JOURNAL OF MEMORY AND LANGUAGE ARTICLE NO.

35, 101117 (1996)

0006

The Role of Mental Imagery in the Creation of False Childhood Memories

IRA E. HYMAN, JR.,
AND

JOEL PENTLAND

Western Washington University We investigated whether guided imagery instructions would increase the likelihood of false memory creation and of remembering previously unremembered true events. In three interviews, participants repeatedly were asked to remember several true events (based on parent reports) and one false event (created by the experimenters). In a guided imagery condition, if participants could not recall an event (either a true of a false event) they were asked to form a mental image of the event and describe the image to the interviewer. In a control condition, if participants could not recall an event they were asked to quietly think about the event for 1 min. Participants in the imagery condition were more likely to create a false event and recover memories of previously unavailable true events (although it was unclear whether the recovered memories were truly recalled or created in response to the interview demands). We argue that the creation of false childhood memories involves both memory reconstruction and errors in source monitor1996 Academic Press, Inc. ing.

Will adults create false memories of childhood experiences in response to the demands of an interview? In many respects this is a question about what happens in therapy focused on memory recovery: When clients recover child abuse memories, are they retrieving previously repressed memories or are they creating false memories? This is an applied question because there is a large body of evidence indicating that human memory is reconstructive and thus open to error. Since Bartlett (1932), many researchers have documented that remembering is a reconstructive process. People do not retrieve a memory as a whole entity, but rather construct or create a memory using the information remaining in memory combined with other related knowledge (or schemata according to Bartlett). Reconstruction has been demonWe thank the following individuals for their help in data collection: Cara Benchwick, Anneliese Kraiger, Sarah Rankin, Marla Shaffer, and Rob Winningham. We thank Henry Roediger, Maria Zaragoza, Douglas Nelson, and Elizabeth Loftus for their comments on an earlier draft. Address reprint requests to Ira Hyman, Psychology Department, Western Washington University, Bellingham, WA 98225. E-mail: hyman@henson.cc.wwu.edu.

strated in material from word lists (Roediger & McDermott, 1995), to short stories (Bartlett, 1932), songs (Hyman & Rubin, 1990), and personal experiences (e.g. Barclay & DeCooke, 1988, Neisser, 1982). Some of the clearest work showing that interviewers can suggest memory errors comes from eyewitness memory research (e.g. Belli, 1989; Lindsay, 1990; Loftus, 1979; Loftus, Donders, Hoffman, & Schooler, 1989; Zaragoza & Lane, 1994). In traditional eyewitness memory research, a person views an original event and is later given information either consistent with (control condition) or contradictory to (misled condition) the original event. In general, researchers nd that a person given misleading postevent information is more likely to incorporate the misleading information into their recollection of the original event than someone given consistent information. Although the misinformation effect is easily replicated, the explanation of such memory errors is hotly contested (Belli, 1989; Lindsay, 1990; Loftus, 1979; Loftus, et al., 1989; McCloskey & Zaragoza, 1985; Tversky & Tuchin, 1989; Zaragoza & Lane, 1994). Although the eyewitness memory research
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shows that memory is reconstructive, it may not generalize to the possible creation of child abuse memories in therapy (Berliner & Williams, 1994; Olio, 1994; Pezdek, 1994). In eyewitness memory research, people change aspects of events and the events are rarely emotional or self-involving. In order to create a false memory of child abuse, a person would have to create a whole, emotional, self-involving event. Such an error is much larger than that typically observed in memory research and may be more difcult, if not impossible, to introduce. For these reasons, it is important to demonstrate that people can create false childhood memories and to describe the factors that contribute to such memories. In addition to the applied issues at stake, theoretical questions also can be addressed through research on false childhood memories. Such research may contribute to the debate on the underlying explanation of the misinformation effect. Integration, or schema theory, explanations posit that the postevent information is stored with the original event and erases, or overwrites, the original information (e.g., Loftus, 1979; Loftus et al., 1989). Source confusion explanations counter that both pieces of information are stored independently in memory. An individual may forget one piece or simply forget the source of the postevent information. When trying to retrieve the original information, the postevent information may come to mind and the person may erroneously claim that the source was the original event (e.g., Lindsay, 1990; Zaragoza & Lane, 1994). A primary difference between integration and source confusion explanations is that integration views claim that memory for the original information is altered by the postevent information while source confusion views argue that the original information remains unchanged and possibly accessible. Recent work in eyewitness memory indicates that both types of errors may be responsible for some errors in the typical eyewitness memory paradigm (Belli, 1989; Lindsay, 1990, 1995; Loftus et al., 1989; Tversky & Tuchin, 1989; Zaragoza & Lane, 1994).

