Close your eyes and imagine every news story you’ve ever heard in your life. What do you picture? You probably remember the big events: 9\/11, Hurricane Katrina, etc. The flashbulb memories; the ones you remember in perfect clarity to the point where you could even remember where you were and what you were doing when you found out about the event. You also remember these events in pictures, right? In all likelihood, you don’t remember the news anchor sitting there telling you about the day, or the words printed on a newspaper. You remember images of the event. Those are the ones that stick in your brain. Well what if those pictures cause people to falsely remember events in the news?<\/p>\n
We say a picture is worth a thousand words, but is an image powerful enough to actually create false memories? Is it even more powerful than words alone? In a study entitled \u201cPhotographs cause false memories for the news,\u201d done by Deryn Strange, \u00a0Maryanne Garry, Daniel M. Bernstein, and D. Stephen Lindsay, participants were tested to see if false memories are more prevalent when images are used in conjunction with words as opposed to words alone. They had participants look at ten individual newspaper headlines for four seconds each. The headlines either had or did not have pictures alongside the words. Also, each headline was of either a real news story or a fake one. After viewing a headline, the participants would rate on a scale from 1 to 5 how confident they were that they recognized the news story; 1 being he or she had never heard about it before and 5 being he or she remembered the specific moment when they learned of the event. After collecting the data, the researchers found out that pictures have a significant impact on memory. They found that when a picture was next to the headline, participants were much more likely to remember a false event. Now, some of you out there may be questioning this idea. Maybe participants were just afraid to say they didn\u2019t remember something. However, participants were clearly comfortable reporting their lack of knowledge of a news story. On true events, participants were okay with saying they did not remember it at all. This shows that the data really does support the idea that a photograph can cause false memories because we know that participants weren\u2019t just claiming to remember when they actually didn\u2019t. This study clearly showed that the addition of photographs makes people more likely to remember false events.<\/p>\n
This is incredibly relevant information for our day-to-day lives. Imagine a court case where eyewitness testimony decides the fate of an accused criminal. If that witness were to confuse events because they had seen a picture associated with a false event, they might create a false memory around it, accidently sending the person to prison, or conversely, setting a guilty man free. In a less dramatic scenario, this phenomenon can come into play in an individual\u2019s life simply by distorting memories of events. Say you are proofreading a colleague\u2019s research paper. They may have gotten some facts wrong, but if they added a picture that relates to the event they claim to have happened, you may believe it to be true and remember hearing about it beforehand. Suddenly, a mistake is left in the paper without anyone realizing it is incorrect. You may even falsely remember an event that The Onion<\/i> wrote about! So now the question becomes how and why does this occur? Why are our memories so easily manipulated by something as simple as a picture? First for the how: According to this study, memories need a support system to make them personally believable. Pictures provide that support. As we search through our memories, we look for cues in our world that provide evidence for our memories to make sure they are accurate. Also, seeing a picture may be misattributed as fact. Photos provide a secondary pathway for a person to place a memory.<\/p>\n
Now for the why. Photos would provide context for memories. When we see an image, we record it in our minds as that image. Images in our minds can be mental representations from the world or photographs. Either way, pictures from the world provide us with a more wholesome picture of memories. Pictures truly are worth MORE than a thousand words, as evidenced by the fact that they can make you remember something that never happened. Mind-blowing, I know\u2026 So next time you are reading the newspaper, be cognizant of the fact that you may be experiencing some mind manipulation, and try to remember that memory isn\u2019t necessarily fact.<\/p>\n
Strange, D., Gary, M., Bernstein, D. M., & Lindsay, D. S. (2010). Photographs cause false memories for the news. Acta Psychologica, 136, 90-94.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Close your eyes and imagine every news story you’ve ever heard in your life. What do you picture? You probably remember the big events: 9\/11, Hurricane Katrina, etc. The flashbulb memories; the ones you remember in perfect clarity to the point where you could even remember where you were and what you were doing when […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5070,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[80215],"tags":[130349],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/648"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5070"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=648"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/648\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3696,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/648\/revisions\/3696"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=648"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=648"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=648"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}