Invitation to Psychology

272 ChaPteR 8 Memory

You are about to learn...

•    how memories of an event can be affected by

the way someone is questioned about it.

•    why children’s memories and testimony about

sexual abuse can be unreliable.

to you and yet is false. This means that your feel-

ings about an event, no matter how strong they

are, do not guarantee that the event occurred.

Consider again our Sam story, which happens to

be true. A woman we know believed for years that

she had been present as an 11-year-old child when

her uncle destroyed the wall. Because the story

was so vivid and upsetting to her, she felt angry at

him for what she thought was his mean and vio-

lent behavior, and she assumed that she must have

been angry at the time as well. Then, as an adult,

she learned that she was not at the party at all but

had merely heard about it repeatedly over the

years. Moreover, Sam had not pounded the wall

in anger, but as a joke, to inform the assembled

guests that he and his wife were about to remodel

their home. Nevertheless, our friend’s family has

had a hard time convincing her that her “memory”

of this event is entirely wrong, and they are not

sure she believes them yet.

As the Sam story illustrates, and as laboratory

research verifies, false memories can be as stable

over time as true ones (Roediger & McDermott,

1995). There’s just no getting around it: Memory

is reconstructive.

2

The image of the event contains lots of details.

Ordinarily, we can distinguish an imagined

event from an actual one by the amount of detail

we recall; memories of real events tend to contain

more details. But the longer you think about an

imagined event, the more likely you are to embroi-

der those images with details—what your uncle

was wearing, the crumbling plaster, the sound of

the hammer—and these added details may per-

suade you that you remember the event and aren’t

just confusing other people’s reports with your

own experience (Johnson et al., 2011).

3

The event is easy to imagine. If imagining an

event takes little effort (as does visualizing a

man pounding a wall with a hammer), then we are

especially likely to think that a memory is real, not

false. In contrast, when we must make an effort to

form an image of an experience, a place we have

never seen, or an activity that is utterly foreign to

us, our cognitive efforts serve as a cue that we are

imagining the event or have heard about it from

others.

As a result of confabulation, you may end up

with a memory that feels emotionally, vividly real

Recite & Review

Recite: Reconstruct what you just read so you can say what you can remember about

why memory is reconstructive, and about source misattribution, flashbulb memories, and

confabulation.

Review: Next, go back and read this section again.

Now take this Quick Quiz:

1. Memory is like (a) a wax tablet, (b) a giant file cabinet, (c) a video camera, (d) none of these.


2. True or false: Because they are so vivid, flashbulb memories remain perfectly accurate over
   time.


3. Which of the following confabulated “memories” might a person be most inclined to accept
   as having happened to them, and why? (a) getting lost in a shopping center at the age of 5,
   (b) taking a class in astrophysics, (c) visiting a monastery in Tibet as a child, (d) being bullied
   by another kid in the fourth grade.
   Answers:

Study and Review at MyPsychLab

a and d, because they are common events that are easy to imagine and that contain a lot of vivid details. It 3. false2. d1.

would be harder to induce someone to believe that he or she had studied astrophysics or visited Tibet because these are rare

events that take an effort to imagine.

Memory and the Power

of Suggestion

The reconstructive nature of memory helps the

mind work efficiently. Instead of cramming our

brains with infinite details, we can store the