Remembering What Never Happened

Imagine this. 

You have just started high school and you’re having recess with this friend of yours that you’ve known since you were both in year 4 at school. She starts talking to you about the time in primary school when you hid all the pens and pencils that were on the teacher’s desk so that your teacher had nothing to write with for that day. You remember that you were somewhat of a mischievous child at school, but as much as you try you can’t quite seem to remember ever hiding your teacher’s pens and pencils. Your friend then pulls out a photo and says “Here, I’ll show you!” to which she pulls out an old little photo with a child holding their shirt out like a tray with a small pile of pens and pencils on it. 

“Is that really me?” you think to yourself. The photo isn’t in the best quality, but you can certainly see what is going on in the picture. 

“After you got them all you went and hid them behind some books in the library! Don’t you remember? It was so funny!” Your friend says through her laughter.

 “I would do something like that” you say as you smile with amusement. But then your friend suddenly stops laughing and looks very closely at the picture again.

“Wait” she says, “That desk is wrong”

With curiosity you peer in closer and examine the photo as best you can. 

“This wasn’t our teacher’s desk” she continues, “This was before I even came to your school! I must have taken this photo when I was in year 3; this photo isn’t of you at all!”

Even more curious now, you grab the photo and look much closer. You feel some sense of relief, but at the same time feel confused because as your friend was telling the story, you could almost remember yourself hiding your primary school teacher’s pens and pencils.

But you just imagined that right?

A group of researchers wanted to find out if it was possible for people to remember stuff that actually never happened. Confused yet?

In counselling, sometimes therapists suspect that their clients have bottled-up feelings inside – stuff that doesn’t make them function very well. These feelings could have been caused by an experience they had as a child and so the therapist might ask their clients to go through old family photo albums in the hope of bringing up some suspected bottled-up feelings.

You may be wondering, if the feelings don’t make them function very well, then why do they need to be brought up? Well, the therapist believes that if these feelings are brought up then they can be dealt with properly, which will make that person function better in the long run.

The only concern with doing this is that clients may start to remember things about themselves that never really happened. Maybe a better way to put it is this; as these clients look at old family photos at the same time listening to their therapist ask about, for example, domestic violence in their family, they can actually create a story in their own mind where they play as the main character. Their mind processes a made up story as a memory. They confuse fact with fiction.

So in this example, the client may start to believe that they were physically abused as a child because they are looking at an old family photo and at the same time being questioned about domestic violence.

Can you think of some reasons why this might be a problem?

The main thing that these researchers were looking for was to see if people were more likely to remember these false events if they were shown a photo at the same time as hearing a story about themselves (Wade, Garry, Read & Lindsay, 2002, p. 151).

So, these researchers asked about 50 people to take part in an experiment to test this whole idea. The researchers asked the parents of each of the students to provide them with stories about two childhood experiences that the students had. For half of these students, their parents were also asked to provide three class photos of their child in their early years of school

So, the researchers had two real stories for each student, and for half of them they also had three class photos.

The researchers then came up with a fake story that they would use with the third class photo. They found out the names of teachers and particular classmates to use in the story to make each student believe that the story was true. The story in this case was similar to the story you read at the top of the page, in that a child played a prank on their teacher. In this story though, the prank involved some slime!

After receiving all this information, the researchers interviewed each of the students and talked about the three stories. Two of them were real stories and one of them was the made up story.

After interviewing them all, the researchers found that the students with the class photos were more likely to remember these false events than the group of students without the class photos.

But why?

Well, it may be because the photo added to the “realness” of the story (Paddock & Terranova, 2001). In other words, the photo may have made the students more confident in believing that the event actually happened. Also, because it was a class photo and not a photo of the actual event, the students may have started to wonder who in their class they would have done the prank with (Hyman and Billings 1998). 

Maybe the greatest reason for this belief though was that the photo showing what the teacher and other classmates looked like may have mixed with the imaginations of the students (Johnson, Hashtroudi, & Lindsay, 1993). This may have helped the students believe that what they were imagining in their mind was actually fact, and not fiction.

Pretty weird huh? This research shows that the brain is sometimes not the most reliable source of information! 

Talk about this stuff with your friends, what might all this mean for you?

Maybe you can use it to convince Santa how good you’ve really been all year!

Reference List

Hyman, I. E., Jr., & Billings, F. J. (1998). Individual differences and the creation of false childhood memories,Memory, 6, 1-20

Johnson, M. K., Hashtroudi, S., & Lindsay, D. S. (1993). Source monitoring, Psychologica Bulletin, 114, 3-28

Paddock, J. R, & Terranova, S. (2001). Guided visualisation and suggestibility: Effect of perceived authority on recall of autobiographical memories. Journal of Genetic Psychology, 162, 347-356

Wade, K. A, Garry, M, Read, J. D, & Lindsay, D. S (2002). A picture is worth a thousand lies: Using false photographs to create false childhood memories. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 9 (3), 597-603.