The Formation Of False Memories Summary

The article “The Formation of False Memories” focuses on how memories can be disrupted by retroactive interference. Their study investigates whether people can be implanted with an incorrect memory for something that have never happened. The subjects were presented with four stories, one of which is the “false” memory and this memory was being lost between the ages of 4 and 6. The memories were provided by the subject’s relatives with the false memory being always in the third position. Then, the participants were scheduled two interviews – either face to face or through phone. They were asked to recall as many information and details about the memories as they could. And they were asked to rate the clarity of their memory and asked to indicate

how confident they feel. After the second interview, the subjects were debriefed and asked to guess which event may have been the false one. The results show that only about 25% of the subjects claimed to remember the false event. Furthermore, the subjects’ ratings of clarity of the false event was much lower compared to those of the true ones. The confidence ratings were low in general, but much lower for the false events. And most of the subjects were able to guess the false memory when asked. These results led the researches to support the presence of the false memory formation. They propose that people create memory errors because their previous experiences interfere with the new information they integrate/learn. In other words, people have underlying schemas that reflects the false memory, and when they are presented with the new false information, those schematic knowledge is activated and supports the false event by adding background information. Therefore, this article demonstrates that new information can cause people to remember mistaken events that never happened to them.