Would the creation of false childhood memories be better explained in terms of schematic integration and reconstruction, or source confusion? A schematic integration approach would emphasize other sets of knowledge activated by the suggested information. That underlying knowledge may be changed by the suggested event and may cause elaborations of the suggested information. In contrast, a source confusion explanation would emphasize that a person comes to believe that an externally suggested event is an internally generated recollection (an individual may also acknowledge both sources, but this would still be an error since the event was not an internally generated recollection, see Zaragoza & Lane, 1994). We will argue, based on the results of the research conducted in our lab, that the creation of false childhood memories involves both schematic integration and reconstruction and errors in source/reality monitoring. A second important issue raised by false childhood memory research is the inuence that memory changes have on an individuals self-concept. Several authors have argued that autobiographical memories contribute to ones sense of self (e.g., Bruner, 1986; James, 1890; Neisser, 1988). In addition, an individuals autobiography is constantly updated to t changing self-knowledge, changing views of others, and different social contexts (Bruner, 1986, 1987; Cohler, 1994; Greenwald, 1980; Neisser & Fivush, 1994; Spence, 1982). This process of rewriting ones autobiography (or creating narrative as opposed to historical truth (Spence, 1982)) is often a healthy, normal process: Rewriting the past allows one to adapt to changes with a revised personal history that opens possibilities for future activities. The addition of suggested events to ones personal history is also a normal process. Families often tell stories that one individual, who previously did not remember, eventually comes to remember. Often these adopted memories may include errors or be wholly erroneous (see Lindsay & Read, 1994, for interesting examples). However, how far can this rewriting of the past be pushed? Will an

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individual accept as a personal memory only events that are consistent with their current understanding of the past or will a person also accept events that are incongruent? Essentially we are asking not only how malleable is ones autobiographical memory, but also how malleable is ones self-concept. Thus we think research on the creation of false childhood memories and factors related to memory creation is important for both applied and theoretical reasons. The basic methodology that we (Hyman & Billings, 1995; Hyman, Husband, & Billings, 1995) and others (Ceci, Huffman, Smith, & Loftus, 1994; Ceci, Loftus, Leichtman, & Bruck, 1994; Loftus & Coan, 1994; Loftus & Pickrell, in press; Pezdek, 1995) have followed is an adaptation of postevent misinformation research and research on memory for early childhood experiences (e.g. Sheingold & Tenney, 1982; Usher & Neisser, 1993). In false memory research, participants experience multiple interviews in which they repeatedly are asked to remember both true and false experiences. The true events are based on information provided by family members. The false events are created by the experimenters. The true and false events are presented to the participants in the exact same mannerusually with an abbreviated description that serves as a cue. The participants are asked to remember and describe all events. They are usually told that repeatedly thinking about and trying to remember will lead to more complete memory for the events. The major question is whether participants generate a memory in response to the false event. With this basic methodology, however, we can also investigate if true events are recovered over repeated interviews (a form of hypermnesia, see Erdelyi, 1990; Wheeler & Roediger, 1992). With slight modications in the basic design, we can study cognitive/personality differences related to memory creation and manipulate factors that may contribute to memory creation. In several studies using this basic methodology, it has now been demonstrated that pre-

school children (Ceci, 1994a, 1994b), college students (Hyman & Billings, 1995; Hyman et al., 1995), and others (Loftus & Pickrell, in press; Pezdek, 1995) will create false childhood memories. In these experimental investigations, people have created memories of being lost (Loftus & Pickrell, in press; Pezdek, 1995), of overnight visits to hospitals (Hyman et al., 1995), of getting ngers caught in mousetraps (Ceci, Huffman 1994a, 199b), and of spilling punchbowls at wedding receptions (Hyman & Billings, 1995; Hyman et al., 1995). Between 15 and 25% of adults have been found to create false memories in the various studies. Several overlapping processes are involved in memory creation. At the very least the social demands present in the repeated interviews are important. The participants are informed by two reliable sources (the experimenter and their parents) that the event occurred. They are also told that repeatedly thinking about the events will help them remember more about the events (Zaragoza and Mitchell (1995) and Roediger, Jacoby, and McDermott (this issue) have recently shown that the mere repetition of suggestions and repeatedly recalling an event leads to more errors). Constructive memory processes also appear to be involved. Hyman et al. (1995) found that no participants created false memories in the rst interview. In their second experiment, they scored whether the participants talked about related self-knowledge in the rst or second interview and compared that to whether they created as false memory by the third interview (e.g., talking about whose wedding it could have been or where it would have been if asked about spilling punch on the parents of the bride at a wedding reception). They found that those individuals who talked about related self-knowledge were more likely to create false memories than those who did not (see also Hyman & Billings, 1995). Similarly, Pezdek (1995) found that people are more likely to create false memories for experiences about which they have

