A New Method to Implant False Autobiographical Memories: Blind Implantation

General Audience Summary A bitter controversy exists surrounding the topic of therapy-induced false memories. Because of this controversy, memory scholars have devised several ways to create false memories. The "lost-in-the-mall" paradigm has become the popular procedure to implant false autobiographical memories. Although the paradigm is highly influential, the paradigm is time consuming and requires extensive training to interview participants and score participants' reports. Therefore, we offer an elegant new and straightforward paradigm to implant false autobiographical memories. Inspired by the memory blindness literature and because of the COVID-19 pandemic, we created a new paradigm that can be fully implemented online. In this paradigm, subjects receive a list of twenty autobiographical events including a critical false event (i.e., swimming trunks falling off), and have to indicate whether they ever experienced these events. Following a 1-week interval, participants stating that they did not experience the false event receive a second survey suggesting that they actually did experience the false event and stating that they experienced several true events. Participants have to provide, before and after receiving imagination instructions, belief and recollection ratings, and event-related details. In the present study, we also told one group that the false event happened once (Single group) while the other group was suggested that the event happened repeatedly (Repeated group). Depending on the memory type (e.g., false belief or false memory), false memory implantation ranged between 9% and 30%. Furthermore, false beliefs were most likely to be elicited in the Single group while false memory rates did not statistically differ between groups. This novel paradigm can offer new insights on how false autobiographical memories can be implanted.We offer an elegant new and straightforward paradigm to implant false autobiographical memories. Participants received 20 autobiographical events including a critical false event (i.e., swimsuit falling off) and had to indicate whether they ever experienced these events. After 1 week, participants who did not experience the false event received a second survey suggesting that they actually did experience the false event. Participants had to provide belief and recollection ratings and event-related details. Also, one group of participants was told that the false event happened once (Single group) while the other group was told that the event happened repeatedly (Repeated group). Depending on the memory type (e.g., false belief or false memory), false memory implantation ranged between 9% and 30%. Furthermore, false beliefs were most likely to be elicited in the Single group. This novel paradigm can offer new insights on how false autobiographical memories can be implanted.