Lawrence Patihis

Are the “Memory Wars” Over? A Scientist-Practitioner Gap in Beliefs About Repressed Memory

The “memory wars” of the 1990s refers to the controversy between some clinicians and memory scientists about the reliability of repressed memories. To investigate whether such disagreement persists, we compared various groups’ beliefs about memory and compared their current beliefs with beliefs expressed in past studies. In Study 1, we found high rates of belief in repressed memory among undergraduates. We also found that greater critical-thinking ability was associated with more skepticism about repressed memories. In Study 2, we found less belief in repressed memory among mainstream clinicians today compared with the 1990s. Groups that contained research-oriented psychologists and memory experts expressed more skepticism about the validity of repressed memories relative to other groups. Thus, a substantial gap between the memory beliefs of clinical-psychology researchers and those of practitioners persists today. These results hold implications for the potential resolution of the science-practice gap and for the dissemination of memory research in the training of mental-health professionals.

False memories in highly superior autobiographical memory individuals.

Significance In a unique memory-distortion study with people with extraordinary memory ability, individuals with highly superior autobiographical memory (HSAM) were as susceptible as controls to false memory. The findings suggest that HSAM individuals reconstruct their memories using associative grouping, as demonstrated by a word-list task, and by incorporating postevent information, as shown in misinformation tasks. The findings also suggest that the reconstructive memory mechanisms that produce memory distortions are basic and widespread in humans, and it may be unlikely that anyone is immune. The assumption that no one is immune from false memories has important implications in the legal and clinical psychology fields, where contamination of memory has had particularly important consequences in the past. The recent identification of highly superior autobiographical memory (HSAM) raised the possibility that there may be individuals who are immune to memory distortions. We measured HSAM participants’ and age- and sex-matched controls’ susceptibility to false memories using several research paradigms. HSAM participants and controls were both susceptible to false recognition of nonpresented critical lure words in an associative word-list task. In a misinformation task, HSAM participants showed higher overall false memory compared with that of controls for details in a photographic slideshow. HSAM participants were equally as likely as controls to mistakenly report they had seen nonexistent footage of a plane crash. Finding false memories in a superior-memory group suggests that malleable reconstructive mechanisms may be fundamental to episodic remembering. Paradoxically, HSAM individuals may retrieve abundant and accurate autobiographical memories using fallible reconstructive processes.

Sleep Deprivation and False Memories

Many studies have investigated factors that affect susceptibility to false memories. However, few have investigated the role of sleep deprivation in the formation of false memories, despite overwhelming evidence that sleep deprivation impairs cognitive function. We examined the relationship between self-reported sleep duration and false memories and the effect of 24 hr of total sleep deprivation on susceptibility to false memories. We found that under certain conditions, sleep deprivation can increase the risk of developing false memories. Specifically, sleep deprivation increased false memories in a misinformation task when participants were sleep deprived during event encoding, but did not have a significant effect when the deprivation occurred after event encoding. These experiments are the first to investigate the effect of sleep deprivation on susceptibility to false memories, which can have dire consequences.

Misinformation Effect in Older versus Younger Adults: A Meta-Analysis and Review

This chapter reports the results of a meta-analysis which revealed that older adults are more susceptible to memory distortion following misleading information compared with young adults. The older the older adults were, the larger the effect (compared with young adults). We recommended some interview techniques that could reduce memory distortion in older adults, such as the Cognitive Interview, source-monitoring questions, encouraging effortful thinking.Part 1: Memory for People. The Reliability of Eyewitness Identifications by the Elderly: An Evidence-based Review, S.L. Sporer, N. Martschuk. Misinformation Effect in Older versus Younger Adults: A Meta-analysis and Review, L.E. Wylie, L. Patihis, L.L. McCuller, D.Davis, E.M. Brank, E. F. Loftus, B. Bornstein. True and False Recognition of Faces by Older Persons, J. Barltett. Eyewitness Identifications: The Interaction Between Witness Age and Estimator Variables, J. Beaudry, C. Bullard. Improving the Performance of Older Witnesses on Identification Procedures, R. Wilcock, R. Bull. Part 2: Memory for Events. Aging and False Memory: Fuzzy-trace Theory and the Elderly Eyewitness, C.F.A Gomes, B.R. Cohen, A. Desai, C.J. Brainerd, V.F. Reyna. Eyewitness Memory and Metamemory in Older Adults, J. Price, M. Mueller, S.Wetmore, J. Neuschatz. Associative Memory Deficits: Implications for the Elderly Eyewitness, D.J. LaVoie, K. Fogler. Accuracy of Eyewitness Memory for Events in Young and Older Adults, A. Aizpurura, M. Migueles, E. Garcia-Bajos. Memory Trust and Distrust in Elderly Eyewitnesses: To what Extent do Older Adults Doubt their Memories?, L. Henkel. Interviewing the Elderly Eyewitness, T.A. Marche, J.L. Briere, T. L. Cordwell, R. E. Holliday. Part 3: Special Topics in Elderly Eyewitness Memory. A Credible Crime Report? Communication and Perceived Credibility of Elderly Eyewitnesses, M. Allison, C.A.E. Brimacombe. Uniting Theory to Empirical Evidence: How to Understand Memory of the Elderly Witness, A.K. Thomas, L. Gordon, J.B. Bulevich. The Older Witness in Court-An International Perspective, G.Davies, N. Robertson. Testimony by the Elderly in the Eyes of the Jury: The Impact of Juror Characteristics, A.E. Pittman, M.P. Toglia, C.T. Leone, K. Mueller-Johnson.