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schematic knowledge (getting lost) than events for which they do not (a rectal enema). The creation of a false memory thus involves the combination of the suggested event with related self-knowledge. When the person is later asked to think about the false event again, they construct an image or understanding of the event that includes both the suggested details and real self-knowledge. The self-knowledge is used to ll in the gaps of the suggested event (whose wedding, where it would have happened, who else would have been there, the responses of parents, etc.). Other factors that may contribute to memory creation are individual differences in cognitive abilities and personality characteristics. Hyman and Billings (1995) looked at several cognitive/personality differences that may be related to memory creation: the Dissociative Experiences Scale (DES; Bernstein & Putnam, 1986), the Creative Imagination Scale (CIS; Wilson & Barber, 1978), the Tellegen Absorption Scale (TAS; Tellegen & Atkinson, 1974), and the MarloweCrowne Social Desirability Scale (SDS; Crowne & Marlowe, 1960; 1964). They found that both the DES (r .48) and the CIS (r .36) were signicantly correlated to memory creation. The DES is a measure of the tendency to have experiences that disrupt the normal integration of consciousness and personality while the CIS is a measure of both imagery vividness and hypnotizability. These individual differences may, to a certain extent, reect differences in reality/source monitoring strategies. The DES could be interpreted as a measure of individual differences of difculties in monitoring reality and source. Clear images may also make reality monitoring decisions difcult because people tend to associate clearer mental images with events remembered as opposed to imagined (Johnson, Foley, Suengas, & Raye, 1988). In the current experiment, we have attempted to investigate the role of mental images in the creation of false childhood memories. For a variety of reasons, we chose to manipulate mental imagery and see if it in-

creases the tendency to create false memories. First, we knew from the Hyman and Billings (1995) and other research (see Schooler & Loftus, 1993) that people with better mental imagery abilities are more likely to accept suggestions of remembered events and details. In addition, Johnson et al. (1988) found that people rated actual memories as having clearer mental images than imagined childhood events. In recent work in our lab, Hyman and Gilstrap (1995) found that people have clearer mental images of events they remember than of events that they know about from another source but do not remember. Thus, clear mental images may contribute to a reality monitoring decision to label a mental experience a memory as opposed to information from other sources. Finally, guided mental imagery is a technique advocated as a memory recovery tool (Bass & Davis, 1988; Edwards, 1990; Fredrickson, 1992; Roland, 1993), and this provides an applied motivation for investigating imagery as well. The basic methodology was an extension of Hyman et al. (1995). During three interviews we asked college students about two to ve true childhood events (based on parent reports) and one false childhood event (spilling a punch bowl on the brides parents during a wedding reception). The participants were divided into two groups based on how they were treated when they failed to recall an event. For any event they failed to recall, the guided imagery group was asked to form a mental image of the event and describe the image. The control group was asked to sit and think about the event for 1 min. We expected that individuals in the imagery group would be more likely to create false memories for two reasons: (1) we ensured that they constructed an event representation for the false event, and (2) vivid mental images lead to difculties in reality monitoring. METHOD Participants Two hundred and twenty-six Western Washington University students were re-

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cruited from introductory psychology class. These students gave us permission to mail a childhood events questionnaire to their parents. Parents returned 123 completed questionnaires by the end of the academic calendar (50% return rate). Based on the order of return and if the parents had provided at least two early childhood events, the students were called and asked to participate in a series of interviews asking them to remember childhood events. Of the 89 we asked to participate, 81 agreed to do so, and 72 completed all three interviews. Tape recording errors resulted in no recordings for four students and three others revealed during debrieng that they had talked to others about the experiment, leaving 65 participants (20 male, 45 female); 32 in the guided imagery condition and 33 in the control condition. There was no difference in drop-out rates between the two groups. Materials A questionnaire regarding the students early childhood experiences was mailed to the students parents. The questionnaire contained items that requested the parents describe events that their son/daughter experienced prior to age 6 (occasionally parents supplied events from later ages). The questionnaire provided 10 categories of events within which the parents could describe events: going to the hospital, getting lost, a family vacation, loss of a pet, interaction with a prominent gure, an eventful birthday, weddings attended, a car accident, winning a contest, and mischief with a friend. If the parents knew about an event in any category, they were asked to supply information about the activities, the location, the people involved, and their childs age at the time. Procedure Upon return of parent questionnaires with at least two event descriptions, the students were asked to participate in three memory interviews. The interviews were scheduled 1 day apart in 1 week (MondayWednesdayFriday or TuesdayThursdaySaturday). For

each student the same interviewer conducted all three interviews (there were two male and four female interviewers). All three interviews were tape-recorded. Each participant was asked to describe between two and ve true events (as based on parent reports) and one false event. The false event was: When you were 5 you were at the wedding reception of some friends of the family and you were running around with some other kids, when you bumped into the table holding the punch bowl and spilled the punch bowl on the parents of the bride. The false event was presented in the same fashion as the true events and was the third event the students were asked to describe. There is a possibility that for one of our participants this is not a false event, that is, the person really did spill a punch bowl at a wedding reception. In the parent questionnaire, we asked parents about weddings and in several hundred questionnaires returned in all our studies, we have yet to encounter a true story of a spilled punch bowl (in addition to the questionnaires from this study, this includes parent questionnaires in Hyman and Billings (1995) and Hyman et al. (1995). When the students reported for the rst interview, they were told that the experiment was investigating how well people could remember early childhood experiences. We told the students that they would be asked about a series of events based on information that their parents had supplied and told them that accuracy was important. They were informed that they would be asked about all the events in each interview and that it was normal for people to remember more as they worked at recalling the events. The students were told that if they experienced difculty remembering an event that they would be given advice to help them remember. For each event, the students were rst given several cues: their age at the time, the nature of the event (i.e., a wedding), the location, the people involved, and a few activities. The cues for true and false events were given in general terms so that the false event did not appear different from the true events. If a student

