News Release

Simply reading about a childhood event people said didn't happen can alter their memories

Peer-Reviewed Publication

University of Washington

Just being exposed to a story about a fictitious childhood experience can alter people's memories to the point that half of them believe the incident probably occurred even though they previously said it didn't, University of Washington researchers will report later this week at the American Psychological Society's annual meeting in Denver.

The study, headed by Elizabeth Sanders, a senior psychology major at the UW, has been selected as the winner of the APS' undergraduate research award and the findings will be presented at a poster session beginning at 7:30 p.m. Thursday in Adam's Mark Hotel Denver. Jacqueline Pickrell, a psychology doctoral student, and Elizabeth Loftus, a UW psychology professor, assisted Sanders in the research.

Sanders and her colleagues also found, surprisingly, that people were more likely to believe the incident depicted happened to them when they read a story involving a person of the opposite sex rather than someone of the same sex.

"We thought same-sex material, females reading about females, for example, would be assimilated easier than opposite-sex material which involves a deeper level of processing," said Sanders. "By levels of processing we mean how deeply people are putting themselves into what is going on in the story so that it influences them in a way their belief increases that the situation happened to them."

In the study, the researchers used a questionnaire to screen a pool of college undergraduates about the likelihood of early childhood experiences happening to them. These included being lost in a shopping mall for an hour or being picked on by a bully. Sixty-five students who indicated that those two experiences probably didn't happen to them were asked to come back and participate in another study, described as a test of reading comprehension.

Participants in the experimental condition were asked to read a short story with few details about a child being lost in a mall or being bullied. Students were randomly assigned to read same-sex or opposite-sex versions of one of the stories. The students then were called back to fill out the screening questionnaire one, eight and 15 days after reading the story. A control group was not exposed to either of the stories but filled out the screening questionnaire along with the other subjects.

When retested, subjects who read one of the stories were far more likely to say they had experienced a similar situation than students in the control group. On the day-one retest, 32 percent of the readers said the event had happened to them, compared to 24 percent of the controls. By day eight the numbers had increased to 50 percent of the readers and 27 percent of the controls. On the 15th day, 39 percent of the readers and 29 percent of the controls said they had experienced the event.

Among the readers, the gap between opposite-sex and same-sex subjects who claimed an event as real widened over time. At day one, 36 percent of the opposite-sex subjects and 29 percent of the same-sex group claimed the experience. On day eight the numbers jumped to 57 percent and 43 percent, and at day 15 they were 50 percent and 29 percent.

"People personalize information, and this study shows how even a little exposure can have an effect on a person's autobiographical memory," said Sanders. "Assimilating information is part of being human. This was a non-stressful situation, and yet it was able to change people's confidence about whether a childhood experience happened to them.

"If memories can be influenced by mere exposure to others' stories, we may gain invaluable insight as to how group therapy, television and popular literature relate to the debate on the reconstruction and recollection of autobiographical memory."

Pickrell added that it seems to take several days for people to assimilate attributes of a story into their memory. This is why the effect was stronger at day eight than at day one.

"Information doesn't have to be obtained week after week in therapy, for example, to effect memory. The influence can be much less. Memory is not photographic and we are constantly assimilating new information into memory," she said.

###

For more information, contact Sanders at chosengirl@aol.com and Pickrell at 206-910-6981 or jpick@u.washington.edu. In Denver, both can be reached June 3-6 at Adam's Mark Hotel at 303-893-3333.



Disclaimer: AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert system.