JOURNAL OF MEMORY AND LANGUAGE

ARTICLE NO.

35, 101117 (1996)

0006

The Role of Mental Imagery in the Creation

of False Childhood Memories
IRA E. HYMAN, JR.,

AND

JOEL PENTLAND

Western Washington University

We investigated whether guided imagery instructions would increase the likelihood of false
memory creation and of remembering previously unremembered true events. In three interviews,
participants repeatedly were asked to remember several true events (based on parent reports)
and one false event (created by the experimenters). In a guided imagery condition, if participants
could not recall an event (either a true of a false event) they were asked to form a mental image
of the event and describe the image to the interviewer. In a control condition, if participants
could not recall an event they were asked to quietly think about the event for 1 min. Participants
in the imagery condition were more likely to create a false event and recover memories of
previously unavailable true events (although it was unclear whether the recovered memories
were truly recalled or created in response to the interview demands). We argue that the creation
of false childhood memories involves both memory reconstruction and errors in source monitoring. q 1996 Academic Press, Inc.

Will adults create false memories of childhood experiences in response to the demands
of an interview? In many respects this is a
question about what happens in therapy focused on memory recovery: When clients recover child abuse memories, are they retrieving previously repressed memories or are they
creating false memories? This is an applied
question because there is a large body of evidence indicating that human memory is reconstructive and thus open to error.
Since Bartlett (1932), many researchers
have documented that remembering is a reconstructive process. People do not retrieve a
memory as a whole entity, but rather construct
or create a memory using the information remaining in memory combined with other related knowledge (or schemata according to
Bartlett). Reconstruction has been demonWe thank the following individuals for their help in
data collection: Cara Benchwick, Anneliese Kraiger,
Sarah Rankin, Marla Shaffer, and Rob Winningham. We
thank Henry Roediger, Maria Zaragoza, Douglas Nelson,
and Elizabeth Loftus for their comments on an earlier
draft. Address reprint requests to Ira Hyman, Psychology
Department, Western Washington University, Bellingham, WA 98225. E-mail: hyman@henson.cc.wwu.edu.

strated in material from word lists (Roediger & McDermott, 1995), to short stories
(Bartlett, 1932), songs (Hyman & Rubin,
1990), and personal experiences (e.g. Barclay & DeCooke, 1988, Neisser, 1982). Some
of the clearest work showing that interviewers
can suggest memory errors comes from eyewitness memory research (e.g. Belli, 1989;
Lindsay, 1990; Loftus, 1979; Loftus, Donders,
Hoffman, & Schooler, 1989; Zaragoza &
Lane, 1994). In traditional eyewitness memory research, a person views an original event
and is later given information either consistent
with (control condition) or contradictory to
(misled condition) the original event. In general, researchers find that a person given misleading postevent information is more likely
to incorporate the misleading information into
their recollection of the original event than
someone given consistent information. Although the misinformation effect is easily replicated, the explanation of such memory errors
is hotly contested (Belli, 1989; Lindsay, 1990;
Loftus, 1979; Loftus, et al., 1989; McCloskey & Zaragoza, 1985; Tversky & Tuchin,
1989; Zaragoza & Lane, 1994).
Although the eyewitness memory research

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Copyright q 1996 by Academic Press, Inc.
All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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HYMAN AND PENTLAND

shows that memory is reconstructive, it may

not generalize to the possible creation of child
abuse memories in therapy (Berliner & Williams, 1994; Olio, 1994; Pezdek, 1994). In
eyewitness memory research, people change
aspects of events and the events are rarely
emotional or self-involving. In order to create
a false memory of child abuse, a person would
have to create a whole, emotional, self-involving event. Such an error is much larger than
that typically observed in memory research
and may be more difficult, if not impossible,
to introduce. For these reasons, it is important
to demonstrate that people can create false
childhood memories and to describe the factors that contribute to such memories.
In addition to the applied issues at stake,
theoretical questions also can be addressed
through research on false childhood memories. Such research may contribute to the debate on the underlying explanation of the misinformation effect. Integration, or schema theory, explanations posit that the postevent
information is stored with the original event
and erases, or overwrites, the original information (e.g., Loftus, 1979; Loftus et al.,
1989). Source confusion explanations counter
that both pieces of information are stored independently in memory. An individual may
forget one piece or simply forget the source
of the postevent information. When trying to
retrieve the original information, the postevent
information may come to mind and the person
may erroneously claim that the source was the
original event (e.g., Lindsay, 1990; Zaragoza & Lane, 1994). A primary difference between integration and source confusion explanations is that integration views claim that
memory for the original information is altered
by the postevent information while source
confusion views argue that the original information remains unchanged and possibly accessible. Recent work in eyewitness memory
indicates that both types of errors may be responsible for some errors in the typical eyewitness memory paradigm (Belli, 1989; Lindsay, 1990, 1995; Loftus et al., 1989; Tversky & Tuchin, 1989; Zaragoza & Lane, 1994).