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recalled any event (either true or false) they were encouraged to provide detailed descriptions and generally asked several questions about what happened and any details remembered. When participants in the imagery condition failed to recall either a true or a false event, they were asked to imagine the event and told that this would help them remember the event. The participants then were asked to describe the image in detail: they were asked what the objects, people, and locations looked like, and asked to describe how they imagined the activities occurred. The participants were required to describe their image to ensure that they formed detailed images. We were concerned that some participants might simply claim that they formed images unless we explicitly required the descriptions. We could not have all participants describe consistent aspects of their images because what they chose to describe was partially their decisionthis was a reection of the conversational nature of the interviews. Instead we required that all give some description of the location and at least three aspects of the event (the punch bowl, the parents of the bride, their own clothing, their parents, the other kids, etc.). Most participants described more than three aspects. The interviewer asked about the next event only after the image had been described in detail. When participants in the control condition failed to recall an event, they were required to sit and quietly think about the event for 45 to 60 s. The interviewer told the participants that sitting and thinking would help them remember the event. At the end of the quiet time, the interviewer asked if anything was remembered. If the participant answered yes, the interviewer asked for a complete description. If the participants answered that nothing was recalled, the interviewer moved to the next event. If the participant started to describe the event after (or in response to) the imagery or sitting/thinking, the interviewer encouraged the participant to describe the event fully just

as if the event had been recalled from the beginning. At the end of the rst and second interview, the interviewer encouraged the participant to continue trying to recall the events that were not yet remembered by either imagining the event (imagery condition) or quietly thinking about the event (control condition). The interviewer also reminded the participant of the time and day for the next interview. All participants were asked to not talk about the events with anyone, particularly family members, as we were interested in what they could remember on their own. During the second interview, if a participant failed to recall an event, they were again asked to either describe their image of the event or to sit and think about the event depending on condition. At the end of the third interview and prior to debrieng, the participants were asked several questions about their memories for all events. They were asked to rate how frequently they had thought or talked about the event previously (on a 4-point scale: never, 12 times, 12 times per year, more frequently), the emotionality of the memory (from 1 to 7: 1, not emotional, to 7, very emotional), the direction of the experienced emotions (from 1 to 7: 1, negative, 4, neutral, to 7, positive), the clarity of their mental image (from 1 to 7: 1, not at all clear, to 7, perfectly clear), and their condence in the memory (from 1 to 7: 1, not condent, to 7, very condent). These questions were selected based on the Johnson et al. (1988) investigation of the differences between remembered and imagined autobiographical experiences. We wanted to ascertain how recovered true memories and created false memories were viewed. The very end of the nal interview included a careful debrieng in which the deception was revealed. The participants were told about the purpose of the experiment and informed that memory creation was possible, normal, and very likely in this experimental design. If they created a memory in response to the false event, they were told that it was possible that they experienced something similar to the false event that they changed to t this specic

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situation. They were encouraged to discuss any concerns they had. RESULTS True Events The 65 participants were asked to recall a total of 210 true events based on the parent feedback (an average of 3.23 events per participant). The tape recorded responses to the true events were rated as recalled or not recalled based on whether the participant provided any clear recollection of the event. Indications of recollections were claims by the participant that the event was remembered, descriptions of the information supplied as part of the cue (such as describing a named location), or provision of additional information consistent with but not present in the cueing information. In general, scoring of the true recalls was straightforward as the participants would satisfy all three criteria: claim to remember, describe the event as cued, and provide additional information. Two raters scored the recalls of 20 participants for the true events and agreed on the classication of 96.2% of the responses to the true events. Disputes were resolved by discussion and the remainder were scored by the second author. As in previous studies (Hyman & Billings, 1995; Hyman et al., 1995), we found that recall of true events increased over the course of the experiment (see Fig. 1). Overall, there was no difference in the percentage of true events recalled in the imagery and control conditions. In large measure this is the result of performance being near the ceilingover 75% of the true events were recalled in the rst interview regardless of condition. Nonetheless, there was a difference in the frequency of recovering a memory of an event that was not recalled in the rst interview, x2 (1, N 47) 6.131, p .013. In the control condition, the participants eventually remembered 7 of the 24 events that were unrecalled in the rst interview (29.2%), while in the imagery condition the participants eventually remembered 15 of the 23 events that were unrecalled

