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Reinforcing false memories

Marc

Graduate Poster
M
Joined
Jul 27, 2001
Messages
1,165
ABC has an article on False Memories. Now it discusses how using real photos can be used to help in the formation of false memories. The photos give the mind something to work with in building the false memory

ABC article

Only 27.3 percent of the students without photos "remembered" the Slime story. But a whopping 65.2 percent of those who were shown a class photo recalled even precise details about putting that awful stuff in the teacher's desk, and getting chewed out for it.
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False memories are a special interest of mine. The phenomenon crosses many paranormal claims (ufo abduction, past lives, satanic ritual abuse, and just plain old false memories of abuse), and is actually the basis of Scientology.
 
Marc said:
False memories are a special interest of mine. The phenomenon crosses many paranormal claims (ufo abduction, past lives, satanic ritual abuse, and just plain old false memories of abuse), and is actually the basis of Scientology.
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(cough)
 
Re: Re: Reinforcing false memories

CFLarsen said:

(cough)
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Are you comming down with a cold? Better take something for that nasty cough of yours.
 
Okay now...

Marc said:
ABC has an article on False Memories. Now it discusses how using real photos can be used to help in the formation of false memories. The photos give the mind something to work with in building the false memory

False memories are a special interest of mine. The phenomenon crosses many paranormal claims (ufo abduction, past lives, satanic ritual abuse, and just plain old false memories of abuse), and is actually the basis of Scientology.
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False memories are believed by weak minded people. Most people are weak minded because if the majority of people on the planet were not weak minded, then the world would not be in its current state of regression. People remember things as they would like for them to be and not for what they actually are in the real world. Anyone showing another person a photograph and telling them that they were there but not there and they believe them is total crap. This is the difference between the have and the have nots in the world.

*I am a member of the Ministry of Information. If you look at this screen long enough, you will remember begin to relax and remember the amount of money you owe me. You will remember the time we went out to the pool hall and I had to pay for you. Don't you remember that I lent you money last Saturday? Yeah, that's right. That girl was hot. You bought her a drink and needed a little extra money to pay for her drink because we both know your broke as hell. I need the money now if you've got it.";)
 
Marc said:
Are you comming down with a cold? Better take something for that nasty cough of yours.
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Paul C. Anagnostopoulos said:
Claus, "(cough)" is just a bit too terse, even for us sound-bite lovers.
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So much for my ability to plant thoughts in Marc's brain. I was hinting, in a subtle way, that Marc pen an article about FM for SR.... ;)
 
This reminds me about the Harvard researcher Susan Clancy, who designed a memory experiment in an effort to prove or disprove the validity of repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse. You can read about it here

Clancy wanted to test to see if some people were more prone to making up memories than others. She guessed that there was a category of people who are prone to create false memories and who might demonstrate this tendency when given a standard memory test. Her strategy was to present a list of semantically related words, like ''candy,'' ''sour'' and ''sugar,'' to those who purported to have recovered memories. Then she would test their recall of those words. On the test, she would throw in words that weren't on the list but were like the words on the list -- ''sweet,'' for example. Her hypothesis was that these people would be especially inclined to ''remember'' seeing the word ''sweet'' -- in effect creating a recollection out of a contextual inference, a fact from a feeling.

She found that the recovered memories people had a higher incidence of false memories than non-abused and non-recovered memories people. A control group of people who had certainly been abused, and who had always remembered the abuse, did not "remember" the words that were not there, any more than people who had not been abused. So the data strongly supported her hypothesis. But she received a lot of hate mail, due to the nature of the subject. So she decided to test her theory another way, only this time not on false memories of abuse, but on false memories of something she thought everyone would agree was false. So she recruited subjects whose memories were, in her opinion, patently false - alien abductees. Her experiment showed that alien "abductees" were also more prone to false memories than the control group.

She tested 11 subjects, ran them and a control group through a battery of tests and collated the data, which demonstrated, in her view, that ''individuals who are more prone to develop false memories in the lab are also more likely to develop false memories of experiences that were only suggested or imagined.''

The funny thing is, she got a lot of criticism from alien abductees "researchers" such as Dr. John Mack who believe that alien encounters are real, and from her Harvard Medical School colleagues who believe that traumatic memories are routinely repressed.
 
This research is useful, but it stretches the case a little too far for me, when we compare confusion over simple word retrieval(like "sweet" with "sugar" - the target word) with traumatic "recovered" memories of experiences such as sexual abuse and alien abduction.
 
Explorer said:
This research is useful, but it stretches the case a little too far for me, when we compare confusion over simple word retrieval(like "sweet" with "sugar" - the target word) with traumatic "recovered" memories of experiences such as sexual abuse and alien abduction.
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How do you explain the differences between the three groups:

- recovered memories people

- non-abused and non-recovered memories people

- people who had been abused, and who had always remembered the abuse

And how do you explain how this result was replicated with a completely different group of people – alien "abductees" / a control group of non "abductees"?
 
