Creating False Childhood Memories

Summary. In this study, Loftus and Pickrell (1995) attempted to set up a situation in which people would generate a false memory for a specific event—being lost in a shopping mall as a young child. The study participants were asked to try to remember details about four events; three were events that the participant’s family had verified had actually occurred, and one event was the “lost in the mall” event that had not occurred. Many of our students find this type of research interesting, and those who are interested in areas such clinical or forensic psychology can see how false memories might be inadvertently created through suggestive interview questions.

Video. Nova: Kidnapped by UFOs? (1996). The segment on the shopping mall study begins approximately 30 minutes into the program, and is about 3 minutes long. Pause the video after the following exchange between the interviewer and the participant: (I) Do you ever remember hearing your name on the P.A. system? (P) Yeah, I do remember that. (I) Could it have been this time when you were five? (P) It could have been. The remainder of the segment is about 1 minute long.  The video can be viewed here (as of July 2018).

Original Research. Loftus, E. F. & Pickrell, J. E. (1995). The formation of false memories. Psychiatric Annals, 25, 720-725.

Design. one-group, pretest-posttest.

Statistical Analysis. The authors report descriptive statistics only. You might also have your students construct a confidence interval for the proportion of people who claim to remember the false event (the margin of error is about 17%, thus the 25% result is significantly different from 0).

Published Results. The authors present descriptive summaries of the data. For example, they report that “68% of the true events were remembered” and that 25% of the subjects claimed to have a partial or full memory of the false event.

Published conclusions. “Nearly two decades of research on memory distortion leaves no doubt that memory can be altered via suggestion. People can be led to remember their past in different ways, and they can even be led to remember entire events that never actually happened to them. When these sorts of distortions occur, people are sometimes confident in their distorted or false memories, and often go on to describe the pseudomemories in substantial detail.” (p. 725).

Table 1. Realistic data showing the number of childhood events the participant claimed to remember, partially or fully (3 true events and 1 false event were presented to each participant).

ID, True Events, False Event
1, 3, 0
2, 3, 1
3, 2, 0
4, 3, 0
5, 2, 0
6, 2, 0
7, 1, 0
8, 1, 1
9, 1, 0
10, 2, 0
11, 2, 1
12, 1, 0
13, 2, 0
14, 3, 0
15, 3, 0
16, 1, 0
17, 3, 1
18, 1, 1
19, 3, 0
20, 3, 0
21, 2, 0
22, 3, 0
23, 1, 1
24, 1, 0

The Excel file for this activity contains the data shown here in Table 1.