in the rst interview (65.2%). The recovered memories can be viewed as truly remembered in response to additional thought and effort (a form of hypermnesia, see Erdelyi, 1990) or as creations in response to the interview demands. We also looked at the true events to discern differences in how the recollections (or lack of recollections) were rated at the end of the third interview. A series of two-way ANOVAs (experimental condition by memory status) were computed. Experimental condition is simply imagery or control. Memory status is whether the event was never remembered in any of the interviews, recovered between the rst and nal interview (not recalled in the rst and rated as recalled in the nal), or remembered in all three interviews. In these analyses, we treated the memories (rather than the participants) as the instances, giving us 25 memories never remembered, 22 recovered, and 163 always remembered (not all participants answered all questions for all events and thus the number of data points contributing to the different analyses varied slightly). Using the memories as the unit of analysis is somewhat inappropriate because the instances are not independentthat is each participant contributed more than one memory. Unfortunately, we could not treat memory status as a within-subjects variable because not all individuals supplied memories in all three categories. Nor does it make sense to only take one memory from each participant because that severely limits the power of the analyses. Thus these analyses should be considered as descriptive and suggestive rather than conclusive. The means and standard deviations for all ratings by condition and memory status are provided in Table 1. Neither condition nor memory status had an effect on participants reports of how frequently they talked and thought about the events, and there was no interaction. In general, the participants reported talking and thinking frequencies of 1.95 (SD .83), which translates to approximately once or twice per year.

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FIG. 1. The percentage of true and false events recalled in rst, second, and third interviews in the control and imagery conditions.

A 2 1 3 ANOVA found no effect of experimental condition on ratings of the emotional content of the memories, a main effect of memory status, F(2,203) 66.129, p .001, MSE 2.921, and no interaction. Tukey fol-

low-up comparisons indicated that memories always remembered were rated as more emotional than recovered memories and never remembered events (p .001), and no signicant difference between recovered memories

TABLE 1 RATINGS
OF

TRUE EVENTS BASED

ON

EXPERIMENTAL CONDITION

AND

MEMORY STATUS

Experimental condition Control memory status Rating scales Frequency Amount of emotion Negative/positive emotion Image clarity Condence Never 1.44 (0.63) 1.31 (0.48) 4.00 (0.37) 1.38 (0.81) 1.25 (0.78) Recover 1.71 (0.76) 1.71 (0.95) 4.43 (1.13) 2.33 (1.03) 2.86 (1.57) Always 2.00 (0.81) 3.79 (1.90) 4.02 (1.92) 4.87 (1.33) 5.35 (1.53) Never 2.38 (0.92) 1.88 (0.99) 4.63 (1.60) 2.88 (2.17) 1.38 (0.74) Imagery memory status Recover 1.67 (0.82) 2.53 (1.41) 3.93 (0.96) 3.60 (1.60) 4.00 (1.77) Always 2.03 (0.85) 3.90 (1.78) 4.37 (1.80) 5.00 (1.36) 5.57 (1.39)

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and never remembered events. With respect to the direction of the emotional content, from negative to positive, there was no effect of either experimental condition or memory status and no interaction. One way of viewing these two scales is that there was no tendency for negative or positive events to be particularly remembered, recovered, or forgotten; however, remembered events contained more emotional content than did recovered memories. For clarity of mental images, there were main effects of both experimental condition, F(1,201) 19.1834, p .001, MSE 1.854, and memory status, F(2,201) 98.631, p .001, MSE 1.854. With respect to experimental condition, memories provided by participants in the imagery condition were rated as higher in image clarity than memories provided in the control condition. For the effect of memory status, Tukey follow-up comparison indicated that always remembered events were rated as having clearer images than either recovered memories or never remembered events and that recovered memories were rated as having clearer images than never remembered events (p .005). The interaction of experimental condition and memory status was marginally signicant, F(2,201) 2.998, p .052, MSE 1.854. Most likely, this is due to the greater effect of the imagery manipulation for never remembered and recovered events than for the always remembered events (see Table 1). For condence, there was an effect of memory status, F(2,203) 182.446, p .001, MSE 2.059, no effect of condition, and no interaction. Follow-up comparisons indicated that always remembered events generated higher reports of condence than either recovered or never remembered events and that recovered memories resulted in higher reported condence than never remembered events (p .001). The general pattern of responses is consistent with the hypothesis that the recovered memories are gradually returning true memories. However, a more complete picture

is apparent when the ratings of the false memories are also considered. False Events The responses to the false event were scored as in Hyman and Billings (1995) as either clear false memory, partial false memory, no memory but trying to recover, and no memory with no effort at recovery. Clear false memories included reports of spilling the punch, consistent elaborations, and statements that the event was a memory. Partial false memories included consistent elaborations with some statements of remembering, but did not include memory of actually spilling the punch. No memory but trying to recover was when participants described an image or reported related self-knowledge, but made no clear claims to remember the event. No memory with no effort at recovery was when the participants failed to recall the event and did not describe any related self-knowledge or any image. Two independent judges rated the responses to the false events by all participants in all interviews. The two judges agreed on the classication of 82% of the responses and resolved all disagreements through discussion. The emphasis was on using the more conservative classication in instances of disagreement. As can be seen in Table 2, the number of clear false memories increased across interviews in both conditions (one individual in the imagery condition claimed a clear memory in the second interview and retracted the recollection in the third interview, returning to the no but trying classication). The actual number of partial false memories held constant, but those were not the same individuals some people moved from no but trying, through partial false memory, to clear false memory. Since there were few false memories of any sort in the control condition and no complete no responses in the imagery condition, we have grouped the no recovery and no but trying to recover responses and the partial and clear false memory responses for further analyses. Using this distinction between no

