Lost In The Mall Summary

In chapter 8, Lost in the Mall, Slater tells us about Elizabeth Loftus. She is a professor at the University of Washington and an experimental psychologist who does research about human memory. She learned about to men who believed different things about human memory and decided to challenge them. The first was Plato. He believed that in a form of absolute or ideal memory. He thought memory would appear completely preserved. The second was Freud. He claimed that memory was a reduplication of a dream and fact. He believed memories were repressed. Loftus believed that people tend to confuse things between memory and imagination. She wanted to prove people could distort memories and also make up fake memories. False memory is an apparent recollection

of an event that did not actually happen. This usually happens when our true memory fades.
False memories will last as long as they are recounted. People with high working memory capacity didn’t experience false memories as much as people with low working memory capacity. According to the False Memory is in the Details essay, false memory is a well-documented phenomenon, and the strength and rates of false memory varies.
Loftus believed that memory was fragile and that it could be easily manipulated. Her studies showed that eye witness testimonies are often unreliable because memories could be easily tampered with and contaminated by the subtlest suggestion. 1990 was Loftus’ turning point. A lawyer named Doug Horngrad had asked her to testify in a troubling case that happened 20 years ago. A girl said she watched her father raped and murdered her best friend. How can someone witness something like that and then 20 years later remember it? She told the judge and jury that the girl’s memory could not be counted as accurate because of the mechanics of memory. But the jury did not believe Loftus. Loftus wanted to help the wrongly accused so she kept on with her work about false memory. She knew she had to scientifically prove that the mind not only distorts real memories but also creates fake ones.
Loftus decided she needed to implant false memories. She and her students came up with Lost in the Mall. She had her students implant false memories on their brothers and sisters over Thanksgiving vacation. The students had to keep track of three real childhood memories and one false one. The false one was being lost in the mall. Loftus found that many of the children believed they remember being lost in the mall. The children even had narrative details about it. She found that as days went by the stories became more elaborate. Our minds don’t like black spots and are unprepared for blank spots, so we fill them in. Loftus experiment proves that people can be led to believe an event happened after suggestions were made to them. Memories are alterations of the past.
Photographs are a good way to look back on memories.

But what if those photographs were altered? Researcher wanted to see if they could use a fake photo and see if people would accept that as a true event. The researchers showed four people three photographs that were true and one false photograph. When the researchers interviewed the four participants, they found that 50% remembered the false event in the photograph. These studies showed that a substantial amount of false memories can be made using photographs. This experiment proved that memories aren’t very reliable and that photographs may be the best way to truly remember an event. Photographs can’t be easily disregarded or

ignored.
Researchers discovered that false memories can be consequential and emotional. Also they learned that is can last for long periods of time. Researchers learned that therapists techniques can be used for false memories by using hypnosis, guided imagination, dream interpretation, and also picture cuing. All these techniques used by the therapists proved false memories. After it was proved that memories could be generated, additional research was possible. Many researchers used the same techniques but they also used new ones. There were many questions and researchers had some creative way of getting them. One question that was being addressed was whether people could differentiate between false memories and true memories. One way of figuring out the different was by considering the consequences for other thoughts, intentions, and behaviors. In our lives, true memories matter. Generally we tend to remember the important memories or maybe even a trip we took. Or a child might even remember if they got sick after eating a particular food. They might not like that particular food in the future. However, we have to ask if false memories have the same kind of consequences. Researchers have used a feedback procedure to determine this.
In one of the studies this question generated, participants were told that they had once gotten sick after eating hard boiled eggs.

The people who believed this statement made up 30% of the study. They believed that they had really gotten sick after eating hard boiled eggs. They were then asked if they liked a list of foods, which included foods like hard boiled eggs and egg salad sandwiches. It was found that the people who believed to have gotten sick from the hard boiled eggs claimed that they liked hard boiled eggs less and didn’t want to eat egg salad sandwiches as much. This experiment proved that false memories had the same consequences as true

memories.
These experiments all prove that memories can be manipulated. False memories can cause the same emotions as true memories. So memories may not be a good way for jurors to determine if someone is telling the truth or not. True memories can last decades, but so can false memories. So how can we decide what really happened. Memories can remain distorted for even longer than true memories. Although there has been many experiments to configure the difference between false memories and true memories, there is no firm difference between them. Further research is still acquired.