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Lost in the Mall: Misrepresentations and Misunderstandings
Abstract
Readers of Ethics and Behavior have been treated to a misrepresentation of my research on planting false memories, to a misstatement of the actual empirical finidngs, and to a distortion of the history of the development of the idea for this line of research. The partisan essay by Crook and Dean which appears in this issue ("'Lost in a Shopping Mall' -- A Breach of Professional Ethics") is disturbing not only because of its errors, exaggerations, and omissions, but because, in some instances, the quality of the argument makes one wonder whether these were innocent mistakes or a deliberate attempt to distort my work. Some of these errors can be explained by simple lack of scientific competence. However, others are sufficiently bizarre that they cast doubt on the process that led to the acceptance of a manuscript written by an individual who has continually made her animosity toward me very publicly known (e.g., Boerner, 1996; Neimark, 1996).
... Subsequently, the participants were interviewed twice in four weeks, being asked to recall four memories: three, according to their parents, were real ones, and one was "getting lost in the mall." Most participants recalled getting lost in the mall when they were young, indicating that they could not discern and attribute fabricated and similar events (Loftus, 1999). ...
... This process is called memory consolidation, and if it is interrupted long-term memory may not form. Conversely, an established memory can be changed in a process called reconsolidation (Loftus, 1998(Loftus, , 1999. Thus, when it is said that memory of a certain kind is located in a certain part of the brain, it apparently means that systems for recognizing and controlling that kind of perception, or important components of it, are located there. ...
To identify the elements and relations of language, the empirical linguistics pioneered by Zellig Harris uses the fundamental methodology of Perceptual Control Theory, the Test for the Controlled Variable, in the form of substitution tests. Statistical learning demonstrates that this suffices for learning and maintaining language, and PCT can model how the brain does it. Intersubjective agreements constituting language result from collective control. Because intersubjective agreement is the basis of Scientific objectivity, linguistics can be objective in ways that other sciences cannot be. Harrisian empirical linguistics characterizes the objective information in language, and PCT shows how an embodied cognitive system associates with it subjective meanings (non-language perceptions). The alignment of stages of growth of the perceptual hierarchy with predictable regression periods in infant behavior also coincides with stages in the development of language. Each field, Harrisian empirical linguistics and PCT, has consequences for the other.
... Ein weiteres Experiment zielt konkret auf Kindheitserinnerungen ab (Loftus 1999). Um diese zu untersuchen, wurden jeder einzelnen Versuchsperson kurze Berichte über ihre Kinderheiterlebnisse vorgelesen, die von ihren Verwandten verfasst wurden. ...
Unter Lernen versteht man ganz allgemein den Prozess, der mit einem gewünschten, zufälligen, beiläufigen oder weitgehend unbewussten Erwerb von neuem Wissen, Erfahrungen und Fertigkeiten einhergeht. Dieser Erwerb führt letztlich zu einer Veränderung des Verhaltens, Denkens oder Fühlens aufgrund von neu gewonnenen Einsichten und Erfahrung. Dieses Kapitel befasst sich mit der Kategorisierung und Beschreibung der unterschiedlichen impliziten und expliziten Lernprozesse.
... In the late 19 th century, for example, soldiers and "hysterics" seeking legal, financial, or social accommodation or compensation were accused of malingering or seeking secondary gain (Herman, 1997;Trimble, 1985). In the late 20 th century, the false memory syndrome debate developed in the wake of individuals making social and legal claims of childhood sexual abuse against family members (Crook & Dean, 1999;Loftus, 1999). Today, as part of the trigger warning debate, we have George accusing progressivism of making "victimhood a coveted status that confers privileges" (para. ...
Paralele između pristrasnosti u autobiografskim i kolektivnim sećanjima.
Positivity biases in autobiographical and collective memories.
After a brief introduction to her upbringing and research interests, Elizabeth Loftus speaks with Witkowski on the problems and severe criticism that she experienced when examining repressed memory. They analyze the problem of social relevance of psychological research, and the reasons why many scientists avoid doing such research. They move on to discuss the problem of the methodological shift in social psychological research—from behavior observation to introspection—and also discuss the replication crisis, its causes and consequences. Loftus also mentions BF Skinner, whom she met during her studies, and offers advice to young psychologists beginning their professional career. Finally, Loftus presents her current research interests in memory engineering and memory blindness.