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Would the creation of false childhood memories be better explained in terms of schematic
integration and reconstruction, or source confusion? A schematic integration approach would
emphasize other sets of knowledge activated by
the suggested information. That underlying
knowledge may be changed by the suggested
event and may cause elaborations of the suggested information. In contrast, a source confusion explanation would emphasize that a person
comes to believe that an externally suggested
event is an internally generated recollection (an
individual may also acknowledge both sources,
but this would still be an error since the event
was not an internally generated recollection, see
Zaragoza & Lane, 1994). We will argue, based
on the results of the research conducted in our
lab, that the creation of false childhood memories involves both schematic integration and reconstruction and errors in source/reality monitoring.
A second important issue raised by false
childhood memory research is the influence
that memory changes have on an individuals
self-concept. Several authors have argued that
autobiographical memories contribute to
ones sense of self (e.g., Bruner, 1986; James,
1890; Neisser, 1988). In addition, an individuals autobiography is constantly updated to fit
changing self-knowledge, changing views of
others, and different social contexts (Bruner,
1986, 1987; Cohler, 1994; Greenwald, 1980;
Neisser & Fivush, 1994; Spence, 1982). This
process of rewriting ones autobiography (or
creating narrative as opposed to historical
truth (Spence, 1982)) is often a healthy, normal process: Rewriting the past allows one to
adapt to changes with a revised personal history that opens possibilities for future activities. The addition of suggested events to ones
personal history is also a normal process.
Families often tell stories that one individual,
who previously did not remember, eventually
comes to remember. Often these adopted
memories may include errors or be wholly
erroneous (see Lindsay & Read, 1994, for interesting examples). However, how far can
this rewriting of the past be pushed? Will an

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IMAGERY AND MEMORY CREATION

individual accept as a personal memory only

events that are consistent with their current
understanding of the past or will a person also
accept events that are incongruent? Essentially
we are asking not only how malleable is ones
autobiographical memory, but also how malleable is ones self-concept. Thus we think
research on the creation of false childhood
memories and factors related to memory creation is important for both applied and theoretical reasons.
The basic methodology that we (Hyman &
Billings, 1995; Hyman, Husband, & Billings,
1995) and others (Ceci, Huffman, Smith, &
Loftus, 1994; Ceci, Loftus, Leichtman, &
Bruck, 1994; Loftus & Coan, 1994; Loftus &
Pickrell, in press; Pezdek, 1995) have followed is an adaptation of postevent misinformation research and research on memory for
early childhood experiences (e.g. Sheingold &
Tenney, 1982; Usher & Neisser, 1993). In
false memory research, participants experience multiple interviews in which they repeatedly are asked to remember both true and false
experiences. The true events are based on information provided by family members. The
false events are created by the experimenters.
The true and false events are presented to the
participants in the exact same mannerusually with an abbreviated description that
serves as a cue. The participants are asked to
remember and describe all events. They are
usually told that repeatedly thinking about and
trying to remember will lead to more complete
memory for the events. The major question
is whether participants generate a memory in
response to the false event. With this basic
methodology, however, we can also investigate if true events are recovered over repeated interviews (a form of hypermnesia, see
Erdelyi, 1990; Wheeler & Roediger, 1992).
With slight modifications in the basic design,
we can study cognitive/personality differences
related to memory creation and manipulate
factors that may contribute to memory creation.
In several studies using this basic methodology, it has now been demonstrated that pre-

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school children (Ceci, 1994a, 1994b), college

students (Hyman & Billings, 1995; Hyman et
al., 1995), and others (Loftus & Pickrell, in
press; Pezdek, 1995) will create false childhood memories. In these experimental investigations, people have created memories of being lost (Loftus & Pickrell, in press; Pezdek,
1995), of overnight visits to hospitals (Hyman
et al., 1995), of getting fingers caught in
mousetraps (Ceci, Huffman 1994a, 199b), and
of spilling punchbowls at wedding receptions
(Hyman & Billings, 1995; Hyman et al.,
1995). Between 15 and 25% of adults have
been found to create false memories in the
various studies.
Several overlapping processes are involved
in memory creation. At the very least the social demands present in the repeated interviews are important. The participants are informed by two reliable sources (the experimenter and their parents) that the event
occurred. They are also told that repeatedly
thinking about the events will help them remember more about the events (Zaragoza and
Mitchell (1995) and Roediger, Jacoby, and
McDermott (this issue) have recently shown
that the mere repetition of suggestions and
repeatedly recalling an event leads to more
errors).
Constructive memory processes also appear
to be involved. Hyman et al. (1995) found that
no participants created false memories in the
first interview. In their second experiment,
they scored whether the participants talked
about related self-knowledge in the first or
second interview and compared that to
whether they created as false memory by the
third interview (e.g., talking about whose wedding it could have been or where it would
have been if asked about spilling punch on
the parents of the bride at a wedding reception). They found that those individuals who
talked about related self-knowledge were
more likely to create false memories than
those who did not (see also Hyman & Billings,
1995). Similarly, Pezdek (1995) found that
people are more likely to create false memories for experiences about which they have

