The slippery nature of memories is one that crops up a lot in different areas of research. It is problematic when they are hypnotically recovered but it gets even trickier to pin down in the young. This is important as they are the source for quite a few spectacular claims (like the Brownies) but is absolutely critical when we are dealing with Satanic Ritual Abuse, where the consequences of unreliable accounts can be life-destroying.
Tell a child it once got its hand stuck in a mouse trap, almost chocked on a candy, underwent a intestinal examination or was abducted by a UFO, and there is a good chance it will 'remember' it. About 30 to 40 percent of children will believe any of these things have in fact happened to them. They don't just accept it, they actually seem to recall the fake memory and give new details about it.
The examples mentioned are all part of a research project by Dutch psychologist Henry Otgaar, who obtained his doctorate at the Maastricht University last week with a thesis on this type of fake memories. That it is easy to plant fake memories into children's heads was a given, Otgaar said. He investigated under which circumstances children are most susceptible to it.
"It is an important topic," Otgaar said in a phone interview, "because in many court cases, about sexual abuse for example, children are confronted with leading questions. Not necessarily by the police; often the damage has been done because parents and teachers, for example, have done the leading questioning beforehand. That way children can easily remember things that never took place. My research focused on when the chances of pseudo memories are the highest."
So what circumstances can this occur in?
"First of all, it is easier to create a negative, unpleasant pseudo memory than a positive one. That is important knowledge for court cases, which often deal with unpleasant incidents. There are therapists who have claimed children couldn't possibly make up such horrible and bizarre things, but my research clearly shows they can.
"Secondly, if you say something is common, that leads to a drastic rise in susceptibility. And thirdly: if a kid knows a lot about something, if you give information about how something works, that increases the chances of pseudo memories. Finally, children between ages 7 and 8 are more susceptible than those aged 11 and 12."
These implanted memories are difficult to shift too:
We said: we made a mistake in the survey, we accidentally told you the wrong story, this did not actually happen to you. There are children who insisted they could remember it. In that case we had to tell them a number of times until he or she was convinced it didn't take place.
This clearly has massive implications for SRA and means we have to very careful about cases that involve no other evidence, especially when the whole area if being pushed by people with an agenda (if you tell a child something is more plausible than it really is, it can make the memory much more likely to stick). It also means we have to be very careful about children's testimonies related to the paranormal too, but it shouldn't mean we dismiss things out of hand, after all even grown-ups' testimony should be treated with caution - in fact we could really do with a study on how easy it is to implant memories into adults too. Anyone know of any?
Source
Hat tip
Abducted by a UFO?
Yep, they did indeed tell children they were abducted by a UFO in this paper (PDF is free to view):
Otgaar, H., Candel, I., Merckelbach, H., & Wade, K.A. (2009) Abducted by a UFO: Prevalence information affects young children’s false memories for an implausible event. Applied Cognitive Psychology. 23 (1). 115-125.
Some of the key content:
The true description described the child’s first day at school. The false description was either plausible and described almost choking on a candy, or implausible and described being abducted by a UFO. Half of the children in each group also received prevalence information in the form of a newspaper article. The article suggested that the target false event was much more common than the children probably thought.
...
For the true and false events a newspaper article was fabricated describing that the event took place quite frequently when participants were age 4. These false newspaper articles were similar in appearance to a local newspaper. Moreover, to personalize the newspaper articles, we included the children’s hometown in the articles. The newspaper articles were identical in terms of lay-out, size and colour and were roughly matched for word count and level of detail. Depending on the event described, the articles contained a photograph of an elementary school, candies or a UFO
...
This study examined the effect of prevalence information on implanting plausible and implausible false memories in 7–8 and 11–12 year old children. Our central finding is that combining false descriptions with prevalence information increased the rate of false memory reports in younger children during an initial interview. Prevalence information made younger children more likely to report memories of a fictitious plausible event (almost choking on a candy) and a fictitious implausible event (being abducted by a UFO). A substantial number of children (over 70%) falsely remembered that they were abducted by a UFO. Although previous studies have looked at the cognitive characteristics of individuals who report UFO abductions (Clancy, McNally, Schacter, Lenzenweger, & Pitman, 2002; McNally, Lasko, Clancy, Macklin, Pitman, & Orr, 2004), this is the first study that succeeded to implant false memories of UFO abductions. The implications of this finding for forensic and clinical contexts are clear. Although we do not want to claim that children’s testimonies about bizarre and implausible events, like those in the ‘McMartin Preschool’ case, are always false, this study clearly shows that children easily develop false memories about a highly implausible event.
I just hope they do a follow-up in a decade or two and find out how many abductees there are amongst them. There are clearly some pretty big ethical issues when you are dicking around inside people's heads and we might not know the full implications for quite a while.
Those references;
Clancy, S. A., McNally, R. J., Schacter, D. L., Lenzenweger, M., & Pitman, R. K. (2002). Memory distortion in people reporting abduction by aliens. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 111, 455–461.
McNally, R. J., Lasko, N. B., Clancy, S. A., Macklin, M. L., Pitman, R. K., & Orr, S. P. (2004). Psychophysiological responding during script-driven imagery in people reporting abduction by space aliens. Psychological Science, 15, 493–497.
