Lost in the mall technique

The "Lost in the Mall" technique, or the "lost in the mall" experiment,[1] is a memory implantation technique used to demonstrate that confabulations about events that never took place – such as having been lost in a shopping mall as a child – can be created through suggestions made to experimental subjects. It was first developed by Jim Coan, an undergraduate student of psychologist Elizabeth Loftus as support for the claim that it is possible to implant entirely false memories in people. The technique was developed in the context of the debate about the existence of repressed memories and false memories (see False memory syndrome).[2]

Study methodology

A lost in the mall experiment is a memory implantation technique used to demonstrate that confabulations about events that never took place, such as having been lost in a shopping mall as a child. It can be created through suggestions made to experimental subjects. It was first developed by Jim Coan, an undergraduate student of psychologist Elizabeth Loftus at the University of Washington as support for the claim that it is possible to implant entirely false memories in people. It was developed in the context of a debate about the existence of repressed memories and false memories (see False memory syndrome).[3]

Coan designed the first lost in the mall experiment as an extra-credit assignment for a course in cognitive psychology. The professor—Loftus—invited her students to design and execute an experiment implanting false memories in subjects. Coan enlisted his mother, sister and brother as subjects. He assembled booklets containing four short narratives describing childhood events, and instructed them to try to remember as much as possible about each of the four events, and to write down those details over the course of six days. Unbeknownst to the participants, one of the narratives was false; it described Coan's brother getting lost in a shopping mall at around the age of 5, then being rescued by an elderly person and reunited with his family. During the experiment, Coan's brother unwittingly invented several additional details of the false narrative. At the conclusion of the experiment during a tape-recorded debriefing when told that one of the narratives was false, Coan's brother could not identify which one was false and expressed disbelief when told.[4]

Coan later refined the study methodology for his senior thesis, in collaboration with Loftus and graduate student Jacqueline Pickrell.[5] In their experiment, they adapted the methods Coan had used on his brother in a formal study with 24 participants, 25% of whom reported remembering the false event. The memory for the false event was usually reported to be less clear than the true events, and people generally used more words to describe the true events than the false events. At the end of the study when the participants were told that one of the 4 events was false, some people (5 out of 24) failed to identify the lost in the mall event as the false event and instead picked one of the true events to be false. Loftus calls this study "existence proof" for the phenomenon of false memory creation and suggests that the false memory is formed as a result of the suggested event (being lost in a mall) being incorporated into already existing memories of going to the mall. With the passage of time it becomes harder for people to differentiate between what actually happened and what was imagined and they make memory errors.[5]

The lost in the mall experiment has been replicated and extended with different ages of subjects.[6] About 25 percent of the participants not only "remembered" the implanted memory but also filled in the missing details.[1]

Criticism of methodology and conclusions

The Lost in the Mall technique is generally accepted as a memory implantation study that is useful for investigating the effect of suggestions on memory. However some people have argued that this is not generalizable to memories for traumatic events. An article in the journal Child Development by Pezdek and Hodges described an extension of the experiment. By using the subjects' family members to do the interviewing, their study was able to replicate Loftus' findings that memories of being lost in the mall could be created and were more likely to occur in young children. However, a much smaller number of children reported false memories of another untrue incident: that of a painful and embarrassing enema.[6] Another article by Kenneth Pope in the American Psychologist suggested possible confounding variables in the study as well as questioning whether the technique's ability to generate a false memory could be compared with the ability of a therapist to create a pseudomemory of childhood sexual abuse.[7]

In 1995, Lynn Crook who had recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse, filed an ethics complaint with the American Psychological Association charging Loftus with misrepresenting Crook's successful recovered memory lawsuit in a media interview with Psychology Today ("Dispatch from the Memory War"). In an article (1999 in the Journal Ethics & Behavior) two women who had recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse, Lynn Crook and Martha Dean, questioned Loftus' Lost in the Mall-study, arguing that the methods used were unethical and the results not generalizable to real life memories of trauma.[8] Loftus responded to Crook and Dean's criticism pointing to the exaggerations, omissions and errors in Crook and Dean's description of the technique and their mistakes about the study's representation in the media. Loftus made it clear that the Lost in the Mall study and other studies using memory implantation techniques in no way tried to claim that all memories of childhood sexual abuse discovered in therapy are false, they merely try to show how relatively easy it is to manipulate human memory. Loftus also accused Crook of writing the article as part of a long series of efforts to discredit her integrity as a researcher and her work.[9][10]

See also

Footnotes

  1. 1 2 Bessel Van Der Kolk, M.D. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score. Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. New York: Viking. pp. 191–192. ISBN 978-0-670-78593-3.
  2. ↑ Loftus EF, Coan J., Pickrell, JE. Manufacturing false memories using bits of reality. In Reder, Lynne M., ed. (1996). Implicit Memory and Metacognition. Lawrence Erlbaum. ISBN 9780805818604.
  3. ↑ Loftus EF, Coan J., Pickrell, JE. Manufacturing false memories using bits of reality. In Reder, Lynne M., ed. (1996). Implicit Memory and Metacognition. Lawrence Erlbaum. ISBN 9780805818604.
  4. ↑ Coan, J.A., Lost in a Shopping Mall: An Experience with Controversial Research. ETHICS & BEHAVIOR, 7(3), 271-284
  5. 1 2 Loftus, E.F.; Pickrell JE (1995). "The formation of false memories" (pdf). Psychiatric Annals. 25: 720–725.
  6. 1 2 Pezdek, K; Hodge, D. (July–August 1999). "Planting false childhood memories: The role of event plausibility". Child Development. 70 (4): 887–895. doi:10.1111/1467-8624.00064. JSTOR 1132249.
  7. ↑ Pope, K. (1996). "Memory, Abuse, and Science: Questioning Claims About the False Memory Syndrome Epidemic". American Psychologist. 51 (9): 957–74. doi:10.1037/0003-066X.51.9.957. PMID 8819364. Retrieved 2008-01-31.
  8. ↑ Crook, L.; Dean, Martha (1999). "Lost in a Shopping Mall—A Breach of Professional Ethics". Ethics & Behavior. 9 (1): 39–50. doi:10.1207/s15327019eb0901_3. PMID 11657487. Retrieved 2008-01-18.
  9. ↑ Loftus, E.F. (1999). "Lost in the Mall: Misrepresentations and Misunderstandings" (PDF). Ethics & Behaviour. 9 (1): 51–60. doi:10.1207/s15327019eb0901_4. PMID 11657488. Archived from the original on 2010-06-19.
  10. ↑ Editorial (1996). "Dispatch from the memory war". Psychology Today.

References

  • Loftus, E.F. (Nov 2003). "Make-Believe Memories" (PDF). The American Psychologist. American Psychologist. 58 (11): 867–73. doi:10.1037/0003-066X.58.11.867. PMID 14609374.
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