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HYMAN AND PENTLAND

schematic knowledge (getting lost) than

events for which they do not (a rectal enema).
The creation of a false memory thus involves
the combination of the suggested event with
related self-knowledge. When the person is
later asked to think about the false event again,
they construct an image or understanding of
the event that includes both the suggested details and real self-knowledge. The self-knowledge is used to fill in the gaps of the suggested
event (whose wedding, where it would have
happened, who else would have been there,
the responses of parents, etc.).
Other factors that may contribute to memory creation are individual differences in cognitive abilities and personality characteristics.
Hyman and Billings (1995) looked at several
cognitive/personality differences that may be
related to memory creation: the Dissociative
Experiences Scale (DES; Bernstein & Putnam, 1986), the Creative Imagination Scale
(CIS; Wilson & Barber, 1978), the Tellegen
Absorption Scale (TAS; Tellegen & Atkinson,
1974), and the MarloweCrowne Social Desirability Scale (SDS; Crowne & Marlowe,
1960; 1964). They found that both the DES (r
.48) and the CIS (r .36) were significantly
correlated to memory creation. The DES is a
measure of the tendency to have experiences
that disrupt the normal integration of consciousness and personality while the CIS is a
measure of both imagery vividness and hypnotizability. These individual differences
may, to a certain extent, reflect differences in
reality/source monitoring strategies. The DES
could be interpreted as a measure of individual
differences of difficulties in monitoring reality
and source. Clear images may also make reality monitoring decisions difficult because people tend to associate clearer mental images
with events remembered as opposed to imagined (Johnson, Foley, Suengas, & Raye,
1988).
In the current experiment, we have attempted to investigate the role of mental images in the creation of false childhood memories. For a variety of reasons, we chose to
manipulate mental imagery and see if it in-

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creases the tendency to create false memories.

First, we knew from the Hyman and Billings
(1995) and other research (see Schooler &
Loftus, 1993) that people with better mental
imagery abilities are more likely to accept
suggestions of remembered events and details.
In addition, Johnson et al. (1988) found that
people rated actual memories as having
clearer mental images than imagined childhood events. In recent work in our lab, Hyman
and Gilstrap (1995) found that people have
clearer mental images of events they remember than of events that they know about from
another source but do not remember. Thus,
clear mental images may contribute to a reality
monitoring decision to label a mental experience a memory as opposed to information
from other sources. Finally, guided mental imagery is a technique advocated as a memory
recovery tool (Bass & Davis, 1988; Edwards,
1990; Fredrickson, 1992; Roland, 1993), and
this provides an applied motivation for investigating imagery as well.
The basic methodology was an extension
of Hyman et al. (1995). During three interviews we asked college students about two to
five true childhood events (based on parent
reports) and one false childhood event (spilling a punch bowl on the brides parents during
a wedding reception). The participants were
divided into two groups based on how they
were treated when they failed to recall an
event. For any event they failed to recall, the
guided imagery group was asked to form a
mental image of the event and describe the
image. The control group was asked to sit and
think about the event for 1 min. We expected
that individuals in the imagery group would
be more likely to create false memories for
two reasons: (1) we ensured that they constructed an event representation for the false
event, and (2) vivid mental images lead to
difficulties in reality monitoring.
METHOD
Participants
Two hundred and twenty-six Western
Washington University students were re-

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cruited from introductory psychology class.

These students gave us permission to mail a
childhood events questionnaire to their parents. Parents returned 123 completed questionnaires by the end of the academic calendar
(50% return rate). Based on the order of return
and if the parents had provided at least two
early childhood events, the students were
called and asked to participate in a series of
interviews asking them to remember childhood events. Of the 89 we asked to participate,
81 agreed to do so, and 72 completed all three
interviews. Tape recording errors resulted in
no recordings for four students and three others revealed during debriefing that they had
talked to others about the experiment, leaving
65 participants (20 male, 45 female); 32 in
the guided imagery condition and 33 in the
control condition. There was no difference in
drop-out rates between the two groups.
Materials
A questionnaire regarding the students
early childhood experiences was mailed to the
students parents. The questionnaire contained
items that requested the parents describe
events that their son/daughter experienced
prior to age 6 (occasionally parents supplied
events from later ages). The questionnaire provided 10 categories of events within which
the parents could describe events: going to the
hospital, getting lost, a family vacation, loss
of a pet, interaction with a prominent figure,
an eventful birthday, weddings attended, a car
accident, winning a contest, and mischief with
a friend. If the parents knew about an event
in any category, they were asked to supply
information about the activities, the location,
the people involved, and their childs age at
the time.
Procedure
Upon return of parent questionnaires with
at least two event descriptions, the students
were asked to participate in three memory interviews. The interviews were scheduled 1 day
apart in 1 week (MondayWednesdayFriday or TuesdayThursdaySaturday). For

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each student the same interviewer conducted

all three interviews (there were two male and
four female interviewers). All three interviews
were tape-recorded. Each participant was
asked to describe between two and five true
events (as based on parent reports) and one
false event. The false event was: When you
were 5 you were at the wedding reception of
some friends of the family and you were running around with some other kids, when you
bumped into the table holding the punch bowl
and spilled the punch bowl on the parents of
the bride. The false event was presented in
the same fashion as the true events and was
the third event the students were asked to describe. There is a possibility that for one of
our participants this is not a false event, that
is, the person really did spill a punch bowl at
a wedding reception. In the parent questionnaire, we asked parents about weddings and
in several hundred questionnaires returned in
all our studies, we have yet to encounter a
true story of a spilled punch bowl (in addition
to the questionnaires from this study, this includes parent questionnaires in Hyman and
Billings (1995) and Hyman et al. (1995).
When the students reported for the first interview, they were told that the experiment
was investigating how well people could remember early childhood experiences. We told
the students that they would be asked about a
series of events based on information that their
parents had supplied and told them that accuracy was important. They were informed that
they would be asked about all the events in
each interview and that it was normal for people to remember more as they worked at recalling the events. The students were told that
if they experienced difficulty remembering an
event that they would be given advice to help
them remember.
For each event, the students were first given
several cues: their age at the time, the nature
of the event (i.e., a wedding), the location, the
people involved, and a few activities. The cues
for true and false events were given in general
terms so that the false event did not appear
different from the true events. If a student

