SOME of your fondest memories may not really be yours. Psychologists have
discovered that people can acquire 鈥減ersonal鈥� recollections of other people鈥檚
experiences simply by imagining them. This could explain why patients in group
psychotherapy sometimes appear to 鈥渟teal鈥� other patients鈥� memories.
This is the latest finding from years of work on false memories by Elizabeth
Loftus and her colleagues at the University of Washington in Seattle. Last year
they announced the discovery of 鈥渋magination inflation鈥�, where asking a person
to imagine themselves in certain situations creates a strong, false memory of
the events concerned.
Speaking to delegates at the AAAS meeting, Loftus described an even more
bizarre twist. 鈥淧eople take in other people鈥檚 stories as their own and believe
they happened to them,鈥� she said.
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To promote false memories, Loftus and her colleagues first ask volunteers
whether they have had a certain experience, for example, pushing their hand
through a pane of glass and cutting it badly. Volunteers answer on an
eight-point scale, from 鈥渋t definitely didn鈥檛 happen鈥� to 鈥渋t definitely
丑补辫辫别苍别诲鈥�.
One group is then asked to imagine that they fell during childhood and pushed
a hand through a window. They are asked to fill in other imaginary details, such
as what they slipped on and who they were with at the time. Later, all the
subjects are again asked to rate the likelihood that they had experienced the
situation in real life.
In one study, 12 per cent of subjects who had not been asked to imagine the
event became more convinced that they had actually cut their hand. But twice as
many subjects who had participated in the imagination exercise found that their
memory of the event had been enhanced.
In their latest experiment, the team asked subjects to think of someone,
Madonna for example, pushing their hand through a window. When questioned later,
some of the volunteers had become more convinced that they had had such an
experience themselves. The memory distortion was about half as great as in the
experiments where people were asked to imagine cutting their own hands.
Loftus said the results may partly explain why some patients in group therapy
complain that other patients plagiarise their stories.