Hey, I have a few pubs on the false memory topic.

The first is the best thing I've ever published.

o Pesta, B., Murphy, M., & Sanders, R. (2001). Are emotionally charged lures immune to false memory? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 27, 328-338.

Link to article:

http://www.psych.utoronto.ca/~pgsa/... Emotions/Pesta, Murphy, & Sanders (2001).pdf



o Pesta, B., Sanders, R., & Murphy, M. (2001). Misguided multiplication: Creating false memories with numbers rather than words. Memory & Cognition, 29, 478-483.
 
bpesta22 said:
Hey, I have a few pubs on the false memory topic.

The first is the best thing I've ever published.

o Pesta, B., Murphy, M., & Sanders, R. (2001). Are emotionally charged lures immune to false memory? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 27, 328-338.

Link to article:

http://www.psych.utoronto.ca/~pgsa/... Emotions/Pesta, Murphy, & Sanders (2001).pdf



o Pesta, B., Sanders, R., & Murphy, M. (2001). Misguided multiplication: Creating false memories with numbers rather than words. Memory & Cognition, 29, 478-483.
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p.s. look at the appendix for the first article. I actually got some people to have false memories for the dirty words.
 
bpesta22,

Hard to read, the font is fuzzy. Something went wrong when you created the PDF.

If you can find better versions, can I have them for SR? :)

(That will put the pressure on Marc to come up with something better - nothing like a little competition among the hungry writers, eh? ;))

Edited to add: Shucks, the pages are just scanned?? Sheeesh...
 
Hey CF.

I didn't do the pdf -- found them on the net like that.

Feel free to use whatever you like, though the APA owns the copyright on the article.

B

CFLarsen said:
bpesta22,

Hard to read, the font is fuzzy. Something went wrong when you created the PDF.

If you can find better versions, can I have them for SR? :)

(That will put the pressure on Marc to come up with something better - nothing like a little competition among the hungry writers, eh? ;))

Edited to add: Shucks, the pages are just scanned?? Sheeesh...
Click to expand...
 
bpesta22 said:
Hey CF.

I didn't do the pdf -- found them on the net like that.

Feel free to use whatever you like, though the APA owns the copyright on the article.
Click to expand...

Okies, better check with them.
 
RichardR said:
She guessed that there was a category of people who are prone to create false memories and who might demonstrate this tendency when given a standard memory test.
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Along those lines, Richard, I also wonder if some people, being so suggestionable (is that a word??) would be more prone to feeling the effects of placebos? That being so, wouldn't that have an effect (even minimal) in the evaluation of drugs, if, for example, a control group has an unusual amount of suggestionable people? Many traits are selected upon forming a control group (age, weight, past medical history, if applicable, everything else being random). If the "level of suggestionability" (now I invented) is not being taken in consideration, how could it affect the evaluation of the efficacy of new drugs?
 
Richard R said:

"How do you explain the differences between the three groups:

- recovered memories people

- non-abused and non-recovered memories people

- people who had been abused, and who had always remembered the abuse

And how do you explain how this result was replicated with a completely different group of people – alien "abductees" / a control group of non "abductees"?"

Difficult to answer those questions without full knowledge of the results and techniques of the test. Were they double blind tests by the way?

I believe that a far more meaningful test technique would have been to use sample sound videos relating a story line. This would have then covered more areas within the brain of each subject from the groups, and provided a more easily identifiable and representative potential "false memory".

The initial word tests can only be considered a useful precursor to more sophisticated techniques that surely now must follow before an unchallengable proof of the hypothesis is achieved.
 
Luciana Nery said:
Along those lines, Richard, I also wonder if some people, being so suggestionable (is that a word??) would be more prone to feeling the effects of placebos? That being so, wouldn't that have an effect (even minimal) in the evaluation of drugs, if, for example, a control group has an unusual amount of suggestionable people? Many traits are selected upon forming a control group (age, weight, past medical history, if applicable, everything else being random). If the "level of suggestionability" (now I invented) is not being taken in consideration, how could it affect the evaluation of the efficacy of new drugs?
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I think you are on to something. This might actually explain why people experience placebo. AFAIK, we don't know today why placebo works at all. Only that it does.

This could be it.
 
Explorer said:
Difficult to answer those questions without full knowledge of the results and techniques of the test. Were they double blind tests by the way?

I believe that a far more meaningful test technique would have been to use sample sound videos relating a story line. This would have then covered more areas within the brain of each subject from the groups, and provided a more easily identifiable and representative potential "false memory".

The initial word tests can only be considered a useful precursor to more sophisticated techniques that surely now must follow before an unchallengable proof of the hypothesis is achieved.
Click to expand...
I agree the experiments need to be replicated by someone else, with more subjects, and (ideally) different protocols before they should be considered anything like "proof". As it stands they are interesting results that should provoke more studies.
 
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