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HYMAN AND PENTLAND

recalled any event (either true or false) they

were encouraged to provide detailed descriptions and generally asked several questions
about what happened and any details remembered.
When participants in the imagery condition
failed to recall either a true or a false event,
they were asked to imagine the event and told
that this would help them remember the event.
The participants then were asked to describe
the image in detail: they were asked what the
objects, people, and locations looked like, and
asked to describe how they imagined the activities occurred. The participants were required to describe their image to ensure that
they formed detailed images. We were concerned that some participants might simply
claim that they formed images unless we explicitly required the descriptions. We could
not have all participants describe consistent
aspects of their images because what they
chose to describe was partially their decisionthis was a reflection of the conversational nature of the interviews. Instead we required that all give some description of the
location and at least three aspects of the event
(the punch bowl, the parents of the bride, their
own clothing, their parents, the other kids,
etc.). Most participants described more than
three aspects. The interviewer asked about the
next event only after the image had been described in detail.
When participants in the control condition
failed to recall an event, they were required
to sit and quietly think about the event for 45
to 60 s. The interviewer told the participants
that sitting and thinking would help them remember the event. At the end of the quiet
time, the interviewer asked if anything was
remembered. If the participant answered yes,
the interviewer asked for a complete description. If the participants answered that nothing
was recalled, the interviewer moved to the
next event.
If the participant started to describe the
event after (or in response to) the imagery
or sitting/thinking, the interviewer encouraged
the participant to describe the event fully just

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as if the event had been recalled from the

beginning. At the end of the first and second
interview, the interviewer encouraged the participant to continue trying to recall the events
that were not yet remembered by either imagining the event (imagery condition) or quietly
thinking about the event (control condition).
The interviewer also reminded the participant
of the time and day for the next interview. All
participants were asked to not talk about the
events with anyone, particularly family members, as we were interested in what they could
remember on their own. During the second
interview, if a participant failed to recall an
event, they were again asked to either describe
their image of the event or to sit and think
about the event depending on condition.
At the end of the third interview and prior to
debriefing, the participants were asked several
questions about their memories for all events.
They were asked to rate how frequently they
had thought or talked about the event previously (on a 4-point scale: never, 12 times,
12 times per year, more frequently), the
emotionality of the memory (from 1 to 7: 1,
not emotional, to 7, very emotional), the direction of the experienced emotions (from 1 to
7: 1, negative, 4, neutral, to 7, positive), the
clarity of their mental image (from 1 to 7: 1,
not at all clear, to 7, perfectly clear), and their
confidence in the memory (from 1 to 7: 1, not
confident, to 7, very confident). These questions were selected based on the Johnson et
al. (1988) investigation of the differences between remembered and imagined autobiographical experiences. We wanted to ascertain
how recovered true memories and created
false memories were viewed.
The very end of the final interview included
a careful debriefing in which the deception
was revealed. The participants were told about
the purpose of the experiment and informed
that memory creation was possible, normal,
and very likely in this experimental design. If
they created a memory in response to the false
event, they were told that it was possible that
they experienced something similar to the
false event that they changed to fit this specific

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IMAGERY AND MEMORY CREATION

situation. They were encouraged to discuss

any concerns they had.
RESULTS
True Events
The 65 participants were asked to recall a
total of 210 true events based on the parent
feedback (an average of 3.23 events per participant). The tape recorded responses to the true
events were rated as recalled or not recalled
based on whether the participant provided any
clear recollection of the event. Indications of
recollections were claims by the participant
that the event was remembered, descriptions
of the information supplied as part of the cue
(such as describing a named location), or provision of additional information consistent
with but not present in the cueing information.
In general, scoring of the true recalls was
straightforward as the participants would satisfy all three criteria: claim to remember, describe the event as cued, and provide additional information. Two raters scored the recalls of 20 participants for the true events and
agreed on the classification of 96.2% of the
responses to the true events. Disputes were
resolved by discussion and the remainder were
scored by the second author.
As in previous studies (Hyman & Billings,
1995; Hyman et al., 1995), we found that recall of true events increased over the course
of the experiment (see Fig. 1). Overall, there
was no difference in the percentage of true
events recalled in the imagery and control
conditions. In large measure this is the result
of performance being near the ceilingover
75% of the true events were recalled in the
first interview regardless of condition. Nonetheless, there was a difference in the frequency
of recovering a memory of an event that was
not recalled in the first interview, x2 (1, N
47) 6.131, p .013. In the control condition, the participants eventually remembered
7 of the 24 events that were unrecalled in the
first interview (29.2%), while in the imagery
condition the participants eventually remembered 15 of the 23 events that were unrecalled

