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Biomedical subjects

E F Loftus

Publications and source records attributed to E F Loftus.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2001

Social influences on reality-monitoring decisions.

A modified Asch (1951) conformity paradigm was used to study the impact of social influence on reality-monitoring decisions about new items. Subjects studied pictures of some objects and imagined others. In a later test phase, they judged whether items had been perceived in the study phase, had been imagined, or were new. Critically, for some items, the subjects were informed of a confederate's response before rendering a judgment. Although the confederate was always correct when they responded to old items, for new items, the confederate responded perceived, imagined, or new, or did not respond (baseline). In two experiments, we show that memory for new items was influenced by an erroneous response of the confederate. Social conformity was reduced by undermining the credibility of the confederate (Experiments 1A and 1B), and the confederate's influence was evident even after there was only a 20-min delay between study and test (Experiment 2), when the subjects were 87% accurate on new baseline items. These experiments reveal the power of social influence on reality-monitoring accuracy and confidence.

Adult↗
PubMed2001

Changing beliefs about implausible autobiographical events: a little plausibility goes a long way.

Three experiments investigated the malleability of perceived plausibility and the subjective likelihood of occurrence of plausible and implausible events among participants who had no recollection of experiencing them. In Experiment 1, a plausibility-enhancing manipulation (reading accounts of the occurrence of events) combined with a personalized suggestion increased the perceived plausibility of the implausible event, as well as participants' ratings of the likelihood that they had experienced it. Plausibility and likelihood ratings were uncorrelated. Subsequent studies showed that the plausibility manipulation alone was sufficient to increase likelihood ratings but only if the accounts that participants read were set in a contemporary context. These data suggest that false autobiographical beliefs can be induced in clinical and forensic contexts even for initially implausible events.

Adult↗
PubMed2000

Accounts of the confidence-accuracy relation in recognition memory.

Confidence and accuracy, while often considered to tap the same memory representation, are often found to be only weakly correlated (e.g., Bothwell, Deffenbacher, & Brigham, 1987; Deffenbacher, 1980). There are at least two possible (nonexclusive) reasons for this weak relation. First, it may be simply due to noise of one sort or another; that is, it may come about because of both within- and between-subjects statistical variations that are partially uncorrelated for confidence measures on the one hand and accuracy measures on the other. Second, confidence and accuracy may be uncorrelated because they are based, at least in part, on different memory representations that are affected in different ways by different independent variables. We propose a general theory that is designed to encompass both of these possibilities and, within the context of this theory, we evaluate effects of four variables--degree of rehearsal, study duration, study luminance, and test luminance--in three face recognition experiments. In conjunction with our theory, the results allow us to begin to identify the circumstances under which confidence and accuracy are based on the same versus different sources of information in memory. The results demonstrate the conditions under which subjects are quite poor at monitoring their memory performance, and are used to extend cue utilization theories to the domain of face recognition.

Cognition↗
PubMed1999

Repressed memories. When are they real? How are they false?

The precise mechanisms by which such false memories are constructed awaits further research. Much is left to learn about the degree of confidence and the characteristics of false memories created in these ways. We have more to learn about the types of individuals who are particularly susceptible to these forms of suggestion, and conversely, who is resistant. As we are learning more, it is probably important to heed the cautionary tale in the data already obtained; mental health professionals, interviewers, and others need to know how much they can potentially influence participants in research, clinical, and forensic contexts and take care to avoid that influence when it might be harmful. Periodic re-reading of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, with a small substitution (change "poet" to "therapist" or to "biased interviewer"), might help keep these important ideas in mind, reminding us how hard it can sometimes be to distinguish a bush from an imagined bear: The poet's eye, in fine fanciful rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven; And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name. Such tricks hath strong imagination, that if it would but apprehend some joy, it comprehends some bringer of that joy; Or in the night, imagining some fear, How easy is a bush supposed a bear!

Adolescent↗
PubMed1999

Measuring dissociation: comparison of alternative forms of the dissociative experiences scale.

The dissociative experiences scale (DES), developed by Bernstein and Putnam (1986), is commonly used to measure dissociation in clinical populations. It is often used with nonclinical populations to assess how levels of dissociation covary with other psychometric measures. When it is used with nonclinical populations, problems arise because the resulting scores can show severe floor effects and often are highly skewed. To remedy these problems, we developed alternative ways of measuring self-reported dissociative experiences. A form of the DES in which people were required to rate how often they have each of 28 experiences compared with other people was superior in avoiding problems of floor effects and skewness. We discuss situations in which this alternative, which we call DES C, is preferred.

Adult↗
PubMed1998

How misinformation alters memories.

Over the past quarter of a century, hundreds of studies have demonstrated that misleading postevent information affects people's memories. Researchers have used several methods to try to understand this phenomenon and have also put forward different theories to account for the effect. Brainerd and Reyna's (1998, this issue) conjoint misinformation method and their fuzzy-trace theory are welcomed additions on both these fronts. We describe how their contribution fits with the other methods and theories which have been used to understand how misleading postevent information affects people's memory.

Adult↗
PubMed1998

Errors in autobiographical memory.

Memory is always constructive. People create the past based on the information that remains in memory, their general knowledge, and the social demands of the retrieval situation. Thus, memories will often contain some small errors and occasionally some large errors. In this article, we describe several different types of memory errors and consider how these errors may influence therapy.

Attitude↗
PubMed1998

How memory research can benefit from CASM.

