Desperately seeking memories of the first few years of childhood: the reality of early memories.

How far back into their childhoods can people remember? Previous research suggests that people's earliest memories date back to the ages of 3 or 4 years. J. A. Usher and U. Neisser (1993, this issue) reported that some events, like the birth of a sibling and a planned hospitalization, can be readily remembered if they occurred at age 2. However, the bits and pieces of such memories that were obtained in their research may not be indicative of genuine episodic memory. An alternative hypothesis is that these apparent memories are the result of educated guesses, general knowledge of what must have been, or external information acquired after the age of 2.

Misinformation and memory: the creation of new memories.

Misleading information presented after an event can lead people to erroneous reports of that misinformation. Different process histories can be responsible for the same erroneous report in different people. We argue that the relative proportion of times that the different process histories are responsible for erroneous reporting will depend on the conditions of acquisition, retention, and retrieval of information. Given the conditions typical of most misinformation experiments, it appears that misinformation acceptance plays a major role, memory impairment plays some role, and pure guessing plays little or no role. Moreover, we argue that misinformation acceptance has not received the appreciation that it deserves as a phenomenon worthy of our sustained investigation. It may not tell us anything about impairment of memories, but it does tell us something about the creation of new memories.

The fate of memory: comment on McCloskey and Zaragoza.

McCloskey and Zaragoza (1985) argue that misleading postevent suggestions do not affect the availability of originally encoded information. Their hypothesis stems from empirical work using a modified paradigm in which no effect of postevent information is observed. Although their "no impairment" hypothesis is plausible, careful consideration of the predictions of their experimental test suggests that it may be insufficiently sensitive to reveal the impact of postevent information. A small effect of postevent information can be observed when their paradigm is repeated with a more sensitive recognition test. McCloskey and Zaragoza's no impairment hypothesis is also difficult to reconcile with numerous reports of "blend" memories that reflect a compromise between the original and postevent information.

Psychological aspects of courtroom testimony.

As jurors in a criminal or civil trial listen to testimony, they construct in their minds an "image" of an incident that was never witnessed by them. Many psychological factors influence this mental construction and, consequently, the verdict. Research with experimental jurors has revealed: 1. The images that jurors construct are influenced by the particular words and phrases that are used in the testimony they hear. 2. Jurors tend to be overbelieving of certain types of evidence, such as eyewitness testimony. Jurors are particularly responsive to the confidence with which eyewitnesses relate their testimony, rather than to the likelihood that the testimony is accurate. 3. Expert testimony, particularly on the subject of the reliability of eyewitness accounts, can cause jurors to better scrutinize the evidence they hear.

Errors in autobiographical memory.

Memory is always constructive. People create the past based on the information that remains in memory, their general knowledge, and the social demands of the retrieval situation. Thus, memories will often contain some small errors and occasionally some large errors. In this article, we describe several different types of memory errors and consider how these errors may influence therapy.

Forgetting sexual trauma: what does it mean when 38% forget?

L. M. Williams (1994) has shown that many women who were sexually abused as children do not report the abuse when questioned 2 decades later. These findings do not support certain freely made claims about memory, but they do support other claims. The findings do not provide cogent support for the claim that a long stream of childhood sexual traumas is routinely banished from conscious awareness and then can be reliably recovered later. The findings do support the claim that many children can forget about a sexually abusive experience from their past. Extreme claims such as "if you were raped, you'd remember" are disproven by these findings.

Repressed memories. When are they real? How are they false?

The precise mechanisms by which such false memories are constructed awaits further research. Much is left to learn about the degree of confidence and the characteristics of false memories created in these ways. We have more to learn about the types of individuals who are particularly susceptible to these forms of suggestion, and conversely, who is resistant. As we are learning more, it is probably important to heed the cautionary tale in the data already obtained; mental health professionals, interviewers, and others need to know how much they can potentially influence participants in research, clinical, and forensic contexts and take care to avoid that influence when it might be harmful. Periodic re-reading of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, with a small substitution (change "poet" to "therapist" or to "biased interviewer"), might help keep these important ideas in mind, reminding us how hard it can sometimes be to distinguish a bush from an imagined bear: The poet's eye, in fine fanciful rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven; And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name. Such tricks hath strong imagination, that if it would but apprehend some joy, it comprehends some bringer of that joy; Or in the night, imagining some fear, How easy is a bush supposed a bear!