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in the first interview (65.2%). The recovered

memories can be viewed as truly remembered
in response to additional thought and effort (a
form of hypermnesia, see Erdelyi, 1990) or as
creations in response to the interview demands.
We also looked at the true events to discern
differences in how the recollections (or lack
of recollections) were rated at the end of the
third interview. A series of two-way ANOVAs
(experimental condition by memory status)
were computed. Experimental condition is
simply imagery or control. Memory status is
whether the event was never remembered in
any of the interviews, recovered between the
first and final interview (not recalled in the
first and rated as recalled in the final), or remembered in all three interviews. In these
analyses, we treated the memories (rather than
the participants) as the instances, giving us 25
memories never remembered, 22 recovered,
and 163 always remembered (not all participants answered all questions for all events and
thus the number of data points contributing to
the different analyses varied slightly). Using
the memories as the unit of analysis is somewhat inappropriate because the instances are
not independentthat is each participant contributed more than one memory. Unfortunately, we could not treat memory status as a
within-subjects variable because not all individuals supplied memories in all three categories. Nor does it make sense to only take one
memory from each participant because that
severely limits the power of the analyses. Thus
these analyses should be considered as descriptive and suggestive rather than conclusive. The means and standard deviations for
all ratings by condition and memory status are
provided in Table 1.
Neither condition nor memory status had
an effect on participants reports of how frequently they talked and thought about the
events, and there was no interaction. In general, the participants reported talking and
thinking frequencies of 1.95 (SD .83),
which translates to approximately once or
twice per year.

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FIG. 1. The percentage of true and false events recalled in first, second, and third interviews in the control
and imagery conditions.

A 2 1 3 ANOVA found no effect of experimental condition on ratings of the emotional

content of the memories, a main effect of
memory status, F(2,203) 66.129, p .001,
MSE 2.921, and no interaction. Tukey fol-

low-up comparisons indicated that memories

always remembered were rated as more emotional than recovered memories and never remembered events (p .001), and no significant difference between recovered memories

TABLE 1
RATINGS

OF

TRUE EVENTS BASED

ON

EXPERIMENTAL CONDITION

AND

MEMORY STATUS

Experimental condition
Control memory status
Rating scales
Frequency
Amount of emotion
Negative/positive
emotion
Image clarity
Confidence

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Imagery memory status

Never

Recover

Always

Never

Recover

Always

1.44
(0.63)
1.31
(0.48)
4.00
(0.37)
1.38
(0.81)
1.25
(0.78)

1.71
(0.76)
1.71
(0.95)
4.43
(1.13)
2.33
(1.03)
2.86
(1.57)

2.00
(0.81)
3.79
(1.90)
4.02
(1.92)
4.87
(1.33)
5.35
(1.53)

2.38
(0.92)
1.88
(0.99)
4.63
(1.60)
2.88
(2.17)
1.38
(0.74)

1.67
(0.82)
2.53
(1.41)
3.93
(0.96)
3.60
(1.60)
4.00
(1.77)

2.03
(0.85)
3.90
(1.78)
4.37
(1.80)
5.00
(1.36)
5.57
(1.39)

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and never remembered events. With respect

to the direction of the emotional content, from
negative to positive, there was no effect of
either experimental condition or memory status and no interaction. One way of viewing
these two scales is that there was no tendency
for negative or positive events to be particularly remembered, recovered, or forgotten;
however, remembered events contained more
emotional content than did recovered memories.
For clarity of mental images, there were
main effects of both experimental condition,
F(1,201) 19.1834, p .001, MSE 1.854,
and memory status, F(2,201) 98.631, p
.001, MSE 1.854. With respect to experimental condition, memories provided by participants in the imagery condition were rated as
higher in image clarity than memories provided in the control condition. For the effect of
memory status, Tukey follow-up comparison
indicated that always remembered events were
rated as having clearer images than either recovered memories or never remembered
events and that recovered memories were
rated as having clearer images than never remembered events (p .005). The interaction
of experimental condition and memory status
was marginally significant, F(2,201) 2.998,
p .052, MSE 1.854. Most likely, this
is due to the greater effect of the imagery
manipulation for never remembered and recovered events than for the always remembered events (see Table 1).
For confidence, there was an effect of memory status, F(2,203) 182.446, p .001,
MSE 2.059, no effect of condition, and no
interaction. Follow-up comparisons indicated
that always remembered events generated
higher reports of confidence than either recovered or never remembered events and that recovered memories resulted in higher reported
confidence than never remembered events (p
.001). The general pattern of responses is
consistent with the hypothesis that the recovered memories are gradually returning true
memories. However, a more complete picture

