fascinating phenomenon of false memories have observed subjects who had false
memories created by watching someone else. Researchers found the subjects were
much more likely to falsely remember doing an action if they had watched someone else
do it.
eaPsychological resrch has shown various ways "false memories" are created, such as through the power of suggestion or through vivid imagination. Now scientists studying imagination have found that people who watched a video of someone else doing a simple action often didn't remember and thought they had done it themselves when asked about it two weeks later.
"This is a completely new type of false memory," says Gerald Echterhoff, a psychology professor at the University of Muenster in Germany and co-author of the paper published in the September issue of the journal Psychological Science.
"This is a false memory from just observing someone," he says.
Psychologist Daniel Schacter of Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass., who has edited a book on false memories, says he hasn't read the new paper, but it "sounds like an extension of earlier work that has shown imagining you'd done something can result in false memories."
"I think it's partly new and partly related to earlier work," Schacter says. "You saw something on TV that you think actually happened. It's another kind of example of what people have talked about as a source memory failure."
Echterhoff says more than 25 percent of participants in the study, as well as in several follow-up experiments, had false memories created by watching someone else. Since the first research on 170 participants was done, findings have been replicated with almost 500 participants, he says.
The paper details three different experiments in which participants read about or actually performed a series of simple actions, such as shaking a bottle or shuffling a deck of cards. Then they watched videos of someone else doing simple actions -- some of which they had done and some they had only seen being done. Two weeks later, they were asked which of as many as 30 actions they had done themselves.
Researchers found the subjects were much more likely to falsely remember doing an action if they had watched someone else do it. Echterhoff says the research controlled for the common situation of thinking you had done something because you do it yourself every day.
"This is a completely new type of false memory," says Gerald Echterhoff, a psychology professor at the University of Muenster in Germany and co-author of the paper published in the September issue of the journal Psychological Science.
"This is a false memory from just observing someone," he says.
Psychologist Daniel Schacter of Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass., who has edited a book on false memories, says he hasn't read the new paper, but it "sounds like an extension of earlier work that has shown imagining you'd done something can result in false memories."
"I think it's partly new and partly related to earlier work," Schacter says. "You saw something on TV that you think actually happened. It's another kind of example of what people have talked about as a source memory failure."
Echterhoff says more than 25 percent of participants in the study, as well as in several follow-up experiments, had false memories created by watching someone else. Since the first research on 170 participants was done, findings have been replicated with almost 500 participants, he says.
The paper details three different experiments in which participants read about or actually performed a series of simple actions, such as shaking a bottle or shuffling a deck of cards. Then they watched videos of someone else doing simple actions -- some of which they had done and some they had only seen being done. Two weeks later, they were asked which of as many as 30 actions they had done themselves.
Researchers found the subjects were much more likely to falsely remember doing an action if they had watched someone else do it. Echterhoff says the research controlled for the common situation of thinking you had done something because you do it yourself every day.
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