Abstract
Since the invention of photography we have learned to rely on photos to help us remember significant moments in our lives. We have come to believe that photographs are accurate and valuable records of events that—years down the track—we may not be able to remember. In this paper, we review recent research demonstrating that photographs can also help us to “remember” events that never really happened. We trace the development of the leading false autobiographical memory paradigm, and we then describe research on the power of both fake narrative stories and fake photographs to cultivate false memories.
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Acknowledgements
We are grateful to the Royal Society of New Zealand and the Marsden Fund for their generous support of this research under contract VUW205 to MG. DS and MPG are supported by scholarships from VUW.
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Communicated by John Sutton
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Strange, D., Gerrie, M.P. & Garry, M. A few seemingly harmless routes to a false memory. Cogn Process 6, 237–242 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-005-0009-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-005-0009-7