the 1990s, but differences persist regarding the nature of false memories.

• Most followers of Sigmund Freud believe that forgetting painful memories is a form of forgetting, and that it is a form of forgetting that is called repression.
• According to recovered memory therapists, repressed memories are the root cause of current life problems that must be addressed to make progress in psychotherapy.
• Nadean Cool's therapist claims that their clients have repressed memories of satanic cults, even though investigations by the FBI have failed to uncover any evidence of the cults.
• In the United States and the United Kingdom, 25 percent of psychotherapists reported in surveys that they used two or more potentially suggestive procedures, including dream interpretation, repeated questioning, and guided imagery.
• According to recent data from Canada, these techniques are still widely used.

• Since the 1990s, as many as 66 percent to nearly 80 percent of undergraduates and clinicians still believe that memories are permanently stored and that traumatic memories are often repressed and recovered in treatment.

• There is a chorus of researchers who claim that there is no evidence that people suppress traumatic memories.
• There is mounting evidence that painful memories, such as the Holocaust, are well remembered and remembered too well.
• They think there's a chance that many memories can be repressed and recovered later in life.

• The researchers voiced serious concerns about whether suggestive procedures can lead patients to wrongly conclude that family members abused them in childhood.
• Hundreds of individuals have been separated from their families and imprisoned because of recovered memory claims of child sexual abuse.
• At least some memory recovery tech Journalist Joshua Foer had no background niques that could cause harm.

• This state of affairs is troubling in a scientific and ethical way.
• Recovered memo memory techniques are given what we know about how fallible human memory is.
• He captured the 2006 U.S. memory corroborating evidence, so ries of child abuse shouldn't be trusted completely unless that's accompanied by clear-cut.
• In the past decade or so, a consensus has emerged that suggestive Championship by, among other things, memorize the exact order of a deck procedures can create false memories of childhood events in many psychotherapy clients.

• Our memories are far from perfect, as we've learned throughout this chapter.
• Many of our memories interfere with each other or fade with the passage of time, and our schemas can bias our memories of events, and misleading information, such as leading questions, can lead us to "remember" occurrences that never happened.

• This shouldn't lead us to despair.
• The story of Joshua Foer teaches us that ordinary people can have extraordinary memories.
• Foer, a reporter with a perfectly normal memory, wanted to see how much he could improve his recall using mnemonic devices.
• Foer won the U.S. Memory Championship by memorize the exact order of a full deck of 52 cards in 1 minute and 40 seconds.

• Although few of us have the time or determination of Foer to become memory whizzes, there's good news: The science of memory can help us learn more effectively and efficiently.
• Drawing on what we've learned, we leave you with a set of evidence-based tips to keep in mind as you study the material in this course and other courses.
• The tips will help you consolidate your memories in college and everyday life.

• The study was distributed or massed.
• Review your notes and textbooks in small groups rather than in large groups.

• The effect is testing.
• If you want to test yourself on the material, put down what you've read.

• Rather than simply memorize facts, connect new knowledge with existing knowledge.

• Don't take notes from instructors' lectures or slides to process ideas.
• Capture the information in your own words and use other concepts from the course.

• Over a long period of time, memories can be surprisingly accurate, but they tend to be less reproductive than before.

• A limited span of seven plus or minus two is how long term memory can be, because people with items that can be extended by grouping things into larger, more meaningful units still form new procemeaningful units called chunks.

• There are different types of long-term memory.

• Explicit memory types include semantic and episodic memory.

• The memory loss of patients with Alzheimer's begins with recent events, with memories of the distant past being the last to go.

• There are memory aids that link new information to familiar knowledge.
• The Development of Memory is one of the many kinds of mnemonics.

• We can use frames of reference for interpreting infants' implicit memory for events.
• Children's memories can be influenced by some of the same errors.

• Different ways of measuring memory.

• Over time, children become better able to use recall by generating previously encountered information and by becoming more aware of their own, whereas recognition simply requires selecting their memory limitations.

• False Memories: When Good Memory is a measure of memory.

• People tend to remember better if they are tested under the flashbulb memories for highly significant events, which seem the same as when they are more vivid and crisp.

• Our memories and testimony.
• Many scientists have for events been influenced by the suggestion that the events may have been different due to the tendency of suggestive therapeutic vations.

• Explain the four levels of analysis that make economy.

What factors affect our reasoning?

• Find out what influences our decision.

• The skills required to read were identified.

• Analyze the relationship between reading mind and various models of the human.