Unconscious Repressed Memory Is Scientifically Questionable

Brewin and Andrews’s (2014) Commentary on our article (Patihis, Ho, Tingen, Lilienfeld, & Loftus, 2014) raises several thoughtful points with which we largely agree, but presents several criticisms that we do not believe withstand careful scrutiny. We respond briefly.

Weak Evidence for Increased Motivated Forgetting of Trauma-Related Words in Dissociated or Traumatised Individuals in a Directed Forgetting Experiment

ABSTRACT Motivated forgetting is the idea that people can block out, or forget, upsetting or traumatic memories, because there is a motivation to do so. Some researchers have cited directed forgetting studies using trauma-related words as evidence for the theory of motivated forgetting of trauma. In the current article subjects used the list method directed forgetting paradigm with both trauma-related words and positive words. After one list of words was presented subjects were directed to forget the words previously learned, and they then received another list of words. Each list was a mix of positive and trauma-related words, and the lists were counterbalanced. Later, subjects recalled as many of the words as they could, including the ones they were told to forget. Based on the theory that motivated forgetting would lead to recall deficits of trauma-related material, we created eight hypotheses. High dissociators, trauma-exposed, sexual trauma-exposed, and high dissociators with trauma-exposure participants were hypothesised to show enhanced forgetting of trauma words. Results indicated only one of eight hypotheses was supported: those higher on dissociation and trauma recalled fewer trauma words in the to-be-forgotten condition, compared to those low on dissociation and trauma. These results provide weak support for differential motivated forgetting.

Individual differences and correlates of highly superior autobiographical memory

Highly superior autobiographical memory (HSAM) is a recently identified ability that has been difficult to explain with existing memory science. The present study measured HSAM participants’ and age/gender-matched controls’ on a number of behavioural measures to test three main hypotheses: imaginative absorption, emotional arousal, and sleep. HSAM participants were significantly higher than controls on the dispositions absorption and fantasy proneness. These two dispositions also were associated with a measure of HSAM ability within the hyperthymesia participants. The emotional-arousal hypothesis yielded only weak support. The sleep hypothesis was not supported in terms of quantity, but sleep quality may be a small factor worthy of further research. Other individual differences are also documented using a predominantly exploratory analysis. Speculative pathways describing how the tendencies to absorb and fantasise could lead to enhanced autobiographical memory are discussed.

Phoneme discrimination of an unrelated language: Evidence for a narrow transfer but not a broad-based bilingual advantage

This study examines monolingual and multilingual individuals’ discrimination of stop consonants in a language to which they had never been exposed: Korean. If bilingualism leads to increased flexibility in phonological categorization, we may see a broad-based bilingual advantage for phoneme discrimination. Using a Korean phoneme discrimination task, we compared 56 adults in four groups: monolingual English, bilingual Spanish, bilingual Armenian, and trilingual. Findings indicate that Spanish–English bilingual individuals scored no better than English monolinguals, and lower than Armenian–English bilingual individuals. In this case, the advantage from early childhood non-English exposure or current bilingualism was found to be specific only to languages with similar phonemic categories. This supports a narrow first/second language to third language transfer view of phoneme discrimination skills.

False memory tasks do not reliably predict other false memories.

Several laboratory techniques have been developed over the last few decades that reliably produce memory distortions. However, it is unclear whether false memory production in one experimental paradigm will predict susceptibility to false memories in other paradigms. In Experiment 1, 202 undergraduates participated in a misinformation experiment and semiautobiographical tasks involving three measures of memory distortion (suggestion, imagination, emotion). We established high internal consistency in individual differences measures and statistically significant experimental effects where we would expect them (e.g., the misinformation effect). However, false memory production in one task did not predict false memories in other paradigms. In Experiment 2, 163 adults participated in a misinformation experiment, a false memory word list task (Deese–Roediger–McDermott), and semiautobiographical false news story tasks. Again we found no consistent predictive relationships among various false memories. In both studies, no individual differences predicted memory distortion susceptibility consistently across tasks and across experiments. At this time, false memory production in a given laboratory task does not appear to adequately predict false memories in other tasks, a finding with implications for using these tasks to predict memory distortion in real world situations.

Full statistical mediation of the relationship between trauma and depressive symptoms

Owing to the potentially devastating effects of trauma-induced depression, explaining the relationship between trauma and depressive symptoms is important. In this study, we measured lifelong exposure to potentially traumatic events and depressive symptoms in 370-female undergraduates. We also measured anxiety, past negative time perspective and dissociation as potential mediators. Trauma exposure and depressive symptoms were related with a small but significant effect size (r = .16). Trauma was not associated with dissociation. We found that past negative time perspective and anxiety were full statistical mediators of this trauma-depressive symptoms relationship. These two mediators combined accounted for all of the variance in that association. Anxiety accounted for more of the variance than past negative time perspective. A proposed explanation is that trauma both affectively elevates anxiety and cognitively creates an enduring focus on the events. Chronic anxiety and a past negative time perspective may lead to depression over time. The clinical implications are possible explanations as to why some treatments work.