Als Gedächtnis bezeichnet man ganz allgemein die Fähigkeit, Erfahrungen, Wissen und unsere motorischen Fertigkeiten so abzuspeichern, dass wir sie für kürzere oder längere Zeit behalten und später wieder abrufen können. In diesem Kapitel wird zunächst erläutert, wie man in der Wissenschaft die unterschiedlichen Gedächtnissysteme entdeckt hat, um diese dann in der Folge ausführlich zu beschreiben. Ein besonderes Gewicht wird aufgrund der Wichtigkeit für unsere Handlungen und Verhaltensweisen auf das emotionale Gedächtnis gelegt. Diese Ausführungen beinhalten eine Beschreibung von wichtigen psychologischen Konstrukten wie Emotionen, Gefühle, Einstellungen und deren Zusammenspiel.
Nadel, Jacobs, and colleagues have postulated that human memory under conditions of extremely high stress is “special.” In particular, episodic memories are thought to be susceptible to impairment, and possibly fragmentation, attributable to hormonally based dysfunction occurring selectively in the hippocampal system. While memory for highly salient and self‐relevant events should be better than the memory for less central events, an overall nonmonotonic decrease in spatio/temporal episodic memory as stress approaches traumatic levels is posited. Testing human memory at extremely high levels of stress, however, is difficult and reports are rare. Firefighting is the most stressful civilian occupation in our society. In the present study, we asked New York City firefighters to recall everything that they could upon returning from fires they had just fought. Communications during all fires were recorded, allowing verification of actual events. Our results confirmed that recall was, indeed, impaired with increasing stress. A nonmonotonic relation was observed consistent with the posited inverted u‐shaped memory‐stress function. Central details about emergency situations were better recalled than were more schematic events, but both kinds of events showed the memory decrement with high stress. There was no evidence of fragmentation. Self‐relevant events were recalled nearly five times better than events that were not self‐relevant. These results provide confirmation that memories encoded under conditions of extremely high stress are, indeed, special and are impaired in a manner that is consistent with the Nadel/Jacobs hippocampal hypothesis.
False Memory Syndrome (FMS) and Parental Alienation Syndrome (PAS) were developed as defenses for parents accused of child abuse as part of a larger movement to undermine prosecution of child abuse. The lost-in-the-mall study by Dr. Elizabeth Loftus concludes that an entire false memory can be implanted by suggestion. It has since been used to discredit abuse survivors’ testimony by inferring that false memories for childhood abuse can be implanted by psychotherapists. Examination of the research methods and findings of the study shows that no full false memories were actually formed. Similarly, PAS, coined by Richard Gardner, is frequently used in custody cases to discredit children’s testimony by alleging that the protective parent coached them to have false memories of abuse. There is no scientific research demonstrating the existence of PAS, and, in fact, studies on the suggestibility of children show that they cannot easily be persuaded to provide detailed disclosures of abuse.
Counterfactual imaginings are known to have far-reaching implications. In the present experiment, we ask if imagining events from one's past can affect memory for childhood events. We draw on the social psychology literature showing that imagining a future event increases the subjective likelihood that the event will occur. The concepts of cognitive availability and the source-monitoring framework provide reasons to expect that imagination may inflate confidence that a childhood event occurred. However, people routinely produce myriad counterfactual imaginings (i.e., daydreams and fantasies) but usually do not confuse them with past experiences. To determine the effects of imagining a childhood event, we pretested subjects on how confident they were that a number of childhood events had happened, asked them to imagine some of those events, and then gathered new confidence measures. For each of the target items, imagination inflated confidence that the event had occurred in childhood. We discuss implications for situations in which imagination is used as an aid in searching for presumably lost memories.
We conducted two experiments to investigate if college students would create false memories of childhood experiences in response to misleading information and repeated interviews. In both experiments we contacted parents to obtain information about events that happened to the students during childhood. In a series of interviews we asked the students to recall the parent-reported events and one experimenter-created false event. In the second experiment we varied the age at which we claimed the false event occurred. In both experiments we found that some individuals created false memories in these circumstances and in the second experiment we found no effect of age of attempted incorporation. In the second experiment we also found that those who discussed related background knowledge during the early interviews were more likely to create a false recall. Generalizations to therapy contexts are discussed.