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is apparent when the ratings of the false memories are also considered.
False Events
The responses to the false event were scored
as in Hyman and Billings (1995) as either
clear false memory, partial false memory, no
memory but trying to recover, and no memory
with no effort at recovery. Clear false memories included reports of spilling the punch,
consistent elaborations, and statements that
the event was a memory. Partial false memories included consistent elaborations with
some statements of remembering, but did not
include memory of actually spilling the punch.
No memory but trying to recover was when
participants described an image or reported
related self-knowledge, but made no clear
claims to remember the event. No memory
with no effort at recovery was when the participants failed to recall the event and did not
describe any related self-knowledge or any
image. Two independent judges rated the responses to the false events by all participants
in all interviews. The two judges agreed on
the classification of 82% of the responses and
resolved all disagreements through discussion.
The emphasis was on using the more conservative classification in instances of disagreement.
As can be seen in Table 2, the number of
clear false memories increased across interviews in both conditions (one individual in
the imagery condition claimed a clear memory
in the second interview and retracted the recollection in the third interview, returning to the
no but trying classification). The actual number of partial false memories held constant,
but those were not the same individuals
some people moved from no but trying,
through partial false memory, to clear false
memory. Since there were few false memories
of any sort in the control condition and no
complete no responses in the imagery condition, we have grouped the no recovery and no
but trying to recover responses and the partial
and clear false memory responses for further
analyses. Using this distinction between no

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TABLE 2

RESPONSE TO THE FALSE EVENT IN THE IMAGERY AND

CONTROL CONDITIONS ACROSS ALL THREE INTERVIEWS
Interview
Response type and
experimental condition
Clear false memory
Imagery
Control
Partial false memory
Imagery
Control
No, but trying to recover
Imagery
Control
No
Imagery
Control
Total N
Imagery
Control

1
1

5
1

8 (25.0%)
3 (9.1%)

4
1

4
2

4 (12.5%)
1 (3.0%)

27
15

23
21

20 (62.5%)
9 (27.3%)

0
19

0
9

0 (0%)
20 (60.6%)
32
33

false memory and a false memory of some

sort, we found that experimental condition
was related to the creation of a false memory
by the third interview, x2 (1, N 65) 5.639,
p .018. Of those in the imagery condition,
37.5% (12 of 32, with the retractor counted
as a no) created a false memory, while only
12.1% (4 of 33) in the control condition created a false memory (see Fig. 1). Since the
participants in the imagery condition both
formed and described mental images, we cannot be sure which process caused the more
frequent creation of memories (in ongoing research using a different methodology we are
trying to disentangle the effects of forming
and talking about an image (Hyman, Gilstrap,
Decker, & Wilkinson, 1996)).
We also used a series of two-way ANOVAs
to investigate differences in how the responses
to the false events were rated based on the
experimental condition and status of the false
memory. In this case false memory status was
simply a distinction between no false memory
(including both no recovery and no but trying
to recover) and a false memory (including
both partial and clear false memory). The

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analyses are somewhat more appropriate than

with the true memories since each participant
contributed only one response on each scale.
We will occasionally make qualitative comparisons to the ratings of the true memories
(particularly to compare false memories to recovered memories). Table 3 provides the
means and standard deviations of all ratings
based on experimental condition and false
memory status.
With respect to the reported frequency of
talking and thinking about the event, there was
no effect of either experimental condition or
false memory status and no interaction. In
general, the subjects accurately reported no
previous instances of talking or thinking about
the false eventon average 1.05 (SD 0.28).
This compares to the average talking and think
about the true events of 1.95, or once or twice
per year.
There was no effect of either experimental
condition or false memory status on the reported emotional strength of the memory and
no interaction. In general the emotional content was rated as low (overall mean was 1.68,
with SD 1.26). This is much lower than the
emotional strength of the always remembered
true events and comparable to the emotional
strength of the never remembered and recovered true memories (which were not significantly different from one another, see Table
1). There was, however, a main effect of false
memory status on the negative to positive rating of the emotion attached to the event,
F(1,61) 7.57, p .008, MSE 0.577. In
this case, those who created false memories
rated their emotions as slightly more negative
than those did not create a false memory (see
Table 3). There was no effect of experimental
condition and no interaction.
With respect to the clarity of the mental
image, there was a main effect of false memory status, F(1,61) 13.332, p .001, MSE
1.208, a tendency for a main effect of experimental condition, F(1,61) 2.871, p .095,
MSE 1.208, and no interaction. Those who
created false memories rated their images as
clearer and those in the imagery condition

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TABLE 3
RATINGS

OF

FALSE EVENTS BASED

ON

EXPERIMENTAL CONDITION

AND

FALSE MEMORY STATUS

Experimental condition
Control false memory status

Rating scales
Frequency
Amount of emotion
Negative/positive emotion
Image clarity
Confidence

No false
memory

Some false
memory

No false
memory

Some false
memory

1.03
(0.19)
1.69
(1.34)
4.03
(0.91)
1.35
(0.72)
1.32
(0.86)

1.00
(0.00)
1.75
(1.50)
3.25
(0.96)
2.75
(1.50)
4.00
(2.45)

1.00
(0.00)
1.35
(0.81)
4.15
(0.37)
2.05
(1.35)
1.10
(0.45)

