{"id":4191,"date":"2018-04-26T19:10:00","date_gmt":"2018-04-26T23:10:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/?p=4191"},"modified":"2018-05-16T16:18:27","modified_gmt":"2018-05-16T20:18:27","slug":"falsememorieseyewitnesstestimoniesdrm","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/2018\/04\/26\/falsememorieseyewitnesstestimoniesdrm\/","title":{"rendered":"Are you SURE that happened or was that that just a (false) memory?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Imagine this. You\u2019re in a convenience store and are getting ready to pay for some delicious<\/em> Toll-House cookie dough (YUM). Suddenly, a man runs in wearing a mask and brandishing what appears to be a gun, so you decide to quickly hide near the front of the store behind some of the shelves. He demands for the cash in the register and the terrified workers quickly hand over the cash. You are so well hidden that the robber does not realize that there is anybody else in the store, and so as he is on his way out, he quickly removes his mask so that he can better see to escape. For a brief, fleeting couple of seconds, you get a perfect view of the man\u2019s face. A few days later, the cops bring in some pictures of potential suspects to identify, and you are adamant that it was definitely a certain man in the pictures. However, the cops later realize that the man has an air-tight alibi from that day, which means that your identification of the criminal was incorrect. How could this happen?<\/p>\n

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This would’ve been a less scary robber to identify.<\/p><\/div>\n

Well, thanks to cognitive psychology, we know that this misidentification probably happened due to the phenomenon called false memory<\/em>. A false memory is when somebody has either a recollection of an event that did not actually occur, or when somebody remembers an event very differently from how it actually occurred. Essentially, no matter how sure you are that you remembered something correctly, there is a still a chance that you could be wrong. Crazy, right? So, next time you\u2019re promising someone you are remembering some event correctly \u2013 just think and wonder how solid this promise actually is<\/a>!<\/p>\n

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False memories are EVERYWHERE!<\/p><\/div>\n

Now, think back to the scenario we talked about with the robber. This problem of incorrectly identifying a criminal is more common than people may think, which means that there are often many errors in eyewitness testimonies<\/a>. An eyewitness testimony<\/a> is a first-hand account of a person who viewed a specific event (such as a crime). The famous false memory researcher Elizabeth Loftus<\/a> explains that even though we think we may remember events well \u2013 such as a crime and the face of the criminal \u2013 memories are reconstructive and are therefore flawed (Loftus, 2013). This means that when a person tries to remember the past, they need to mentally recreate previously experienced events; so, a person has to \u201creconstruct\u201d the past, which is a process that is definitely susceptible to errors. Also, in highly emotional situations such as a robbery, the heightened emotions can increase people\u2019s susceptibility to false memories (Kaplin et al. 2016) This presents a major issue in a legal setting, because a victim may have to talk about something that might elicit very intense, negative emotions. The distortions and false memories that may ensue can cause people to be wrongly accused and convicted of crimes that they didn\u2019t commit. To put the extent of this problem into perspective, within 300 cases of wrongful conviction with the supposed perpetrator later exonerated, about 75% were due to errors in faulty memory (May, 2013). Basically, our memory of highly emotional events is far from perfect!<\/p>\n

How much trust would you put in your memory? Many people would probably argue that misremembering likely occurs about smaller events, such as being convinced they sent an email to a colleague about an important topic when they did not. However, the fact is this: false memories still occur about major events that a person may remember as critical or influential in their life. Memories of these important, potentially life-changing events are known as flashbulb<\/a> memories; however, not all important events are flashbulb memories. A flashbulb memory is a highly vivid and detailed memory of a moment in which something emotionally stimulating occurred. Even though these memories appear to be accurate, they are about 25% correct (Nachson & Anat, 2003).<\/p>\n

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Dory (sort of) gets the problem at hand.<\/p><\/div>\n

If I gave you a basic memory test and tested your memory pretty much right after, I bet you think you would perform very well. Now, I understand why you might think that, because maybe you believed you would have accurate memories if there was a small delay in time between being shown information and your memory being tested. Well, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but people still form many false memories in this type of scenario. The Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm is a main method used to show that people create false memories about even super simple material that they think they should remember with ease (Roediger & McDermott, 1995). In this study, participants are presented with a list of words that are semantically related, which means that they are related by their meaning. All of the words on the list relate to one<\/em> word that seems to connect all of the other words, however, this one word does not actually appear on the list. For example, a word list could have the words bed, rest, tired, night, (as well as many others) and the word absent from the list would be \u201csleep.\u201d The word sleep is therefore called the critical lure, because it was the item that was not studied. After, participants are asked to say what words they remember studying. Guess what they often \u201c<\/em>remember?\u201d The word sleep! This is because people form strong associations between the aforementioned words and so they then falsely think that sleep was also presented. So, the main take-away from this is that there doesn’t need to be a complicated event with a huge delay between encoding and retrieval in order to form a false memory. We can create false memories in a matter of seconds or minutes! This again points to the reconstructive nature of false memories.<\/p>\n

Basically, the DRM is a pretty cool tool for cognitive psychologists. Anyway, let’s now unpack a theory that helps explain why people are susceptible to forming false memories – even with simple memory tasks. The Activation Monitoring Theory<\/a> is a dual (two) process model, which includes automatic activation of critical lures and controlled monitoring. Upon studying the list in the DRM, the items are automatically activated because they are related, which spreads to other semantically similar words like \u201csleep.\u201d If something is automatically activated, it requires minimal effort and happens quickly and relatively easily. When participants try to later remember what they studied, they have to engage in a process called source monitoring, where they discern whether the activated words were in the list or just are related. This controlled source monitoring is more difficult and takes time. If a participant does not properly monitor, then they probably will remember the critical lure. Boom. False memory!<\/p>\n

Since we\u2019re now pros at understanding false memory, let\u2019s recap what we talked about:<\/p>\n