False Memories: The Reconstructive Nature Of Memory

The human memory is thought to be a reliable source to retrieve information about the past. Although memory is often deemed reliable, due to its reconstructive nature it can also be prone to error. Individuals recollect memories based on their personal experience of an event, general world knowledge, and external information. The addition of new information to memory on a daily basis leads to the continuous modification of old memories and the formation of new ones making memory reconstructive, and not an infallible recording of the past able to be replayed in high fidelity at will.
The reconstructive nature of memory has spurred significant interest in researching false memories, specifically childhood memories recovered in therapeutic practices
Not only can suggestion be a powerful tool in changing a person's thinking, but it can also factor significantly in the formation of false memories. Loftus and Pickrell’s (1995) “lost in the mall” experiment provided evidence supporting the hypothesis that completely false childhood memories can be formed through the method of suggestion (p. 720). The "lost in the mall" experiment is an archetypal experiment conducted where twenty-four participants were asked to remember four events from their childhood, three of the events were true and one was false. Details about three childhood events that actually took place had been obtained from participants' families by researchers, and the false event, the participant being lost in a large mall or department store, was one made up entirely by researchers (Loftus & Pickrell, 1995, p.721). Participants were sent booklets and asked to read the narrative for the childhood events and try to recall them by writing the recollection of the event in a booklet. Following writing in the booklet, participants partook first in an interview where they were asked to recall the four events and then rate their clarity and confidence of the event. In the second interview participants were asked to recall the four childhood events and determine which of the memories was false (Loftus & Pickrell, 1995, p.722). The results of the study showed
Gary, Manning, and Loftus (1996) suggest that when a person is able to imagine an event, they are forced to create a false reality for a period of time, where they can match the imagined facts with their own personal knowledge (p. 205). The aforementioned researchers did an experiment to see if imagination inflation can occur when a person uses imagination to determine if an event happened or not (Gary, Manning & Loftus, 1996, p. 205). The imagination inflation hypothesis proposed by researchers was supported with the evidence that when a person is asked to imagine an event that was unlikely to have occurred, they tend to become more assured that it did happen (Garry et al., 1996, p. 212). Research suggests that imagining a memory of the past can result in the reconstruction of memory and potentially lead a person to believe that the imagined memory took place (Garry et al., 1996, p. 213). Hyman and Pentland (1996) were also interested in the influence that imagination and mental imagery have on the creation of childhood false memories. This team of researchers conducted a study where participants were asked to recall a series of true and false events, and when participants were unable to recall the events, researchers had them imagine and describe the event (p. 106). The participants were put in two groups, the