Remembering True and False TRAUMATIC EXPERIENCES

How is a false memory created? Researchers think that perhaps a memory for an event that really happened (such as a visit to the shopping mall) becomes confused with images produced by trying to remember the imagined event (being lost in a mall). Images are created during the recall attempt, and eventually the two images become confused and the false event comes to be "remembered." Moreover, the social demands placed on the individual over repeated interviewing can motivate him or her to "remember" in order to please the authority figure.

What these studies show is an alternative explanation to how "repressed" memories may be later "recovered." That is, they provide evidence to suggest that memories "recovered" after some period of "repression" may have actually been memories created from suggestions of events that never happened.

Such studies have utilized either altered events or trusted persons' misleading suggestions, but how might it be that someone like Donald Watt could come to remember an entire sequence of events falsely without either of these techniques? Research by Maryanne Garry [one of this article's authors] and her colleagues, reported in the 1996 Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, has indicated that, simply by imagining an event, one can become more confident that it occurred.

In experiments, subjects first are tested on their confidence that a number of childhood events happened to them. Two weeks later, they are instructed to imagine some of those events for a few minutes. After the imagination task, the subjects are again asked to indicate how confident they are that the same list of childhood events happened to them. Subjects who imagine events become more confident that they happened to them, compared to the subjects who do not imagine the events. That is, imagining an event inflates one's confidence that it actually occurred--thus the name of the phenomenon, "imagination inflation."

What does imagination inflation have to do with Watt? It is known that he has read much about the Nazi concentration camps and that he also conferred with a number of those who were at those camps. He may have started to imagine what it would be like if he were present as a stoker at Auschwitz. He admits in his autobiography that, "the more I wrote, the more I started to remember," and that even more memories came back after each interview.

Recent research suggests that Watt may not have even needed to imagine himself present at one of those camps. Instead, he might have imagined what it was like for one of those whom he was talking with about their experiences. A study by Garry, Sue Frame, and Loftus, reported in a 1999 book, Mind Myths, used a procedure which was essentially the same as that used by Garry and colleagues in 1996. In the more recent study, however, they asked some subjects to imagine someone other than themselves in the event. It made no difference whether the subjects imagined themselves or someone else in the event. In either case, their confidence that the event had happened to them increased.