Scientists from Germany and Great Britain said that the memory of the events that allegedly happened to us can be sown and then erased in a reverse process.
Prepared by psychologists from the Universities of Hagen, Mainz and Portsmouth, the experiment demonstrated for the first time the effectiveness of techniques to “correct false memories of past events” without harming memories of what “really happened”.
Our memories can be deceptive. As it turned out several times, the passage of time and the repeated reconstruction of past events disturb their order and even change the details, as the authors of the article wrote in the magazine.PNASThis natural ‘resume’ process has never been corrected before.
Researchers from Germany and the United Kingdom suggest that knowing more about how memories are formed, identified, and reversed can have a significant impact on the work of police and courts, as recalling facts that are incorrectly remembered can lead to an incorrect judgment.
Remember something that never happened that could have dire consequences. Providing such information in the context of police questioning or court proceedings may lead to false testimony or false allegations. This is why it is so important to reduce the risk of false memories – W. explains. Press release Doctor. Hartmut Blank from Portsmouth College.
Dr. Blank explains that an international team of psychologists has “been able to” identify interviewing techniques that allow people to pull off false memories. ” For the “childhood memories” experiment, 52 participants (most of them were 20 years old) were invited.
With the help of these people’s parents, the volunteers were able to inculcate memories of events that “never happened, but in theory it could.” It was about getting lost, running away, or getting involved in a car accident, for example.
After encouraging people to strictly stick to only memories that they themselves are confident of, and ignore all others, we showed them what they remembered wrongly, or what they thought only happened. These are the technologies that, for example, criminologists can use – we are reading.
Under the guidance of psychologists, the parents of the study volunteers, such as the heroes of Christopher Nolan’s film “The Beginning,” the son of a wealthy man kidnapped, provided their children with false memories along with some real facts. In the following days, during several sessions with the psychologists, volunteers were encouraged to remember these cultivated events.
After the third session, two events became real and two were faked in most parts of their autobiographical memories. 40 percent created additional false memories to add credence to something that didn’t happen. Then the scientists set about reversing the process. They choose two strategies.
The first is to remind the volunteers that the memory of events does not necessarily have to be the result of direct participation in them, but rather must be based on narration by third parties (parents’ words) or physical evidence such as photos. Then, each person was asked to recall the sources of their memories in relation to the four cultivated events (correct or not).
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