Wednesday March 18, 14:10-15:10

Illusions of Memory: Remembering Events that Never Happened

Henry L. Roediger, III

(Department of Psychology, Washington University, United States)

Memory illusions are systematic distortions in remembrance of past events. People either remember events differently from the way they happened or, in the most interesting case, remember events that never happened at all. My presentation will place the study of memory illusions in the context of perceptual illusions. I will briefly review six primary factors that can lead to memory distortions and then present recent experimental evidence on two of these factors.

The relatedness of materials is one factor that can create memory illusions. If people are presented with lists of words that are strongly related to a word that is not presented, they often recall and recognize the missing word as having been part of the list. Similar effects can be observed with series of related pictures, or sentences, as well as in other materials.

A second factor that can create false memories is imagination. In our procedure, people are given an instruction to perform a simple action and they either just listen to the instruction, they carry out the act, or they imagine carrying out the action. We find that when people repeatedly imagine performing an act, they can come to remember having actually done it. Further, increasing the number of times they imagined the act increases the false recollections.

These two techniques, among others, can lead people to remember events that never happened to them. A general finding to emerge from this research is that many of the factors (such as strongly related materials,imagery, or repetition) which are known to improve memory for events that did happen can, under other circumstances, create false memories.