Trivial persuasion in the courtroom: the power of (a few) minor details.

Investigated the influence of trivial testimonial detail on judgments of 424 undergraduates who served as mock jurors. Ss read a summary of a court case involving robbery and murder. In Experiment 1, detailed testimony influenced judgments of guilt, even when the detail was unrelated to the culprit. In Experiment 2, detailed testimony was especially powerful when an opposing witness testified that she could not remember the trivial details. Subsequent analyses suggest that the impact of detailed testimony on guilt judgments is mediated by inferences about the eyewitnesses. When eyewitnesses provided more detail, they were generally judged to be more credible, to have a better memory for the culprit's face and for details, and to have paid more attention to the culprit.

The reality of repressed memories.

Repression is one of the most haunting concepts in psychology. Something shocking happens, and the mind pushes it into some inaccessible corner of the unconscious. Later, the memory may emerge into consciousness. Repression is one of the foundation stones on which the structure of psychoanalysis rests. Recently there has been a rise in reported memories of childhood sexual abuse that were allegedly repressed for many years. With recent changes in legislation, people with recently unearthed memories are suing alleged perpetrators for events that happened 20, 30, even 40 or more years earlier. These new developments give rise to a number of questions: (a) How common is it for memories of child abuse to be repressed? (b) How are jurors and judges likely to react to these repressed memory claims? (c) When the memories surface, what are they like? and (d) How authentic are the memories?

Psychologists in the eyewitness world.

Over the past century, but especially over the past 20 years, psychological studies of eyewitness identification have been accumulating. Wells (1993, this issue) believes that the time is ripe to summarize the research on identification procedures, such as lineups and showups, that will minimize false identifications of innocent people and maximize accurate identifications of the guilty. Other experts in the field worry that there is still too big a leap from the laboratory work to the real world of crime. Identification research, many agree, has the potential for being one of the more useful arenas in which psychological science can make a difference in society.

Resolving legal questions with psychological data.

Psychologists are ever finding new legal arenas for their psychological data and concepts. Findings about the character and operation of stereotyping have been introduced in sex discrimination litigation in the United States. Findings about conformity, obedience to authority, and bystander apathy have been introduced into death penalty cases in South Africa. These concrete and detailed applications of psychological science demonstrate the expanding role that psychology is playing in the legal world.

Is the unconscious smart or dumb?

How sophisticated is unconscious cognition? This is one of the most fundamental questions about the unconscious that has been posed by research psychologists over the past century. Anthony Greenwald takes a contemporary look at this classical problem and concludes that unconscious cognition is severely limited in its analytic capability. In response, other leading scholars agree that the reality of unconscious processes is no longer questionable. Although there is some disagreement about just how sophisticated these processes are, the consensus is that exciting times are ahead for both research and theory concerning the mental processes involved in unconscious cognition.

Qualities of the unreal.

Witnesses to complex events often recall nonexistent objects after being exposed to misleading postevent information. The present series of experiments investigated whether descriptions of these "unreal" memories differ from those of memories based on perception. In Experiment 1 subjects viewed a slide sequence depicting a traffic accident. In one condition, the sequence included a slide involving a yield sign. In a second condition, subjects did not see the sign but merely had its existence suggested. Many subjects in both groups later reported seeing the sign, and these subjects provided verbal descriptions. Descriptions that resulted from suggestion were longer and contained more hedges, more reference to cognitive operations, and fewer sensory details. Experiment 2 replicated these findings with a different object. Experiment 3 investigated judges' ability to discriminate the source of the descriptions based on perception and suggestion. Although judges often employed the appropriate criteria, their performance was only slightly above chance. Experiments 4 and 5 revealed that providing judges with clues regarding differences between perceived and suggested memories facilitated discrimination. The results of these experiments indicate that subtle differences exist between perceived and suggested memories, that people have a minimal ability to detect these differences, and that instructions can improve that ability.

Eye fixations and memory for emotional events.

