Elizabeth Loftus and memory studies: can false memories be created?

An essential psychologist to understand how human memory works.

When we think about how memory works, it is very easy to be tempted to think that the brain works like a computer. Thus, it is most intuitive to believe that memories are actually information stored in the past that remains isolated from other mental processes until it is our turn to recall those experiences, knowledge or skills. However, we also know that memories often provide a distorted picture of the past.

Now then... Are memories imperfect because they deteriorate with the simple passage of time, or is it that what we experience after having "memorized" that information modifies our memories? In other words, are our memories isolated from the rest of the metal processes going on in our brain, or do they mix with them to the point of change?

Which brings us to a third, more disturbing question: can false memories be created? An American psychologist named Elizabeth Loftus has devoted several years of her life to researching this topic..

Elizabeth Loftus and Cognitive Psychology

When Elizabeth Loftus began her research career, cognitive psychology was just beginning to reveal new aspects of how mental processes work. Among them, of course, was memory, one of the topics that generated the most interest as the basis of learning and even of people's identity..

However, in the judicial field there was another, rather more pragmatic, reason why it was highly desirable to investigate the study of memory: it had to be determined to what extent the information given by witnesses attending trials, or by the victims of crimes themselves, was reliable. Loftus focused on studying the possibility not only that the memories of these people could be false or totally modified, but also that it was other people who were the ones who were responsible for the false memories.but that it was other people who introduced false memories into them, albeit intentionally.

The car experiment

In one of his most famous experiments, Loftus recruited a series of volunteers and showed them recordings of vehicles crashing into each other. After this stage of the research, the psychologist found something very curious.

When the volunteers were asked to recall the content of the recordings, very specific phrases were used to tell them that they had to evoke what they had seen. In the case of some people, the phrase used contained the word "contacted", while in others this word was changed to "hit", "collided" or "smashed". The rest of the phrase was always the same for all people, and only the word with which the action of colliding was described changed. What the volunteers were asked to do was to give their opinion about how fast the vehicles they had seen were going.

Although all the volunteers had seen the same thing, Elizabeth Loftus noticed that the way in which they were asked to give their opinion of the speed at which the vehicles they had seen were going was very different. the way in which they were asked to recall what appeared in the videos altered their memories.. People who had been given instructions containing the words "contacted" and "hit" said that the vehicles were going at a lower speed, while this was significantly higher if people were asked with whom the terms "collided" and "smashed" had been used.

That is, people's memories varied according to the degree of crash intensity suggested by the words used by the research team members. A single word could cause volunteers to conjure up slightly different scenes about what they had seen.

At the mall

With the experiment of the videos of cars crashing, Elizabeth Loftus provided evidence about how information given in the present can alter memories. However, her findings went further by showing that it is possible to "introduce" false memories into the memory through suggestion..

This research was somewhat more complicated, as it required information about the lives of the volunteers. This is why Loftus teamed up with friends or relatives of each of them.

In the first phase of the research, the volunteers were told, one by one, four anecdotes about their childhood. Three of these memories were real, and the explanations about these experiences had been constructed from information that the volunteers' relatives had given Loftus, but one was false, totally fabricated. Specifically, this fictitious anecdote was about how the participants had gotten lost in a shopping mall when they were small..

A few days later, the volunteers were re-interviewed and asked if they remembered anything about the four stories they had been told in the first part of the study. One in four people said they remembered something about what happened when they got lost in the mall. But, in addition, when told that one of the four stories was false and asked to guess which one was pure fiction, five of the 24 people who participated failed to give the correct answer. With minimal effort on the part of Elizabeth Loftus, a false memory had settled in her memory.

The implications of these studies

The discoveries made by Elizabeth Loftus were a violent shock to judicial systems throughout the worldessentially because they pointed out that memories can be distorted without our realizing it and that, therefore, first-hand information given by witnesses and victims need not be reliable. This made it very necessary to support versions of what happened with material evidence.