Abstract
Claims of amnesia are frequently raised in criminal and civil cases. There is a consensus in the legal community that amnesia is easily faked and practically impossible to disprove, and that many who claim to be amnesic are malingering. The present studies compared, on a variety of memory tasks, subjects instructed to simulate amnesia with subjects who had memory impairments due to brain damage. The simulators displayed patterns of performance different from those of memory-impaired subjects. These results suggest that lay-people have inaccurate beliefs about the cognitive features of amnesia, and do not distinguish among etiologically distinct amnestic disorders. Tasks that exploit lay-people's inaccurate beliefs about amnesia appear promising for the detection of malingering.
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The first author received support from a NIMH Law and Psychology Training Grant (No. MH16820). This research was also supported by grants Nos. AG05146, RR07041, MH38387, and NS16375 to the Johns Hopkins University The authors thank Steven Breckler, Michael McCloskey, Hilly Rubinsky, and Molly Treadway for their helpful comments on the manuscript. The assistance of Pat Anders in collecting the data for Study 2 is gratefully acknowledged.
Department of Psychology, Johns Hopkins University
Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
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Wiggins, E.C., Brandt, J. The detection of simulated amnesia. Law Hum Behav 12, 57–78 (1988). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01064274
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01064274