Larry Mayes Memories Of Thing's Unseen
Memories are known as the mental faculty of retaining and recalling past experiences. In her article, Memories of Thing s Unseen, Elizabeth Loftus proves that memory can be very faulty at times and not only can memories be changed, but false memories can be planted into the mind. In addition, she also explains the characteristics and consequences of false memories and discusses the role of imagination inflation. Faulty memory has a lot of negative effects, but most importantly it has led to at least a hundred people being wrongly imprisoned. For example, Larry Mayes was convicted of raping a gas station cashier after the victim positively identified him in court. Mayes spent twenty one years in prison after attorney Thomas Vanes wrongfully prosecuted him of the crime. It was only two decades after prosecuting Mayes that Vanes saw the result of old evidence being subjected to new DNA testing, and he changed his mind. In a newspaper, Vanes wrote, “he was right, I was wrong” (Loftus). Faulty memory can change a person’s life forever and it is just one of the reasons why the study of memory is so important (Loftus).
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Not only can memories be faulty, they can be altered and planted.
In the mid 1990’s investigators succeeded in getting people to incorrectly believe that when they were children, they had been lost in a shopping mall for an extended time, hospitalized overnight, or involved in an unfortunate accident at a family wedding. The investigators were able to do this by enlisting the help of family members to construct scenarios describing true and false experiences and feeding these scenarios to the subjects as if they were all true. A significant minority of subjects came to accept all or part of the suggestion and claimed it as their own experience (Loftus). However, what if there were no family members to help out with the experiment and it were more like a real world situation? Then guided imagination and imagination inflation can come into
play. Guided imagination is a technique in which individuals are led to imagine that they have had experiences that they have previously denied. Even a minute’s worth of such imagination can increase people’s confidence that in the past they had an experience like the imagined one—a phenomenon called imagination inflation (Loftus). There have been studies done demonstrating imagination inflation. Do you remember proposing marriage to the Pepsi machine is one of them. During a campus walk, participants were given familiar or bizarre action statements. For example, “Check the Pepsi machine for change” vs. “Propose marriage to the Pepsi machine” (Seamon, Philbin, and Harrison) with instructions either to perform the actions or imagine performing the actions (Group 1) or to watch the experimenter perform the actions or imagine the experimenter performing the actions (Group 2).One day later, some actions were repeated, along with new actions, on a second walk. Two weeks later, the participants took a recognition test for actions presented during the first walk, and they specified whether a recognized action was imagined or performed. Imagining themselves or the experimenter performing familiar or bizarre actions just once led to false recollections of performance for both types of actions (Seamon, Philbin, and Harrison). The experiment represents imagination inflation by showing that these false performance recollections can occur in a natural, real-life setting following just one imagining.
How can we tell the difference between true memories and false ones? According to some studies, there are some statistical differences, that true memories are held with more confidence or seem more vivid than false ones. But other studies do not demonstrate such differences. In the Slime study, for example, subjects rated their memories on a number of scales, including scales indicating their confidence that the event actually took place and the extent to which they felt their memory experience resembled reliving the event (Loftus). It turned out that false memories were as important as true memories. There are consequences to false memories. False memories can influence what people think or do later. In one study, people who were led by a fake advertisement to believe that they met Bugs at Disneyland were later asked to say how associated various pairs of characters were in their minds. Those who fell for the fake ad and believed that they had met Bugs later on claimed that Bugs Bunny was more highly related to various Disney characters than did people who were not exposed to the fake ad (Loftus). This suggests that people can be influenced by fake memories, leading them to believe something different or interpret things in a different manner. People can definitely be led to believe that they experienced things that never happened, even if those things are unlikely and people can be led to believe these fake memories as genuine recollections. Memory is a wonderful thing, but at the same it can be very inexact and misleading.
Works Cited
Seamon, John G., Morgan M. Philbin, and Liza G. Harrison. "Do You Remember Proposing Marriage to the Pepsi Machine? False Recollections from a Campus Walk - Springer." Do You Remember Proposing Marriage to the Pepsi Machine? False Recollections from a Campus Walk - Springer. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 01 Oct. 2006. Web. 06 Dec. 2013
Loftus, Elizabeth F. "Memories of Things Unseen." Current Directions in Psychological Science, 2004. Web. 6 Dec. 2013
Not only can memories be faulty, they can be altered and planted.
In the mid 1990’s investigators succeeded in getting people to incorrectly believe that when they were children, they had been lost in a shopping mall for an extended time, hospitalized overnight, or involved in an unfortunate accident at a family wedding. The investigators were able to do this by enlisting the help of family members to construct scenarios describing true and false experiences and feeding these scenarios to the subjects as if they were all true. A significant minority of subjects came to accept all or part of the suggestion and claimed it as their own experience (Loftus). However, what if there were no family members to help out with the experiment and it were more like a real world situation? Then guided imagination and imagination inflation can come into
play. Guided imagination is a technique in which individuals are led to imagine that they have had experiences that they have previously denied. Even a minute’s worth of such imagination can increase people’s confidence that in the past they had an experience like the imagined one—a phenomenon called imagination inflation (Loftus). There have been studies done demonstrating imagination inflation. Do you remember proposing marriage to the Pepsi machine is one of them. During a campus walk, participants were given familiar or bizarre action statements. For example, “Check the Pepsi machine for change” vs. “Propose marriage to the Pepsi machine” (Seamon, Philbin, and Harrison) with instructions either to perform the actions or imagine performing the actions (Group 1) or to watch the experimenter perform the actions or imagine the experimenter performing the actions (Group 2).One day later, some actions were repeated, along with new actions, on a second walk. Two weeks later, the participants took a recognition test for actions presented during the first walk, and they specified whether a recognized action was imagined or performed. Imagining themselves or the experimenter performing familiar or bizarre actions just once led to false recollections of performance for both types of actions (Seamon, Philbin, and Harrison). The experiment represents imagination inflation by showing that these false performance recollections can occur in a natural, real-life setting following just one imagining.
How can we tell the difference between true memories and false ones? According to some studies, there are some statistical differences, that true memories are held with more confidence or seem more vivid than false ones. But other studies do not demonstrate such differences. In the Slime study, for example, subjects rated their memories on a number of scales, including scales indicating their confidence that the event actually took place and the extent to which they felt their memory experience resembled reliving the event (Loftus). It turned out that false memories were as important as true memories. There are consequences to false memories. False memories can influence what people think or do later. In one study, people who were led by a fake advertisement to believe that they met Bugs at Disneyland were later asked to say how associated various pairs of characters were in their minds. Those who fell for the fake ad and believed that they had met Bugs later on claimed that Bugs Bunny was more highly related to various Disney characters than did people who were not exposed to the fake ad (Loftus). This suggests that people can be influenced by fake memories, leading them to believe something different or interpret things in a different manner. People can definitely be led to believe that they experienced things that never happened, even if those things are unlikely and people can be led to believe these fake memories as genuine recollections. Memory is a wonderful thing, but at the same it can be very inexact and misleading.
Works Cited
Seamon, John G., Morgan M. Philbin, and Liza G. Harrison. "Do You Remember Proposing Marriage to the Pepsi Machine? False Recollections from a Campus Walk - Springer." Do You Remember Proposing Marriage to the Pepsi Machine? False Recollections from a Campus Walk - Springer. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 01 Oct. 2006. Web. 06 Dec. 2013
Loftus, Elizabeth F. "Memories of Things Unseen." Current Directions in Psychological Science, 2004. Web. 6 Dec. 2013