Abstract
When people encounter misleading information after they view an event, their recollection of the event is often affected (see Loftus, Miller, & Burns, 1978; Bekerian & Bowers, 1983; for examples). We refer to the change in report arising from postevent misinformation as the misinformation effect. In thinking about the impact of misinformation, it is useful to distinguish between a memory report (or what people claim to remember), and a memory trace (or what memory information is stored in the brain). Because the memory traces themselves are, obviously, never directly accessible to researchers, we must rely on memory reports to give us clues about the nature of the underlying trace.
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Loftus, E.F., Hoffman, H.G., Wagenaar, W.A. (1992). The Misinformation Effect: Transformations in Memory Induced by Postevent Information. In: Howe, M.L., Brainerd, C.J., Reyna, V.F. (eds) Development of Long-Term Retention. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-2868-4_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-2868-4_5
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