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TABLE 2

HYMAN AND PENTLAND

RESPONSE TO THE FALSE EVENT IN THE IMAGERY AND CONTROL CONDITIONS ACROSS ALL THREE INTERVIEWS Interview Response type and experimental condition Clear false memory Imagery Control Partial false memory Imagery Control No, but trying to recover Imagery Control No Imagery Control Total N Imagery Control 1 2 3

1 1 4 1 27 15 0 19

5 1 4 2 23 21 0 9

8 (25.0%) 3 (9.1%) 4 (12.5%) 1 (3.0%) 20 (62.5%) 9 (27.3%) 0 (0%) 20 (60.6%) 32 33

false memory and a false memory of some sort, we found that experimental condition was related to the creation of a false memory by the third interview, x2 (1, N 65) 5.639, p .018. Of those in the imagery condition, 37.5% (12 of 32, with the retractor counted as a no) created a false memory, while only 12.1% (4 of 33) in the control condition created a false memory (see Fig. 1). Since the participants in the imagery condition both formed and described mental images, we cannot be sure which process caused the more frequent creation of memories (in ongoing research using a different methodology we are trying to disentangle the effects of forming and talking about an image (Hyman, Gilstrap, Decker, & Wilkinson, 1996)). We also used a series of two-way ANOVAs to investigate differences in how the responses to the false events were rated based on the experimental condition and status of the false memory. In this case false memory status was simply a distinction between no false memory (including both no recovery and no but trying to recover) and a false memory (including both partial and clear false memory). The

analyses are somewhat more appropriate than with the true memories since each participant contributed only one response on each scale. We will occasionally make qualitative comparisons to the ratings of the true memories (particularly to compare false memories to recovered memories). Table 3 provides the means and standard deviations of all ratings based on experimental condition and false memory status. With respect to the reported frequency of talking and thinking about the event, there was no effect of either experimental condition or false memory status and no interaction. In general, the subjects accurately reported no previous instances of talking or thinking about the false eventon average 1.05 (SD 0.28). This compares to the average talking and think about the true events of 1.95, or once or twice per year. There was no effect of either experimental condition or false memory status on the reported emotional strength of the memory and no interaction. In general the emotional content was rated as low (overall mean was 1.68, with SD 1.26). This is much lower than the emotional strength of the always remembered true events and comparable to the emotional strength of the never remembered and recovered true memories (which were not signicantly different from one another, see Table 1). There was, however, a main effect of false memory status on the negative to positive rating of the emotion attached to the event, F(1,61) 7.57, p .008, MSE 0.577. In this case, those who created false memories rated their emotions as slightly more negative than those did not create a false memory (see Table 3). There was no effect of experimental condition and no interaction. With respect to the clarity of the mental image, there was a main effect of false memory status, F(1,61) 13.332, p .001, MSE 1.208, a tendency for a main effect of experimental condition, F(1,61) 2.871, p .095, MSE 1.208, and no interaction. Those who created false memories rated their images as clearer and those in the imagery condition

IMAGERY AND MEMORY CREATION TABLE 3 RATINGS

OF

111

FALSE EVENTS BASED

ON

EXPERIMENTAL CONDITION

AND

FALSE MEMORY STATUS

Experimental condition Control false memory status No false memory 1.03 (0.19) 1.69 (1.34) 4.03 (0.91) 1.35 (0.72) 1.32 (0.86) Some false memory 1.00 (0.00) 1.75 (1.50) 3.25 (0.96) 2.75 (1.50) 4.00 (2.45) Imagery false memory status No false memory 1.00 (0.00) 1.35 (0.81) 4.15 (0.37) 2.05 (1.35) 1.10 (0.45) Some false memory 1.17 (0.58) 2.17 (1.59) 3.58 (0.79) 3.25 (1.29) 3.00 (1.34)

Rating scales Frequency Amount of emotion Negative/positive emotion Image clarity Condence

tended to rate their images as clearer. The ratings of image clarity for those with false memories is in the range of image clarity for recovered true memories (above never remembered true events and below always remembered true events; see Tables 1 and 3). For condence, there was again a main effect of false memory status, F(1,59) 48.394, p .001, MSE 1.015, a tendency for a main effect of experimental condition, F(1,61) 3.444, p .068, MSE 1.015, and no interaction. As expected those individuals who created false memories were more condent than those who did not. Surprisingly, the imagery manipulation resulted in lower condence. It may be that directly asking individuals to form a mental image helps dene the source of the image and thus results in lower average condence compared to those not directly asked to form an image. Nonetheless, the imagery manipulation did cause more people to describe their image as a memory. Thus the imagery manipulation may encourage careful reality monitoring, but may make the task difcult for those individuals able to construct clear mental images. The condence in the false memories is similar to the condence expressed in recovered true memories (again