Subjects watched either an emotional, neutral, or unusual sequence of slides containing 1 critical slide in the middle. Experiments 1 and 2 allowed only a single eye fixation on the critical slide by presenting it for 180 ms (Experiment 1) or 150 ms (Experiment 2). Despite this constraint, memory for a central detail was better for the emotional condition. In Experiment 3, subjects were allowed 2.70 s to view the critical slide while their eye movements were monitored. When subjects who had devoted the same number of fixations were compared, memory for the central detail of the emotional slide was again better. The results suggest that enhanced memory for detail information of an emotional event does not occur solely because more attention is devoted to the emotional information.

Imagination inflation: Imagining a childhood event inflates confidence that it occurred.

Counterfactual imaginings are known to have far-reaching implications. In the present experiment, we ask if imagining events from one's past can affect memory for childhood events. We draw on the social psychology literature showing that imagining a future event increases the subjective likelihood that the event will occur. The concepts of cognitive availability and the source-monitoring framework provide reasons to expect that imagination may inflate confidence that a childhood event occurred. However, people routinely produce myriad counterfactual imaginings (i.e., daydreams and fantasies) but usually do not confuse them with past experiences. To determine the effects of imagining a childhood event, we pretested subjects on how confident they were that a number of childhood events had happened, asked them to imagine some of those events, and then gathered new confidence measures. For each of the target items, imagination inflated confidence that the event had occurred in childhood. We discuss implications for situations in which imagination is used as an aid in searching for presumably lost memories.

Accounts of the confidence-accuracy relation in recognition memory.

Confidence and accuracy, while often considered to tap the same memory representation, are often found to be only weakly correlated (e.g., Bothwell, Deffenbacher, & Brigham, 1987; Deffenbacher, 1980). There are at least two possible (nonexclusive) reasons for this weak relation. First, it may be simply due to noise of one sort or another; that is, it may come about because of both within- and between-subjects statistical variations that are partially uncorrelated for confidence measures on the one hand and accuracy measures on the other. Second, confidence and accuracy may be uncorrelated because they are based, at least in part, on different memory representations that are affected in different ways by different independent variables. We propose a general theory that is designed to encompass both of these possibilities and, within the context of this theory, we evaluate effects of four variables--degree of rehearsal, study duration, study luminance, and test luminance--in three face recognition experiments. In conjunction with our theory, the results allow us to begin to identify the circumstances under which confidence and accuracy are based on the same versus different sources of information in memory. The results demonstrate the conditions under which subjects are quite poor at monitoring their memory performance, and are used to extend cue utilization theories to the domain of face recognition.

Changing beliefs about implausible autobiographical events: a little plausibility goes a long way.

Three experiments investigated the malleability of perceived plausibility and the subjective likelihood of occurrence of plausible and implausible events among participants who had no recollection of experiencing them. In Experiment 1, a plausibility-enhancing manipulation (reading accounts of the occurrence of events) combined with a personalized suggestion increased the perceived plausibility of the implausible event, as well as participants' ratings of the likelihood that they had experienced it. Plausibility and likelihood ratings were uncorrelated. Subsequent studies showed that the plausibility manipulation alone was sufficient to increase likelihood ratings but only if the accounts that participants read were set in a contemporary context. These data suggest that false autobiographical beliefs can be induced in clinical and forensic contexts even for initially implausible events.

Pseudomemories without hypnosis.

Hypnosis is often colloquially associated with "the power of suggestion"; however, some cognitive memory researchers believe that suggestions have power even without hypnosis. A well-known phenomenon in cognitive psychology is the "misinformation effect," in which subjects who are misled about previously witnessed events often integrate that inaccurate postevent information into their accounts of the event. In the present article, we review the misinformation literature in four major rounds according to the nature of the memory distortion. The first three rounds are studies of memory suggestibility for observed events; by contrast, the fourth (and newest) one deals with personal or autobiographical memory. Considered collectively, these four rounds of research provide compelling evidence that it is not hard at all to make people truly believe they have seen or experienced something they have not-without any hypnosis at all. Finally, we discuss the tragic implications for the unquestioned acceptance of all recovered memories.