Throughout your life, you may have considered memory to be infallible, a way of reliving, without error, like a video camera, those moments of our lives that have been relevant. In fact, you’ve almost certainly uttered a phrase along the lines of «I’m sure this happened like this.» However, decades of research have shown that our memory doesn’t work exactly as we imagine.
In fact, memory is dependent on, among other things, our mood. This means that the way you remember an event depends partly on how you feel at the time of remembering it. For example, if you’re cheerful, you’ll more easily recall cheerful moments, and the same happens if you’re sad; you’ll more easily recall moments congruent with your state of sadness. This is one of the reasons why it can be difficult to get out of a depression without help: a low mood favours the appearance of memories congruent with that mood, helping to maintain the depressive problem.
In this article, we’re going to focus on the research of a renowned psychologist on a specific aspect of memory: the creation of false memories.
Creating False Memories
Elizabeth F. Loftus is one of the most relevant doctors in the field of memory psychology. A mathematician and cognitive psychologist, her findings have had a significant impact in the fields of cognitive and social psychology, as well as in criminology and law. You can access her professional page here.
In one of her works, carried out with her colleague John C. Palmer, she demonstrated how language could modulate the way we remember an event. To do this, she showed participants recordings of car accidents. After this, a questionnaire was given to the participants, which included a question about the speed of the crashed cars. The only difference between participants was the way the question was worded. For some participants, the verb used was «smashed,» which implies a necessarily violent collision; while for the rest the verbs could be «collided,» «bumped,» «contacted,» or «hit,» words whose meaning is more neutral and do not have an associated violent collision. Well, the people with whom the verb «smashed» had been used made a higher estimate of the car’s speed than those with whom the rest of the verbs had been used. Two possible explanations are provided here: either the verb used changes the way the car’s speed is estimated, or it changes the memory of the accident.
The car experiment didn’t end there. A week later, a second questionnaire was carried out, which included a question about whether they had seen any broken glass in the video. Needless to say, no broken glass appeared in the video. However, some participants responded that they did remember seeing broken glass. The interesting thing is not only the fact of having created the false memory of the broken glass, but that this false memory was created more easily in the group of those who, a week earlier, had been asked about the speed using the verb «smashed,» more violent than the rest. The way the question was asked had increased the probability of creating a false memory a week later.
However, the previous is not the only work in which the creation of false memories has been studied. Among others, Loftus published what would become known as «the shopping centre experiment». In it, the psychologist had set out to create a false memory in the participants, referring to a childhood event in which they got lost in a shopping centre. To do this, she needed the help of some relatives close to the participants. In the experiment, the participants were given a leaflet with four stories relating to their childhood, provided by their relative. One of them recounted how the participant had gotten lost as a child in a shopping centre, which, in reality, had never happened. Between one and two weeks later, the participants were interviewed, asking them to give as many details as possible of the stories they had been given. 25% of the participants perfectly remembered getting lost in a shopping centre when they were children, although it had never actually happened.
Conclusions
The creation of false memories can be shocking, or even amusing, but it can have really serious consequences. The McMartin case is a clear example. It studied the possible multiple sexual abuse in a pre-school in the USA. The research methodology applied by the psychologist in charge of the case led to the creation of memories about sexual abuse and false satanic rituals in 384 children. The accused spent five years in prison, awaiting a trial in which it was demonstrated that these abuses had never occurred. The accused was innocent.
As we have seen, the functioning of memory is far from being like that of a video camera. Memories are modified, and can even be created, even if we have never lived them. In this sense, psychologists must be especially careful when exploring and working with those techniques that repeatedly investigate memories, especially the more distant or deep they are.
References:
Ruiz-Vargas, J. M. (2000). Cognitive Psychology of Memory. Barcelona, 2001, Anthropos.
Vázquez C, Hervás G, Hernán Gómez L, Romero N. (2009) Cognitive models of depression: A synthesis and new proposal based on 30 years of research. Psicología conductual.
Loftus E, Palmer J. (1974) Reconstruction of Automobile Destruction : An Example of the Interaction Between Language and Memory. Journal of verbal learning and verbal behavior. Vol 13, 585-589.
Loftus E. (1997). Creating Childhood Memories. Applied Cognitive Psychology. Vol 11(7), 75-86. DOI: 10.1002/(SICI)1099-0720(199712)11:73.0.CO;2-F.
Manzanero A. Falsas memorias. Blog en internet. Cited on 1 September 2016. Available at: http://www.psicologiadeltestimonio.com/p/falsas-memorias.html
Linder D. The McMartin Preschool Abuse Trial: A Commentary. Internet page. Cited on 1 September 2016. Available at: http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/mcmartin/mcmartinaccount.html
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