Research on cognitive aspects of survey methodology (CASM) has helped survey researchers to understand the processes involved in responding to survey questions. The survey situation, and the methods employed by CASM researchers, can also be used to benefit cognitive psychology. In particular, the size and coverage of sample surveys, and the techniques used to examine how respondents understand survey questions, could be of much value for exploring some aspects of memory research. We give some examples where this is being done and urge others to follow suit.

Cognitive Science↗
PubMed1997

Remembering and forgetting childhood sexual abuse.

Out of a large number of university students who responded to a questionnaire about childhood sexual abuse (CSA), approximately a quarter reported that they had an experience in childhood that qualified. The majority of students who reported a CSA experience refused, elsewhere in the questionnaire, to classify themselves as 'sexually abused'. Moreover, those who claimed lack of understanding of the event at the time it occurred also reported that they thought about the event less often in the intervening years and that they conceivably would have not remembered the event even if asked directly about it. Lack of understanding at the time of encoding leads to less reported memory. These observations are discussed in terms of possible mechanisms for how genuine sexual abuse experiences might be temporarily forgotten--even for extended periods--and subsequently remembered.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1996

When dreams become reality.

In three experiments, we found that after a subtle suggestion, subjects falsely recognized words from their own dreams and thought they had been presented during the waking state. The procedure used in these studies involved three phases. Subjects studied a list of words on Day 1. On Day 2, they received a false suggestion that some words from their previously reported dreams had been presented on the list. On Day 3, they tried to recall only what had occurred on the initial list. Subjects falsely recognized their dream words at a very high rate-sometimes as often as they accurately recognized true words. They reported that they genuinely "remembered" the dream words, as opposed to simply "knowing" that they had been previously presented. These findings, which suggest that dreams can sometimes be mistaken for reality, have significant implications for the practice of psychotherapy.

Adult↗
PubMed1996

Memory distortion and false memory creation.

The 1990s have brought to public attention thousands of cases that began when a grown-up daughter or son walked into a therapist's office seeking help for depression, low self-esteem, or any of a number of life's problems. Many of these cases grew to involve memories of childhood sexual abuse recovered while in therapy--memories that did not exist, or at least were not remembered, before therapy began. Many of these cases also involved families torn violently apart. What should we make of these new-found memories? Are they true memories that were successfully revived in therapy? Are they false memories that were unwittingly planted? Are they symbolic expressions--historically false but representing some deep underlying truth? Insights from cognitive psychology may shed some light. Much of the litigation that has resulted from the emergence of "repressed memories" has been hazardous to the patients, and their families, as well as to the therapists who treat them.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1995

Misinformation revisited: new evidence on the suggestibility of memory.

In three experiments involving a total of 623 subjects, a series of slides was shown depicting a student in a college bookstore stealing a variety of items. Next, subjects read a narrative describing the event that contained some misinformation and some neutral information about several critical details. Finally, subjects took a memory test. On this test, subjects were asked to list exemplars of 20 specified categories but were instructed not to list any items that they saw in the slide sequence. Analogous to Lindsay's (1990) adaptation of Jacoby, Woloshyn, and Kelley's (1989) "logic-of-opposition" paradigm, the tendency to report suggested details was thus set in opposition to the ability to remember the source of those details. Therefore, we interpreted failure to include suggested details as exemplars as evidence that subjects believed those details had been present in the event. Analysis of subjects' responses under opposition instructions suggests that some misled subjects come to genuinely believe that they saw items that, in reality, were only suggested to them.

Adult↗
PubMed1994

Forgetting sexual trauma: what does it mean when 38% forget?

L. M. Williams (1994) has shown that many women who were sexually abused as children do not report the abuse when questioned 2 decades later. These findings do not support certain freely made claims about memory, but they do support other claims. The findings do not provide cogent support for the claim that a long stream of childhood sexual traumas is routinely banished from conscious awareness and then can be reliably recovered later. The findings do support the claim that many children can forget about a sexually abusive experience from their past. Extreme claims such as "if you were raped, you'd remember" are disproven by these findings.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1994

The possible role of source misattributions in the creation of false beliefs among preschoolers.

In this article the authors examine one possible factor in the creation of false beliefs among preschool-aged children, namely, source misattributions. The authors present the results from an ongoing program of research which suggest that source misattributions could be a mechanism underlying children's false beliefs about having experienced fictitious events. Findings from this program of research indicate that, although all children are susceptible to making source misattributions, very young children may be disproportionately vulnerable to these kinds of errors. This vulnerability leads younger preschoolers, on occasion, to claim that they remember actually experiencing events that they only thought about or were suggested by others. These results are discussed in the context of the ongoing debate over the veracity and durability of delayed reports of early memories, repressed memories, dissociative states, and the validity risks posed by therapeutic techniques that entail repeated visually guided imagery inductions.

Child, Preschool↗
PubMed1994

Pseudomemories without hypnosis.

Hypnosis is often colloquially associated with "the power of suggestion"; however, some cognitive memory researchers believe that suggestions have power even without hypnosis. A well-known phenomenon in cognitive psychology is the "misinformation effect," in which subjects who are misled about previously witnessed events often integrate that inaccurate postevent information into their accounts of the event. In the present article, we review the misinformation literature in four major rounds according to the nature of the memory distortion. The first three rounds are studies of memory suggestibility for observed events; by contrast, the fourth (and newest) one deals with personal or autobiographical memory. Considered collectively, these four rounds of research provide compelling evidence that it is not hard at all to make people truly believe they have seen or experienced something they have not-without any hypnosis at all. Finally, we discuss the tragic implications for the unquestioned acceptance of all recovered memories.

Adolescent↗