1.17
(0.58)
2.17
(1.59)
3.58
(0.79)
3.25
(1.29)
3.00
(1.34)

tended to rate their images as clearer. The

ratings of image clarity for those with false
memories is in the range of image clarity for
recovered true memories (above never remembered true events and below always remembered true events; see Tables 1 and 3).
For confidence, there was again a main effect of false memory status, F(1,59) 48.394,
p .001, MSE 1.015, a tendency for a main
effect of experimental condition, F(1,61)
3.444, p .068, MSE 1.015, and no interaction. As expected those individuals who created false memories were more confident than
those who did not. Surprisingly, the imagery
manipulation resulted in lower confidence. It
may be that directly asking individuals to form
a mental image helps define the source of the
image and thus results in lower average confidence compared to those not directly asked
to form an image. Nonetheless, the imagery
manipulation did cause more people to describe their image as a memory. Thus the imagery manipulation may encourage careful reality monitoring, but may make the task difficult for those individuals able to construct
clear mental images. The confidence in the
false memories is similar to the confidence
expressed in recovered true memories (again

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see Table 1 and 3). The overall pattern of

ratings leads us to two conclusions. First, it
will be difficult to discern any differences between recovered true memories and created
false memories. Second, one reason for this
difficulty may be that the recovered true memories are actually creations as well.
CONCLUSIONS
The research that we have conducted (see
also Hyman & Billings, 1995; Hyman et al.,
1995) and research conducted by others (Ceci
et al., 1994a, 1994b; Loftus & Coan, 1994;
Loftus & Pickrell, in press; Pezdek, 1995) indicates that children and adults will create
false memories of complete, emotional, and
self-involving events. This research also illuminates the processes involved in memory
creation. At the very least, a social context
that supports memory creation is important.
In addition, the creation of memories is a constructive enterprise that combines the content
of suggestion with related self-knowledge. A
person then engages in a difficult source monitoring process when trying to discern if the
constructed memory is the product of memory
or solely due to the suggestions received from
others. Individual differences contribute to the

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tendency to create false memories, although

the stage of the creation process influenced
(social demand, memory construction, or
source monitoring failures) is unclear at this
juncture.
In the experiments that we and others have
conducted, the social demands to remember
the false event are quite highthe person is
expected to remember and we directly inform
the participants that we expect them to remember more in subsequent interviews. Orne
(1962) showed that individuals conform to experimental demands and surely the willingness to believe that the event occurred and to
attempt to recall the event is partially a response to the repeated demands. In addition,
the suggestions that an event occurred are offered by powerful authority figures who are in
complete agreement (parents or other family
members and an experimenter). Asch (1956)
showed that people are more likely to conform
in the face of a unanimous majority, and recent work in the suggestibility of human memory has documented the importance of the authority of the source of the suggestions (Betz,
Skowronski, & Ostrom, 1993; Ceci, Ross, &
Toglia, 1987; Dodd & Bradshaw, 1980;
Greene, Flynn, & Loftus, 1982). A demanding
social context may not be a necessary condition for the creation of false childhood memories (individuals may place pressure to remember on themselves), but it may facilitate
memory creation by encouraging individuals
to engage in memory construction and perhaps
by discouraging careful reality monitoring
strategies (for an extension of this argument,
see Lindsay and Read (1994)).
In all of our studies, the suggestions regarding an event do not appear to be adopted
wholesale. Rather what appears to occur is
that the individual considers the suggestions
in light of other self-knowledge (self-schema,
personal memories, etc.), and constructs a
memory that is a combination of the suggestion plus related self-knowledge. Hyman et al.
(1995) and Hyman and Billings (1995) both
reported that individuals who talked about related self-knowledge in the early interviews

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were more likely to create a false memory by

the end of the experiment. Using a similar
methodology, Pezdek (1995) reported that individuals are more likely to create a false
memory in response to a suggested event that
is something about which they know a lot (getting lost) than an event about which they have
little background knowledge (a rectal enema).
She argued that without script information
about a suggested event, memory construction
may be impossible (see also Pezdek, 1994).
Using very different methodology, Barclay
and DeCooke (1988) have also found that people use self-schemata to reconstruct the past.
The importance of having some background
information would seem to imply that there
are important limitations on the creation of
false memories: A person can, perhaps, create
a memory only if they have related selfknowledge. Thus, it would follow that an individual with little knowledge of sexual abuse
would have difficulties creating memories of
abuse. Hyman et al., however, noted that how
much and what type of personal knowledge
is needed for memory creation is unclear. Certainly the existence of memories of alien abductions implies that personal experience with
the to-be-created memory is not necessary (if
we assume that the memories are not accurate). In keeping with this view, Spanos,
Cross, Dickson, and DuBreuil (1993) found
that the primary difference between people
who claimed to have close encounters and
controls without such memories was the willingness to believe in extraterrestrial life and
other exotic ideas. Spanos et al. argued that
this minimal belief system (a form of selfknowledge) plus an ambiguous event, such
as seeing lights or having an unusual sleep
disturbance, may be all that is needed for the
creation of a memory of a close encounter.
Further, when considering created memories
of sexual abuse, self-knowledge of an abuserelated nature may be suggested first. Many
books (i.e., Bass & Davis, 1988; Fredrickson,
1992) provide readers with lists to help them
identify if they might have been abused. Arguments that certain memories may be repressed

