What research paradigms have cognitive psychologists used to study “False memory,” and what are the implications of these choices?

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Abstract

This research examines the methodologies employed by cognitive psychologists to study “false memory,” and assesses if these methodologies are likely to facilitate scientific progress or perhaps constrain the conclusions reached. A PsycINFO search of the empirical publications in cognitive psychology was conducted through January, 2004, using the subject heading, “false memory.” The search produced 198 articles. Although there is an apparent false memory research bandwagon in cognitive psychology, with increasing numbers of studies published on this topic over the past decade, few researchers (only 13.1% of the articles) have studied false memory as the term was originally intended—to specifically refer to planting memory for an entirely new event that was never experienced in an individual’s lifetime. Cognitive psychologists interested in conducting research relevant to assessing the authenticity of memories for child sexual abuse should consider the generalizability of their research to the planting of entirely new events in memory.

Introduction

One dark night, a drunk man was scurrying around under a street light at the end of an alley. A man walking by asked him what he was doing. The drunk man explained that he had lost his keys and was trying to find them. “Where did you lose your keys?” the man asked. “At the far end of the alley,” he responded. “So why are you looking at this end of the alley if you lost your keys down at the other end?” asked the man. “Because it’s too dark down there to see,” he replied.

There are cycles in scientific development. For scientific research to be progressive, the scientific community in a particular research area must agree on their goals, on the basic characteristics of the real world that are relevant to their topic of study, and on what the permissible research methods are for studying this topic. Kuhn (1970) called this shared view a paradigm. A shared paradigm allows scientists to analyze their topic from a collective, unified standpoint and an integrated body of knowledge is more likely to develop. Once established, however, paradigms can break down and be replaced, and the driving forces here are not always scientific forces. Kuhn emphasized that the scientific community is, after all, composed of social beings who operate in a changing historical and social context.

Boring, 1963b, Boring, 1963a proposed a similar view of scientific development, based on the concept of Zeitgeist. The Zeitgeist is the total climate in which a scientific idea is developed—the theories, problems, and methods within the scientific community as well as the values and attitudes of the scientists and the social context in which the work is conducted. The progress of scientific ideas and methods is both advanced and mired by these forces, producing cyclical changes in research paradigms.

In the past decade, there has been a veritable explosion of cognitive research on the topic of false memory. The fact that the research on this topic has been so prolific and has drawn the attention of so many researchers clearly conveys how important this concept is currently considered to be. The purpose of this study is to examine the research methodologies employed by cognitive psychologists to study the concept of “false memory,” and to assess if these methodologies are likely to facilitate scientific progress or perhaps constrain the conclusions reached.

This review is timely because cognitive research on false memory is in its infancy; this term was first cited in the cognitive research literature in 1994. The fact that false memory research is relatively new and that its emergence in journals produced a veritable explosion, gave us the opportunity to examine the “first wave” of methodological research tools used in this large set of studies. Although research on false memories will surely evolve in various directions over time, by looking at the “first wave” of research on this topic we can observe the relatively immediate methodological reactions that a large number of cognitive psychologists have brought to bare on the phenomenon of false memory. Specifically, we were interested in the proportion of these studies that involve planting memories for an entirely new event that was never experienced, as this was the intended use of the term false memory when it was coined.

The origin of use of the term “false memory” by cognitive psychologists can be traced to a symposium at the 1992 meeting of the American Psychological Society on the topic, “Remembering ‘Repressed’ Abuse: Initial Research, Theoretical Analysis, and Evaluation of the Claims” (“Remembering ‘Repressed’ Abuse”, 1992). Elizabeth Loftus served as the symposium discussant and presented her research on planting in adults, false childhood memories for being lost in a mall. She drew generalizations from this research to the real-world issue of assessing whether memories for incidents of childhood sexual abuse may be suggestively planted and thus be “false memories.” The False Memory Syndrome Foundation, which coined the phrase “false memory syndrome,” was founded that same year and Loftus and two other members of the APS symposium were members of the Foundation’s Board of Directors. This symposium was then followed by a lead article in the American Psychologist by Loftus (1993) entitled, “The reality of repressed memory.” This is a highly cited article; according to the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), there have been 493 published citations of this article. In both the symposium and the subsequent article, the use of the termfalse memorywas specifically intended to refer to memory for an entirely new event, that is, an event or a specific episode of an event that was never experienced by an individual in his or her lifetime, but nonetheless, came to reside in the individual’s memory.

The data for this study were generated from a review of the published empirical research literature in cognitive psychology journals in which the term “false memory” was indicated as a key word or key concept, from 1872 to January, 2004. In this search, we identified a total of 198 articles and then categorized these articles based on the principal methodology that was used in each. We were primarily interested in the percent of these articles that involved planting memories for entirely new events that were never experienced by participants in their lifetime. (In this work, we did not distinguish between beliefs and memories although this may prove to be an important distinction. See Mazzoni & Kirsch, 2002.)

Section snippets

Procedures

A PsycINFO search for the time period from 1872 (the first study identified was, in fact published in 1994) through the first week of January, 2004 was conducted using the subject heading, “false memory.” The resulting citations were then limited to journal articles, empirical study and the classification codes: cognitive processes, or learning and memory, or developmental psychology, or cognitive and perceptual development. This search produced 188 articles. Ten additional articles were

What research paradigms have cognitive psychologists used to study “False memory?”

The number of false memory articles classified according to each of the six types of tasks is presented in Table 1. Of primary interest is the percentage of the 198 articles in which cognitive psychologists used the term false memory as it was originally intended, that is, to refer to planting entirely new events in memory. Only 13.1% (N = 26) of these articles fell in this category. The list of these 26 articles is included in Appendix A.

A separate category included articles in which new or

Discussion

The results suggests that although there is an apparent false memory research bandwagon in cognitive psychology, with increasing numbers of studies published on this topic over the past decade, few researchers (only 13.1% of the articles) have studied false memories as the term was originally intended—to specifically refer to planting memory for an entirely new event—and this pattern has remained relatively unchanged.

Why should there be one clear definition of false memory among cognitive

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