Cara Laney

The College of Idaho · Department of Psychology

False memory is an active and dynamic research area. This chapter discusses some of the most recent advances in theory, methodology, and application, as well as recent findings. Recent work has reinterpreted false memory through lenses of evolutionary psychology, pre‐ and postgoal emotions, and persuasion. New findings include false memories caused...

When a person, whether a child or an adult, makes an accusation of sexual abuse (or is suspected of being a victim in the absence of a specific accusation), forensic interviews are used to explore what really happened. The history of interviews of abuse victims (and purported victims) is complicated, and this history has led directly to many of the...

https://www.thedailybeast.com/its-shockingly-easy-to-create-false-memories

In the last few years, substantial gains have been made in our understanding of human memory errors and the phenomenon of false memory, wherein individuals remember entire events that did not happen at all. Research had established that false memories can be consequential and emotional, that they can last for long periods of time, and that they are...

Can people develop false memories for committing aggressive acts? How does this process compare to developing false memories for victimhood? In the current research we used a simple false feedback procedure to implant false memories for committing aggressive acts (causing a black eye or spreading malicious gossip) or for victimhood (receiving a bla...

The current study investigated the effects of change blindness and crime severity on eyewitness identification accuracy. This research, involving 717 subjects, examined change blindness during a simulated criminal act and its effects on subjects’ accuracy for identifying the perpetrator in a photospread. Subjects who viewed videos designed to induc...

In two experiments, involving 231 subjects, we planted the suggestion that subjects loved to eat asparagus as children. Relative to controls, subjects receiving the suggestion became more confident that they had loved asparagus the first time the tried it. These new (false) beliefs had consequences for those who formed them, including increased gen...

False memory refers to the experience of thinking that we remember something from our past that did not really happen.

The legal system has long relied on eyewitness testimony in the determination of guilt, but how reliable are eyewitnesses? Researcher Cara Laney takes a look at how and when eyewitness testimony can be less than believable.

We exposed college students to suggestive materials in order to lead them to believe that, as children, they had a negative experience at Disneyland involving the Pluto character. A sizable minority of subjects developed a false belief or memory that Pluto had uncomfortably licked their ear. Suggestions about a positive experience with Pluto led to...

So said Jackson Browne in his 1974 track “Fountain of Sorrow.” The album containing this track stayed for 29 weeks on the Billboard Top Pop Album Chart. While we know rather little about changing the future, we do know quite a bit about how to change the past. Since witnesses in legal proceedings are routinely asked to recall the past, it is crucia...

Do false beliefs last? To explore this question, this study planted false beliefs or memories of a childhood experience with asparagus. We found that these false beliefs had consequences for subjects, when assessed directly after the suggestive manipulation. Moreover, subjects were brought back two weeks later to see if their false beliefs persiste...

In past research, we planted false memories for food related childhood events using a simple false feedback procedure. Some critics have worried that our findings may be due to demand characteristics. In the present studies, we developed a novel procedure designed to reduce the influence of demand characteristics by providing an alternate magnet fo...

Autobiographical memory is the “diary that we all carry about” said Oscar Wilde. Autobiographical memory defines us. And because autobiographical memory is the foundation on which we build our identity, we like to believe that our memories are accurate, comprehensive and robust. Anything else would challenge our sense of self. But over the previous...

Two experiments investigated the effects of sadness, anger, and happiness on 4- to 6-year-old children's memory and suggestibility concerning story events. In Experiment 1, children were presented with 3 interactive stories on a video monitor. The stories included protagonists who wanted to give the child a prize. After each story, the child comple...

Many people believe that emotional memories (including those that arise in therapy) are particularly likely to represent true events because of their emotional content. But is emotional content a reliable indicator of memory accuracy? The current research assessed the emotional content of participants' pre-existing (true) and manipulated (false) me...

Can judging an individual as being morally responsible for a negative act affect memory for details of the act? We presented participants with a story describing an individual (Frank) who committed a crime (he walked out on a restaurant bill). Some participants were told that the negative act was not intentional and that Frank was essentially a goo...

When given suggestive information, some people can be led to believe that they had experiences that they did not actually have. For example, they may come to believe falsely that they got sick eating particular foods as children, and as a result of that belief they may avoid the foods. But how do we know that someone has developed a false belief or...

Some therapists, as well as other commentators, have suggested that memories of horrific trauma are buried in the subconscious by some special process, such as repression, and are later reliably recovered. We find that the evidence provided to support this claim is flawed. Where, then, might these memory reports come from? We discuss several resear...

We suggested to 228 subjects in two experiments that, as children, they had had negative experiences with a fattening food. An additional 107 subjects received no such suggestion and served as controls. In Experiment 1, a minority of subjects came to believe that they had felt ill after eating strawberry ice cream as children, and these subjects we...

In two experiments, we suggested to 336 participants that as children they had become ill after eating either hard-boiled eggs or dill pickles. Eighty-three additional control participants in Experiment 1 received no suggestion. In both experiments, participants' confidence increased in line with the suggestion. In the second experiment, we used a...

Many studies have indicated that emotional arousal improves memory for the center, or gist, of an event but undermines memory for the event's periphery. However, all of these studies have elicited emotion by showing participants some salient visual stimulus intended to arouse them (e.g., the sight of a wound). This stimulus may have served as an at...

A number of studies have examined participants' recollection of previously-experienced emotional events. In these studies, emotion has generally been evoked by means of a specific attention-grabbing visual stimulus (the sight of a bloody face or a weapon, views of surgery, and the like). We argue, however, that emotion outside of the laboratory is...

Can judging an individual as being morally responsible for a negative act affect memory for details of the act? We presented participants with a story describing an individual (Frank) who committed a crime (he walked out on a restaurant bill). Some participants were told that the negative act was not intentional and that Frank was essentially a goo...