False memory
memory of events that actually did not happen
In psychology, a false memory is a phenomenon in which someone incorrectly recalls something that did not actually happen or recalls it differently from the way it actually happened. Suggestibility, activation of associated information, the incorporation of misinformation effect, and source misattribution have been suggested to be several mechanisms underlying a variety of types of false memory.
Early work
The false memory phenomenon was initially investigated by psychological pioneers Pierre Janet and Sigmund Freud.
Freud was fascinated with memory and all the ways it could be understood, used, and manipulated. Some claim that his studies have been quite influential in contemporary memory research, including the research into the field of false memory. Pierre Janet was a French neurologist also credited with great contributions into memory research. Janet contributed to false memory through his ideas on dissociation and memory retrieval through hypnosis.
In 1974, Elizabeth Loftus and John Palmer conducted a study to investigate the effects of language on the development of false memory. The experiment involved two separate studies.
In the first study, 45 participants were randomly assigned to watch different videos of a car accident, in which separate videos had shown collisions at 20 mph (32 km/h), 30 mph (48 km/h) and 40 mph (64 km/h).
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “False memory” as memory of events that actually did not happen. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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This entry incorporates text from “False memory” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.