Cognitive Daily posts here on recent research that attempts to explain how and when we are most likely to develop "false memories." Here's an excerpt:
Yoko Okado and Craig Stark designed a study to examine the problem. They showed participants eight different slide shows telling stories on topics ranging from students talking in the hallway outside of class to the theft of a woman’s wallet. Each slide show had 50 pictures and was shown twice. During the second showing, 12 of the pictures were surreptitiously changed in an effort to create false memories. Two days later, participants were tested on their memory for those 12 critical slides.
Sure enough, a significant portion of the time, participants responded with false memories: They believed they had seen the same slide in both presentations (the man stole the wallet and hid behind a tree), when in fact they had seen two different slides (in the first slide show, the man hid behind the door, but in the second show, he hid behind the tree).
This result matched earlier research finding that when people watch a movie and then are presented with a written account that doesn’t match the movie, they will often falsely “remember” that the written story agrees with the movie. But Okado and Stark were able to take their research one step further, because their participants had agreed to perform the task while undergoing a constant fMRI, which mapped brain activity in three dimensions as they watched the slide shows.
And here's how they conclude the post:
So what does this say about Mafia “hardball” attempts to influence witnesses? Ironically, they may be doing exactly the wrong thing. If a witness is intimidated by physical force to change her original story, isn’t she more likely to remember the context? It might be more effective to use subtler techniques to get witnesses to change their tune.
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