Contact Information: Charles J. Brainerd 520-621-7831 [email protected]
Memory for Nonevents--The Persistence of (False) Memory
How good is your memory? Really? Do you pride your ability to recall facts and events as clearly as if they just happened?
Two University of Arizona psychologists have experimental data to show that things that were never experienced are easier to "remember" than things that were.
In the November issue of the journal "Psychological Science," Charles J. Brainerd and Valerie F. Reyna report "a surprising finding about false memory: On tests that parallel methods of memory interrogation that are common in psychotherapy and the law, things that were not experienced are more likely to be accepted (in this case by test subjects) than things that were."
Brainerd, a professor of educational psychology at the UA, and Reyna, an associate professor in the UA department of surgery, say this explanation of false memory predicts that this phenomenon provides "superior access to the gist of events."
They tested this prediction in three experiments in which the task was to accept all test items that were consistent with the substance of previously studied material, regardless of whether they had been studied. They found that acceptance rates were consistently higher for never-studied items (that provided superior access to gist memories) than for studied items. It suggests, they say, that false memories can be by-products of how the brain stores and retrieves information in the first place.
In their tests, subjects studied a series of short word lists. The target words on the lists initiate certain themes, such as types of furniture or medical themes. A critical word that is an example of a theme and is an associate of all the target words is omitted from each study list, but is included in the test list. On immediate recognition tests, where the task is to accept only target words, acceptance rates for these critical "distractors" do not significantly differ from target words.
Ultimately, they say, these results have implications for the use of exploratory memory-interrogation procedures used by psychotherapists, and by police, lawyers and others in the judicial system.
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