see Table 1 and 3). The overall pattern of ratings leads us to two conclusions. First, it will be difcult to discern any differences between recovered true memories and created false memories. Second, one reason for this difculty may be that the recovered true memories are actually creations as well. CONCLUSIONS The research that we have conducted (see also Hyman & Billings, 1995; Hyman et al., 1995) and research conducted by others (Ceci et al., 1994a, 1994b; Loftus & Coan, 1994; Loftus & Pickrell, in press; Pezdek, 1995) indicates that children and adults will create false memories of complete, emotional, and self-involving events. This research also illuminates the processes involved in memory creation. At the very least, a social context that supports memory creation is important. In addition, the creation of memories is a constructive enterprise that combines the content of suggestion with related self-knowledge. A person then engages in a difcult source monitoring process when trying to discern if the constructed memory is the product of memory or solely due to the suggestions received from others. Individual differences contribute to the

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tendency to create false memories, although the stage of the creation process inuenced (social demand, memory construction, or source monitoring failures) is unclear at this juncture. In the experiments that we and others have conducted, the social demands to remember the false event are quite highthe person is expected to remember and we directly inform the participants that we expect them to remember more in subsequent interviews. Orne (1962) showed that individuals conform to experimental demands and surely the willingness to believe that the event occurred and to attempt to recall the event is partially a response to the repeated demands. In addition, the suggestions that an event occurred are offered by powerful authority gures who are in complete agreement (parents or other family members and an experimenter). Asch (1956) showed that people are more likely to conform in the face of a unanimous majority, and recent work in the suggestibility of human memory has documented the importance of the authority of the source of the suggestions (Betz, Skowronski, & Ostrom, 1993; Ceci, Ross, & Toglia, 1987; Dodd & Bradshaw, 1980; Greene, Flynn, & Loftus, 1982). A demanding social context may not be a necessary condition for the creation of false childhood memories (individuals may place pressure to remember on themselves), but it may facilitate memory creation by encouraging individuals to engage in memory construction and perhaps by discouraging careful reality monitoring strategies (for an extension of this argument, see Lindsay and Read (1994)). In all of our studies, the suggestions regarding an event do not appear to be adopted wholesale. Rather what appears to occur is that the individual considers the suggestions in light of other self-knowledge (self-schema, personal memories, etc.), and constructs a memory that is a combination of the suggestion plus related self-knowledge. Hyman et al. (1995) and Hyman and Billings (1995) both reported that individuals who talked about related self-knowledge in the early interviews

were more likely to create a false memory by the end of the experiment. Using a similar methodology, Pezdek (1995) reported that individuals are more likely to create a false memory in response to a suggested event that is something about which they know a lot (getting lost) than an event about which they have little background knowledge (a rectal enema). She argued that without script information about a suggested event, memory construction may be impossible (see also Pezdek, 1994). Using very different methodology, Barclay and DeCooke (1988) have also found that people use self-schemata to reconstruct the past. The importance of having some background information would seem to imply that there are important limitations on the creation of false memories: A person can, perhaps, create a memory only if they have related selfknowledge. Thus, it would follow that an individual with little knowledge of sexual abuse would have difculties creating memories of abuse. Hyman et al., however, noted that how much and what type of personal knowledge is needed for memory creation is unclear. Certainly the existence of memories of alien abductions implies that personal experience with the to-be-created memory is not necessary (if we assume that the memories are not accurate). In keeping with this view, Spanos, Cross, Dickson, and DuBreuil (1993) found that the primary difference between people who claimed to have close encounters and controls without such memories was the willingness to believe in extraterrestrial life and other exotic ideas. Spanos et al. argued that this minimal belief system (a form of selfknowledge) plus an ambiguous event, such as seeing lights or having an unusual sleep disturbance, may be all that is needed for the creation of a memory of a close encounter. Further, when considering created memories of sexual abuse, self-knowledge of an abuserelated nature may be suggested rst. Many books (i.e., Bass & Davis, 1988; Fredrickson, 1992) provide readers with lists to help them identify if they might have been abused. Arguments that certain memories may be repressed

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or dissociated provide individuals with a means of explaining why apparently unusual and non-self-relevant suggestions are actually self-relevant (as a side-note, in our research, many individuals have themselves suggested repression or blocking as the reason for their memory failures). With such suggestions and memories of ambiguous actions that can be interpreted as abuse related (memories of being kissed, held, and hugged), an individual may have enough personal knowledge to support the creation of a memory of abuse. This process alters the self-concept and may open the way for the construction of more unusual memories, such as of Satanic Ritual Abuse. Thus, although the importance of related selfknowledge in memory creation may appear to argue that some sorts of memories can not be created, this is an open question. Simply because a person can create an image or some mental construct with the feel of a memory, does not, however, mean that the person will accept it as a memory. All of the participants in the imagery condition were able to create a mental image and describe that image to the interviewer. Undoubtedly, this created image was a product of the suggestion and some self-knowledgethe participants drew on their knowledge of what weddings are like in creating the image. Nonetheless, not all individuals claimed the constructed image as a memory. The participants were engaged in a task of reality or source monitoring (e.g., Johnson, Hastroudi, & Lindsay, 1993). They were trying to attribute the image to either their memory or to the suggestions from their parents via the experimenter. We have argued previously that this task is made difcult because the constructed memory includes actual self-knowledge. The imagery manipulation may make reality monitoring difcult as well, both because it provides people with a clear image and people tend to believe vivid memories (see Johnson et al., 1988; Rubin & Kozin, 1984) and because it provides them with a clear source for the image that is not memory (thus we found more people claimed false memories in the imagery

