Remolding Your Memory

(HealthScoutNews) -- Because your brain is constantly stitching and restitching memories together, your "memory" of something that never happened can be tweaked until you think it did, says new research.

Although there has been much debate over false memory and what role it plays in courtroom testimony during child abuse trials, researchers from the University of Washington found certain kinds of advertisements can plant false memories of a more benign nature in people's minds. A false memory is the ability to recall an experience you never had.

When the scientists showed college students a fake print ad that described a visit to Disneyland and a meeting with Bugs Bunny, at least a third of the students later said the event had actually happened to them when they visited the park as kids. But Bugs Bunny is a Warner Bros. cartoon character, so it would be impossible to see him in a Disney theme park.

"Here is a situation where advertising is something we're all exposed to," says co-author Elizabeth Loftus. "We've found now that you can actually alter childhood memories with autobiographical advertising. It shows you a new domain where we all may be having a tampering of our autobiography that we're not aware of. Our minds are probably full of these altered memories."

In the study, 120 college students were divided into four groups and told they were going to evaluate advertising copy, fill out questionnaires and answer questions about a trip to Disneyland.

The first group read a generic Disneyland ad that mentioned no cartoon characters. The second group read the same ad in a room where there was a large cardboard figure of Bugs Bunny. The third group read a fake Disneyland ad featuring Bugs Bunny and describing how they met and shook hands with the character. But there was no cardboard cutout in the room. The fourth group read the fake ad with Bugs Bunny and had a cardboard cutout of the rabbit in the room.

Thirty percent of the people in the third group said later they remembered meeting Bugs Bunny when they visited Disneyland. In the fourth group, that percentage jumped to 40 percent.

This latest study, which was presented at the American Psychological Society's recent annual meeting in Toronto, is a follow-up to another by the same researchers. In that study, 16 percent of the people who saw an ad suggesting they had met Bugs Bunny at Disneyland later said they actually remembered doing so.

Loftus notes this research raises questions about how we construct memories.

"When will people take a detail and attach it to some other memory?" she asks. "How do we bind pieces of experience together? When will you take a piece of experience that kind of floats around in the mind and attach it to another experience? Why and when does that happen?"

Other research has shown that the more sources of perceptual information people have about a particular experience, the more likely they are to have a false memory of it. And the more often someone is exposed to an experience, the more likely it is that it will be confused with a similar experience, researchers found.

Memory researcher Linda Henkel says the best thing about this latest study is its simplicity.

"Everybody can read this and say, 'Wow, I get it. I understand how memory distortion works'," she says.

And people might be surprised to know how often our memories are distorted, she adds.

"We don't have separate traces for every separate memory we have," she explains. "Our minds generalize. There's a lot of overlap, a lot of room for confusion. Our memories are constantly altered by the stories we tell about them. That's what we do in memory."

But that's no cause for panic, she says. "Why would we want to have a separate file for every breakfast we eat?" she asks. More importantly, we should remember that no one remembers everything perfectly.

"People could be a whole lot more tolerant if they know that their experience is not a video recording and everyone else is an idiot. It makes you realize your humanness," she says.

Still, Loftus says a healthy dose of skepticism can go a long way if you're watching an ad that evokes fond memories of your childhood.

"If something seems familiar to you, it might not be because you actually experienced it," she says.

What To Do

To read more about false memories, visit the False Memory Syndrome Foundation.

And read more about a University of Missouri study that found brain patterns reveal when a memory is false.

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