Cognitive Psychology; Critical Report on Abducted by Ufo: Prevalence Information Affects Young Childrens False Memories for an Implausible Event

We have such strong memories of these false things because we are mashing multiple real things together inside our heads.  An example of this is how many people remember a genie movie from the 90's called Shazaam starring a comedian named Sinbad. This movie never existed, but many have vivid memories of this movie and the plot. Reddit member EpicJourneyMan explicitly remembers viewing the movie at work at a movie rental

The study of creation of false memories has been a topic of interest since the 1930s when Bartlett (1932) conducted the first experiment on the topic. Though the results of this experiment were never replicated, they contributed greatly to research by distinguishing between reproductive and reconstructive memory (Bartlett 1932 as cited in Roediger & McDermott, 1995). Reproductive memory refers to accurate production of material from memory and is assumed to be associated with remembering simplified materials (e.g., lists). Reconstructive memory emphasizes the active process of filling in missing elements while remembering and is associated with materials rich in meaning (e.g., stories).

Imagination can also create a false memory of an occurrence that never happened. Loftus and her colleagues requested the participant to record on a scale the possibility of the forty events named occurred in their childhood. After two weeks, they were allowed to imagine some of the occurrences they had said never happened in their childhood. They were asked to rate the events again. Individuals, who participated in the imagining test, became convinced that the incident happened (Loftus 75).

Memory is one of the most critical parts of cognition. It is important because it is involved in almost every aspect of cognition including problem solving, decision making, attention, and perception. Because of this importance, people rely on one’s memory to make important decisions. The value of one’s memory in this society is so high that it is used as evidence to either save one’s life or kill one’s life during murder trials. But as many of the cognitive psychologists know, human’s memory can cause many errors. One of these errors is false memory which is either remembering events that never happened or remembering events differently from the actual event. This finding of false memory raised big interests among psychologists and

Research design can be categorized into two sections including experimental and quasi-experimental research design ((Soy, 2015). In an experimental research design, the researcher needs to assign the subjects based on random selection. The subjects are assigned to particular groups for a different level of treatment. On the other hand, the quasi-experiment design suggests a process where the researcher avoids randomization, as the subjects are not selected randomly. The random assignment facilitates the researcher to control participant differences. On the contrary, it has a threat to internal validity of a particular research study (Kafle, 2013). Moreover, experimental research design does not guarantee regarding differences among participants. The researcher needs to maintain the differences while assuming a smaller sample size for the research analysis. In some cases, the researcher may match participants across control and treatment. With the involvement of experimental research design, the researcher treats each pair of participants as one virtual participant (Robson & McCartan, 2016).

False memories are an apparent recollection of an event that did not actually occur. The reason why false memories happen are due to the fact that one's brains can only handle so much.There has been several experiment pertaining to the phenomenon, to find how it works.In the next part of the experiment the psychologist showed the participants a word list.False memories are very common and can happen to anyone. On very rare occasions false memories can be harmful to someone and the people around them.False memories are so common that they affect all of a person's memories. False memories can be made more clear by others memories or they could become more distorted. False memories have caused many wrongful convictions. A psychologist

3.     What are the advantages and disadvantages of an experimental design in an educational study?

Moreover, research also examined the effects of age on participants in regards to the onset of false memory. With materials and testing procedures that have been repeatedly found to produce higher levels of false memory, older children are more susceptible to generating false memories than younger children (Holliday, Brainerd & Reyna, 2010). This is particularly realistic in the DRM lists (Holliday, Brainerd &

The need for understanding the phenomenon of repressed memories is also very important from a legal standpoint. In recent years there has been numerous cases of people suing their parents or other authority figures for abuse that has been recalled many years after the abuse was said to have occurred. The rulings in these cases have often been controversial considering there is often not enough concrete or collaborative evidence to prove the accused to be guilty or innocent. The judge and jury are often forced to make a ruling that relies heavily on the testimonial of the accuser. This is very contentious considering there is not an accurate and reliable test to determine the validity of the accuser.

There are two prominent distortions of the episodic memory system: forgetting and the false memory effect. False memory is the propensity to report an event as part of an episodic experience that was not actually present (Holliday, Brainerd, & Reyna, 2011). Several theories give an explanation for this effect, but the most prominent one is the fuzzy trace theory,

A fundamental aspect of human memory is that the more time elapsed since an event, the fainter the memory becomes. This has been shown to be true on a relatively linear scale with the exception of our first three to four years of life (Fitzgerald, 1991). It is even common for adults not to have any memory before the age of six or seven. The absence of memory in these first years has sparked much interest as to how and why it happens. Ever since Freud (1916/1963) first popularized the phenomenon there have been many questions and few robust empirical studies. Childhood amnesia is defined as the period of life from which no events are remembered (Usher & Neisser, 1993) beginning at birth and ending at the onset of your

False memories have been the subject of many studies since Deese (1959) investigated their effects.

An Article Review of “Memory blindness: Altered memory reports lead to distortion in eyewitness memory” by Cochran et al. (2016)

Memory does not work like a video camera, smoothly recording every detail. Instead, memory is more of a constructive process. We remember the details that we find most important and relevant. Due to the reconstructive nature of memory, the assimilation of old and new information has the ability to cause vulnerable memories to become distorted. This is also known as the misinformation effect (Loftus, 1997). It is not uncommon for individuals to fill in memory gaps with what they assume they must have experienced. We not only distort memories for events that we have observed, but, we may also have false memories for events that never occurred at all. False memories are “often created by combing actual memories with suggestions received from

The article is about false memory. The researchers are trying to find out the effect of planting positive false memory in an individual. The authors of the article are; Cara Laney from University of Leicester, Erin K. Morris from University of California, Irvine, Daniel M. Bernstein from Kwantlen University College and University of Washington, Briana M. Wakefield from University of