I'll start with the general concept, then move into specifics. All information is paraphrased from the textbook 'Cognition 4th Ed.' by Mark H. Ashcroft (the text for my Cognitive Psych class this term).
The Misinformation Effect
Several studies have confirmed that people often claim to remember certain misinformation. The typical study invovles a video or slides of a car accident where one car runs a stop sign.
Later, they are exposed to a narrative of the same accident. One group of participants recieves a neutral narrative account, no mention of any type of sign or traffic volation is made.
The other group however is exposed to a specific narrative mentioning the presence of a yield sign.
Then, both group perform a simple yes/no recognition task, at some point they are asked, "was there a stop sign or a yield sign?".
The common result shows that the misled subjects have 20% lower accuracy on the recognition task than the groups not exposed to misinformation.
Furthermore, the misled group shows faster reaction times in their incorrect judgements than in their correct ones. This suggests that their initial reaction is confidence in the misinformation, then they must take a second to think in order to come up with the right judgement.
Misinformation Acceptance
Basically this is an explanation of the Misinformation Effect. It posits that participants in such 'car crash' studies accept additional information as having been part of an earlier experience without actually remembering that information.
For example, the participant might not remember seeing a yield sign, but they are more than willing to go along with the information in the narrative.
In short, people often become quite certain about such 'secondhand' memories and disturbingly, these tendancies grow stronger as more and more time elapses.
Implanted Memories
Other work has shown how memories of events that never happened can be successfully implanted in participants.
Early studies in this area involved telling participants some childhood stories about themselves that were supplied by the participants parents, however the experiment add in one story that is a complete fiction.
A surprisingly large number of the participants eventually claim to 'remember' the fictional story. For example, none of the participants claimed to remember the 'pseudo-event' when first told about it, but by the third session of questioning, 25% claimed to remember it as true, often in detail.
More recent work shows even more disturbing results.
A group of researchers conducted a study where they attempted to implant a false childhood memory using a photograph.
They used the same technique as in the earlier work (telling 2 childhood stories supplied by the parents and one fiction), but this time they used a photograph of one of the participants grade-school classes as a sort of 'memory cue'.
In case you're interested, the pseudo-event used was a story about sneaking some Slime (that bright, gelatinous toy made by Mattel) into the teacher's desk.
The participant were then asked to recall all that they could about the events in the stories and come in for more questioning after a week had passed. They were also encouraged to "work at remembering more about the events" during the week.
I'll summarize the results here.
After Session 1:
35% had no memories of the pseudo-event
30% claimed to remember the pseudo-event
35% claimed to remember some images of the event, but did not remember doing it.
After Session 2:
21% had no memories of event
67% claimed to remember the pseudo-event
12% claimed to remember some images of the event, but did not remember doing it.
Results were significantly lower in control groups that were not shown the photo as a memory cue (about 20% claimed to remember the event after session 2).
Interestingly, the researchers also reported that after they told the subjects that the Slime event never happened, the subjects expressed surprise...
"You mean that didn't happen to me?!"
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