Memory1-Recovered & False Memories

->What evidence is there to support the existence of recovered memories?
->Is is possible to create false memories?
->What is the distinction between Know/Remember judgements?
->What evidence is there to support the existence of false memories in real life events?

**Much researches has been done but people still hold radically different opinions. It may be some time before we have satisfactory answer.

Recovered Memories

=>The re-appearance in consciousness of memories for past events after a period during which these memories were not accessible.
=>At first sight, it seems unlikely that people could fail to remember traumas-often traumatic memories are memories we can't keep out of our minds(PTSD). Yet, there is evidence for recovered memories.
=>One would sincerely believe that they had discovered longest memories which are responding to actually events.

• (Freyd, 1996) Prof. Cheit attended the San Francisco Boys Chorus summer camp at the age of 10 and 13 years. He was sexually abused by the camp's administrator and only recalled the event at the age of 36 (which was 24 years later). Others confirmed the story that the same thing has happened to them.
• DN (a 41-year-old female) was being raped in a hospital when she was 19. However, she discovered the memory at age 35 while driving home several hours after her group therapy session. The case was taken to court and the perpetrator was found guilty.

=>Three independant elements (Schooler, 2001):

• The original event occurred.
• There was a period of time during which the person did not remembered the event
• The memory was suddenly discovered.

=>At the time of discovery, one has the experience of currently remembering the event but also believing they had bot previously remembered the event.
     ->Forgot-it-all-along effect-less to do with discovering the memory itself, rather coming to and understanding about the traumatic experience. During the discovered memory experience, one thinks about the episode in a different way.
=>Corroboration from others is either:
     ->knowing about the victims' abuse soon after it occurred.
     ->having also been abused by the accused individual.
     ->personally heard a confession from the alleged perpetrator.
=>Two types of recovered memory
     1. gradually recovered within the context of suggestive therapy
     2. spontaneously recovered without extensive prompting or explicit attempt to reconstruct the past.

False Memories

=>One would remember a traumatic experience that has never occurred and seems rather unlikely. People have recalled all sorts of unlikely events such as previous lives/alien abductions.
=>The systematic creation of memories for events which never in fact occurred.

• In 1986, Nadean Cool, a nurse's aide in Wisconsin sought therapy from a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist used hypnosis and other suggestive techniques to dig out buried FALSE memories of abuse. When Cool discovered, she sued the psychiatrist for malpractice; the case was settled out of court for $2.4 million.
• In Missouri, a church counsellor helped Beth Rutherford to recall during therapy that her father had regularly raped out at the ages of 7 to 14. Under the therapist's guidance, Rutherford developed memories of her father twice impregnating her and force her to abort the foetus herself using a coat hanger. Later medical examination revealed that she was still a virgin at age 22 and had never been pregnant. The therapist was sued and Rutherford received a $1 million settlement in 1996.

There is evidence for the existence of both true and false recovered memories, but there is also serious disagreement as to how widespread each type is.

Without corroboration, it is very difficult to differentiate between false memories and true ones.

Inducing false memories:
->It is possible under right circumstances to instil elaborate & confident false memories.
->Deese, Roerdiger &McDermott (DRM) Paradigm
     --Deese (1959) + Roediger & McDermott (1995)
     --Tested memory for word lists in a single trial, free recall paradigm, false memories are relatively easy to produce in this sort of paradigm. It has became a standard tool in cognitive psychology with numerous variants.
     --Participants had to memorise two word lists with given time and recall the words. In the next recognition phase, participants were asked to rate their confidence/certainty about some given words whether they were on the original lists or not.
     --Overall 65% probability of recalling an item that was on the list, but also a 40% probability of recalling a critical item that was not on the list. Words at the start and end of the lists were recalled more than those in the middle.

>>Standard Scoring Technique(sDT) for recognition experiments.
>>YES=old item target; NO=new item distractor
>>HIT=signal is present & correctly identified; FALSE ALARM= signal is absent but identified








     --Mean hit rate=84%, Mean false alarm rate=84%
     --When longer lists and more of them were used, only half the lists were recalled, and 55% probability of recalling the critical item that was not on the list.
     --Participants cannot distinguish between false and true memories in this experiment- the phenomenology is the same. Previously recalling an item increases the likelihood of subsequently remembering both true & false events.

Freyd & Gleaves (1996): three questions for drawing conclusions about false memory syndrome based on the DRM paradigm 

• Are words presented in a list really events?
• False memories for childhood sexual abuse are not close associate of things tat actually happened.
• Can we generalise from artificial laboratory studies to meaningful events in the real world?

Remember/Know distinction (Tulving 1985)
~Remember items are those where participants have a vivid memory for the actual presentation of the item.
~Know items are there where participants are sure that they were on the list but don't actually have a memory for the moment of hearing the word.

False memories for Real Events:

Lost in a shopping mall-Loftus & Pickrell (1995)
->24 student participants with their parent/older sibling.
->Four short stories about events from the student's childhood provided by the parent/sibling. 3 of the stories are true, the 4th is a fabricated account of being lost for an extended period in a mall/large department store at about the age of 5.
->Parents/siblings confirm that no such event actually happened.
->Students fill in a questionnaire that describes what they can remember about each event.
->They are then interviewed by a psychologist 1-2 weeks later about each event. and interviewed again a further 1-2 weeks later.
->7 students accepted the false memory and 6 of them maintained it at interview.

False Photographs-Wade et al., 2002)
->Process guided by the Source Monitoring Framework (SMF, Johnson, Hastroudi &Lindsay, 1993) that three conditions must be satisfied for subjects to create a false memory:

• Judge what the event is plausible
• Concoct contextual information about the event, such as photos/ narrative 
• Commit a source monitoring error, subjects wrongly construct the false memory to personal experience rather than to a image that they have created.

->Participants were interviewed on 3 separate occasions. They gave a free narrative of events, answered general questions and then answered spice questions about the events. 50% created complex/partial false memories.



Human memory does not provide a consistent record of the events that we have experienced. Memory is a reconstruction from many sources. This isn't to say any particular memory is inaccurate.