Two practical sensitization strategies can reverse false memories, a study suggests. Remembering events that never happened has important legal implications, potentially resulting in wrongful accusations or confessions. Relatively little is known about pragmatic strategies for successfully reversing false memories of autobiographical events. Aileen Oeberst and colleagues demonstrated the effectiveness of two such approaches: source sensitization, which involves alerting participants that their memories could come from external sources, and false memory sensitization, which involves informing individuals that repeatedly being asked to recollect events can produce false memories. Over the course of three repeated interviews over 2 weeks, 52 participants were asked to recollect childhood events, which were verified through questionnaires sent to their parents. Two of the events occurred, and the other two were plausible but never happened. Using suggestion techniques, the interviewers implanted false memories in up to 56% of the participants. Next, the authors attempted to reverse the false memories through source and false memory sensitization. Together, the two approaches returned the incidence of false memories to baseline levels. False memory rates decreased even further, to 5%, when 38 of the participants were tested 1 year later. According to the authors, the two strategies could be widely implemented in real-world settings and do not require interviewers to know any ground truths.
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Article #20-26447:
"Rich false memories of autobiographical events can be reversed" by Aileen Oeberst, Merle Madita Wachendörfer, Roland Imhoff, Hartmut Blank.
MEDIA CONTACT:
Aileen Oeberst,
University of Hagen, GERMANY;
email: <aileen.oeberst@fernuni-hagen.de>