Background:

There have been several past studies about how people can develop false memories if they are exposed to short, plausible narratives. These studies involved the participants reading several narratives about childhood events, some supplied by family members and one that never happened. After the participants read the narratives they were given instructions to work at remembering all they could about the events and to report in two or three sessions. Results showed that you could in fact "implant" false childhood memories. How is this done? Hyman and his colleagues created a three-stage process, guided by the source monitoring framework (SMF) to explain this phenomenon. The three conditions that must be satisfied are 1) The participants must accept that the narrative is plausible, 2) The participants must create contextual information for the event (such as an image), and 3) The participants must commit a source monitoring error (they must relate their memory construction to a past experience rather than to a created image). There are procedures that the experimenters use to help in the creation of false memories, such as providing detailed information like who accompanied the participant, where it occurred, etc…. The focus of this study is to see whether or not a "doctored" photo would have the same effect in producing false memories as these narratives.

Method:

20 adult confederates each recruited a family member who met 3 requirements. 1)They had never been on a hot air balloon ride, 2)They were at least 18 years old, and 3) They had never taken a psychology class. There were 10 female participants and 10 male participants from local universities. They were between the ages of 18-28. Each participant and confederate received $20 for their contributions to this research.

The participants were shown four pictures (3 were of things that had actually taken place and the 4^th was the "doctored" photo of the participant on a hot air balloon ride). All of the pictures featured the participant when they were between the ages of 4-8. The participants were interviewed 3 times over a period of 7-16 days. Interviews 1 and 3 were a modified version of the Step-wise procedures. This technique involves three stages if the interview 1) participants give a free narrative, 2) participants answer general questions, and 3) participants answer specific questions.

In Interview 1 participants were told that the study was about how and why people reminisce about some childhood events. The first of the photos was introduced and the participant was instructed to tell the experimenter everything they could remember about the particular event without leaving anything out. When they could remember no more, the participant’s confidence level was tested. If the participant could not remember anything about a particular event, they were told that was normal because they hadn’t thought about the event in so long. They were given a few more minutes to think. If they still couldn’t remember it, the participants were told that another goal of the study was to assess the efficacy or different memory retrieval techniques. Context reinstatement and guided imagery were used to help the participant "recall" a certain event. As they were doing this, the target photo was in full view. At the end of Interview 1 the participant was given a copy of their photos and asked to take a few minutes each night trying to remember specific details about each event.

Interview 2 was conducted 3-7 days later. During this interview they were only asked if they remembered anything else from the "forgotten" event. Then the context reinstatement and guided imagery were repeated. No confidence levels were tested during this interview. Interview 3 was conducted 3-7 days after Interview 2. This was simply a repeat of Interview 1. At the end of the session, the true experiment was revealed and the participants were debriefed.

Results:

Recall for the sixty true events (3 for each of the 20 participants) was 93.3% at the end of Interview 1 and 96.7% at the end of Interview 3. The false events were categorized by Hyman and Billing’s (1998) criteria for categorizing memories. A clear false memory was defined as being able to report memories critical to the event with consistent elaboration on items not present in the photo. A partial false memory was defined as being able to consistently elaborate on the photo or feelings, but not to actually indicate that an event happened to you. A subject trying to recall was defined as when a subject describes images of an event, but does not claim any of these images are personally experienced. No memory is defined as failing to attempt any recall. At the end of Interview 1, 1 participant reported a clear false memory, 6 reported partial false memories, 3 were trying to recall and 10 had no memory. By the end of Interview 3, 4 participants reported a clear false memory, 6 reported partial memory, 5 were trying to recall and 5 had no memory, thus 50% of the participants reported a clear or partial false memory. The confidence ratings were higher for true events rather than false events. On average true recalled memories received confidence ratings of 90.8% whereas the ratings for true non-recalled memories only averaged 41.7%. For the false memories, the recalled ratings were 44.5% while the non-recalled ratings only averaged to 10.0%.

Clause analysis:

Memory reports were divided into clauses and categorized in an effort to investigate the extent to which perceptual details in the photos contributed to the false memories. For true and false photos it is seen that these details had a limited role in memory. Less than 30% of a subject’s report was made from information from a photo. Due to the fact that there was no significant difference in the two types of photos in Interview 1 it is thought that true and false photos are looked at in much the same way in the beginning. In Interview 3 however, there is more use of perceptual details for true events rather than false events. This is said to have occurred because the surrounding in the false photos were unfamiliar, thus, could not be commented on. The beyond photograph clauses were grouped into three groups 1) Setting, 2) Feeling, and 3) Perception. The setting was most commented on, followed by perception, and last feeling. Perception seemed to stay the same throughout the course of the interviews but feeling had increased by Interview 3. This is said to have occurred because the participants have more feeling associated with a memory the longer they have to think about it.

General Discussion:

This research leaves 3 questions for future research. 1) Can "doctored" photos cause people to testify to events that didn’t happen, 2) What impact does gaining access to your past have on people, and 3) Can using photos in trauma therapy, along with suggestion and imagination, be in fact, producing false memories of early traumatic experiences?