Study finds people rewrite memories

By Dan Vergano
USA Today

Ah, memories — like the time you saw that entire car accident, or that spill in the grocery store or Bugs Bunny at Disneyland. Only you didn't.

A novel set of experiments, released Sunday in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, suggests people unconsciously tamper with their own memories, inventing causes for events they see around them to help make sense of things.

"Memory isn't a record. It's an interpretation to a large extent," says psychologist Mark Reinitz of the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Wash.

In the just-released study, he and Boston University researcher Sharon Hannigan showed slides of scenes from settings such as a grocery store or restaurant to 144 student study participants.

The slides depicted events such as dishes spilling as a meal is ordered, without showing the causes.

Questioning the students one or two days after they had viewed the scenes, the researchers found (as have earlier studies) that people "fill in the blanks" in their memories, claiming to have seen slides not originally presented to them that fit a scene's narrative, Reinitz says.

Going beyond these findings, the researchers found that people claimed confident memories of viewing unseen slides that explained events in the scenes 68 percent of the time.

For example, to explain a spill seen in the grocery store scene, many claimed to have seen a picture of someone pulling an orange from a pile of fruit.

"Surprisingly, often they don't remember the slide as an inference. Instead, they think their inference is a real memory," Reinitz says.

"They've taken this further, (by) showing people invent memories of causes," says psychologist Elizabeth Loftus of the University of Washington-Seattle.

"It certainly does have practical relevance" to court testimony of eyewitnesses of crimes or accidents, she says.

In her own research, Loftus has shown people advertisements depicting Bugs Bunny, a non-Disney character, welcoming them to Disneyland.

In an upcoming paper in Psychology and Marketing, she and Harvard's Kathryn Braun found about 35 percent claim to have shaken hands with Bugs on a past visit to the Magic Kingdom.

"Memory is malleable for a reason," Loftus says. "It helps us remember ourselves in a more positive light."