In a recent article, Rosenbaum, Kenny, and Derr (1983) described a hierarchical storage and execution model for a class of repetitive, discrete response sequences. With a few modifications, this model can match the performance of subjects performing sequences from this class. The authors claimed that this provides an "existence proof" for hierarchical control during movement execution, at least for these sequences. My purpose is to show by counterexample that this claim is too strong. I present a logogen activation model for the rapid execution of stored motor sequences which assumes that (a) logogens corresponding to responses are activated via association and repetition; (b) activation decays; and (c) interresponse time is inversely related to activation of the correct response at each position in the sequence. This model can also fit the results of Rosenbaum et al. A much richer data base, designed to discriminate between competing formulations, will be needed to prove the existence of the hierarchical, tree-traversal control process proposed by Rosenbaum et al.
A theory of cognitive mapping is developed that depends only on accepted properties of hippocampal function, namely, long-term potentiation, the place cell phenomenon, and the associative or recurrent connections made among CA3 pyramidal cells. It is proposed that the distance between the firing fields of connected pairs of CA3 place cells is encoded as synaptic resistance (reciprocal synaptic strength). The encoding occurs because pairs of cells with coincident or overlapping fields will tend to fire together in time, thereby causing a decrease in synaptic resistance via long-term potentiation; in contrast, cells with widely separated fields will tend never to fire together, causing no change or perhaps (via long-term depression) an increase in synaptic resistance. A network whose connection pattern mimics that of CA3 and whose connection weights are proportional to synaptic resistance can be formally treated as a weighted, directed graph. In such a graph, a "node" is assigned to each CA3 cell and two nodes are connected by a "directed edge" if and only if the two corresponding cells are connected by a synapse. Weighted, directed graphs can be searched for an optimal path between any pair of nodes with standard algorithms. Here, we are interested in finding the path along which the sum of the synaptic resistances from one cell to another is minimal. Since each cell is a place cell, such a path also corresponds to a path in two-dimensional space. Our basic finding is that minimizing the sum of the synaptic resistances along a path in neural space yields the shortest (optimal) path in unobstructed two-dimensional space, so long as the connectivity of the network is great enough. In addition to being able to find geodesics in unobstructed space, the same network enables solutions to the "detour" and "shortcut" problems, in which it is necessary to find an optimal path around a newly introduced barrier and to take a shorter path through a hole opened up in a preexisting barrier, respectively. We argue that the ability to solve such problems qualifies the proposed hippocampal object as a cognitive map. Graph theory thus provides a sort of existence proof demonstrating that the hippocampus contains the necessary information to function as a map, in the sense postulated by others (O'Keefe, J., and L. Nadel. 1978. The Hippocampus as a Cognitive Map. Clarendon Press, Oxford, UK). It is also possible that the cognitive mapping functions of the hippocampus are carried out by parallel graph searching algorithms implemented as neural processes. This possibility has the great attraction that the hippocampus could then operate in much the same way to find paths in general problem space; it would only be necessary for pyramidal cells to exhibit a strong nonpositional firing correlate.
In this paper we review the factors alleged to be responsible for the creation of inaccurate reports among preschool-aged children, focusing on so-called "source misattribution errors." We present the first round of results from an ongoing program of research that suggests that source misattributions could be a powerful mechanism underlying children′s false beliefs about having experienced fictitious events. Preliminary findings from this program of research indicate that all children of all ages are equally susceptible to making source misattributions. Data from a follow-up wave of data indicate that very young children may be disproportionately vulnerable to these kinds of errors when the procedure is changed slightly to create mental images more easily. This vulnerability leads younger preschoolers, on occasion, to claim that they actually experienced events that they only thought about. These preliminary findings are discussed in the context of the ongoing debate over the veracity and durability of delayed reports of early memories, repressed memories, dissociative states, and the validity risks posed by therapeutic techniques that entail repeated visually guided imagery inductions.