condition but they were less condent about their false memories). Repetition of interviews and suggestions may also contribute to confusion regarding the source of a memory: we see an increase in claims of remembering the image over time, and Zaragoza and Mitchell (1995) reported an increase in source monitoring errors with repeated suggestions (see also Roediger et al., this issue). Hyman and Billings (1995) found that individual differences are reliably related to the creation of false memories. At this point, there is little clear evidence concerning how individual differences contribute to memory creation (see Schooler & Loftus, 1993). Some individual may be more inuenced by social demand and thus more likely to create false memories (neither Hyman and Billings (1995) nor Black, Marts, Heise, and Allen (1995) found this when using the MarloweCrowne measure of social desirability, but this may not be the correct measure to ascertain tendency to respond to social demands in this context). Other individuals may be more willing to engage in constructive memory processeseither because of better mental imagery abilities (Hyman & Billings, 1995) or because of better memory that provides clear retention of both self-knowledge and the suggested event (Schooler & Loftus, 1995). Finally, some individuals may have different standards for evaluating the source of memory suggestions (see Lindsay and Read (1994) and Pezdek) (1994) for a consideration of memory monitoring strategies). Perhaps the Dissociative Experiences Scale that was correlated with memory creation measures something about the willingness to accept external suggestions as relevant to the self (Hyman & Billings, 1995). We see individual differences as likely contributing to each step in the memory creation process. Many people have argued about whether research such as we reported here should be generalized to the creation of false childhood memories of sexual abuse (Berliner & Williams, 1994; Lindsay & Read, 1994; Loftus, 1993; Olio, 1994; Pezdek, 1994). We have

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already weighed in on this debate by noting the similarities and differences between the research and therapy contexts that can lead to either conclusion (see Hyman et al., 1995; Hyman & Loftus, in press a, in press b). Thus we will simply restate our view that memory creation in therapy is likely if the therapy context involves demands to remember, encouragement of memory construction, and discouragement of careful reality monitoring strategies. Instead of focusing on the creation of memories in therapy, we want to end by discussing memory creation in other settings. Memory construction in response to social demands is likely a common activity. Remembering is often a social activity in which people exchange information and evaluations and come to some agreement about the past (Edwards & Middleton, 1986a, 1986b; Edwards, Potter, & Middleton, 1992; Hyman 1994). These discussions are much more likely to take place with work associates, friends, and family members than with therapists. In this sense, life is an ongoing misinformation experimentan event occurs and then a person receives additional information about the event (some of it possibly erroneous) from conversation partners. Sometimes that information will become incorporated into the persons memory of the event. From this perspective many everyday autobiographical memories will include some small errors and some will include large errors. Errors may be particularly likely after long periods of time (as would be the case for childhood events) because the memory itself will have faded, leaving gaps available for the acceptance of information from others or construction guided by the self-schema. Although the creation of false child abuse memories in therapy is clearly a horror, the construction of memories in other situations is not as clearly problematic and may sometimes be advantageous. One goal of remembering in a social context is to either initiate or strengthen social bonds (Hyman & Faries, 1992). Coming to an agreed upon version of the past may add to the strength of the social

group or delineate power structures within a group, and it is in this sense that Edwards and Middleton (1986a, 1986b; Edwards, Potter, & Middleton, 1992) have argued that truth is negotiated through discourse. Another goal of remembering is self-denition (e.g., Neisser, 1988; Neisser & Fivush, 1994). If ones memories are changed, then to some extent ones self-concept also changes. Fivush (1991, 1994) suggested that the self is constructed through memory conversations between children and their parents. Spence (1992) argued that individuals can create a narrative truth, a story of their past that allows them to move forward, that may not match the historical truth, what actually happened (see also, Bruner, 1986, 1987; Cohler, 1994). In this sense, constructing a version of the past that allows future growth can be benecial. It is important to note that Spence saw this as one goal of therapyto help individuals construct functional narrative truths. What the recent research on false childhood memories adds to our understanding of the changing self-concept is an understanding of the size of some of these changes and thus a challenge concerning what is constant about the self. William James (1890) noted that I know that I am the same person as yesterday because I remember what I experienced yesterday. Unfortunately, those memories may be someone elses suggestions that the self has adopted. To the extent that memories change over the course of a lifetime and in response to suggestion, the self may be memorys greatest illusion. REFERENCES
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