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or dissociated provide individuals with a

means of explaining why apparently unusual
and non-self-relevant suggestions are actually
self-relevant (as a side-note, in our research,
many individuals have themselves suggested
repression or blocking as the reason for their
memory failures). With such suggestions and
memories of ambiguous actions that can be
interpreted as abuse related (memories of being kissed, held, and hugged), an individual
may have enough personal knowledge to support the creation of a memory of abuse. This
process alters the self-concept and may open
the way for the construction of more unusual
memories, such as of Satanic Ritual Abuse.
Thus, although the importance of related selfknowledge in memory creation may appear to
argue that some sorts of memories can not be
created, this is an open question.
Simply because a person can create an image or some mental construct with the feel of
a memory, does not, however, mean that the
person will accept it as a memory. All of the
participants in the imagery condition were
able to create a mental image and describe
that image to the interviewer. Undoubtedly,
this created image was a product of the suggestion and some self-knowledgethe participants drew on their knowledge of what
weddings are like in creating the image. Nonetheless, not all individuals claimed the constructed image as a memory. The participants
were engaged in a task of reality or source
monitoring (e.g., Johnson, Hastroudi, & Lindsay, 1993). They were trying to attribute the
image to either their memory or to the suggestions from their parents via the experimenter.
We have argued previously that this task is
made difficult because the constructed memory includes actual self-knowledge. The imagery manipulation may make reality monitoring
difficult as well, both because it provides people with a clear image and people tend to believe vivid memories (see Johnson et al.,
1988; Rubin & Kozin, 1984) and because it
provides them with a clear source for the image that is not memory (thus we found more
people claimed false memories in the imagery

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condition but they were less confident about

their false memories). Repetition of interviews
and suggestions may also contribute to confusion regarding the source of a memory: we
see an increase in claims of remembering the
image over time, and Zaragoza and Mitchell
(1995) reported an increase in source monitoring errors with repeated suggestions (see also
Roediger et al., this issue).
Hyman and Billings (1995) found that individual differences are reliably related to the
creation of false memories. At this point, there
is little clear evidence concerning how individual differences contribute to memory creation (see Schooler & Loftus, 1993). Some
individual may be more influenced by social
demand and thus more likely to create false
memories (neither Hyman and Billings (1995)
nor Black, Marts, Heise, and Allen (1995)
found this when using the MarloweCrowne
measure of social desirability, but this may not
be the correct measure to ascertain tendency to
respond to social demands in this context).
Other individuals may be more willing to engage in constructive memory processeseither because of better mental imagery abilities
(Hyman & Billings, 1995) or because of better
memory that provides clear retention of both
self-knowledge and the suggested event
(Schooler & Loftus, 1995). Finally, some individuals may have different standards for evaluating the source of memory suggestions (see
Lindsay and Read (1994) and Pezdek) (1994)
for a consideration of memory monitoring
strategies). Perhaps the Dissociative Experiences Scale that was correlated with memory
creation measures something about the willingness to accept external suggestions as relevant to the self (Hyman & Billings, 1995).
We see individual differences as likely contributing to each step in the memory creation
process.
Many people have argued about whether
research such as we reported here should be
generalized to the creation of false childhood
memories of sexual abuse (Berliner & Williams, 1994; Lindsay & Read, 1994; Loftus,
1993; Olio, 1994; Pezdek, 1994). We have

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already weighed in on this debate by noting

the similarities and differences between the
research and therapy contexts that can lead
to either conclusion (see Hyman et al., 1995;
Hyman & Loftus, in press a, in press b). Thus
we will simply restate our view that memory
creation in therapy is likely if the therapy context involves demands to remember, encouragement of memory construction, and discouragement of careful reality monitoring
strategies.
Instead of focusing on the creation of memories in therapy, we want to end by discussing
memory creation in other settings. Memory
construction in response to social demands is
likely a common activity. Remembering is often a social activity in which people exchange
information and evaluations and come to some
agreement about the past (Edwards & Middleton, 1986a, 1986b; Edwards, Potter, & Middleton, 1992; Hyman 1994). These discussions are much more likely to take place with
work associates, friends, and family members
than with therapists. In this sense, life is
an ongoing misinformation experimentan
event occurs and then a person receives additional information about the event (some of it
possibly erroneous) from conversation partners. Sometimes that information will become
incorporated into the persons memory of the
event. From this perspective many everyday
autobiographical memories will include some
small errors and some will include large errors. Errors may be particularly likely after
long periods of time (as would be the case for
childhood events) because the memory itself
will have faded, leaving gaps available for the
acceptance of information from others or construction guided by the self-schema.
Although the creation of false child abuse
memories in therapy is clearly a horror, the
construction of memories in other situations
is not as clearly problematic and may sometimes be advantageous. One goal of remembering in a social context is to either initiate
or strengthen social bonds (Hyman & Faries,
1992). Coming to an agreed upon version of
the past may add to the strength of the social

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group or delineate power structures within a

group, and it is in this sense that Edwards and
Middleton (1986a, 1986b; Edwards, Potter, &
Middleton, 1992) have argued that truth is negotiated through discourse. Another goal of
remembering is self-definition (e.g., Neisser,
1988; Neisser & Fivush, 1994). If ones memories are changed, then to some extent ones
self-concept also changes. Fivush (1991,
1994) suggested that the self is constructed
through memory conversations between children and their parents. Spence (1992) argued
that individuals can create a narrative truth, a
story of their past that allows them to move
forward, that may not match the historical
truth, what actually happened (see also,
Bruner, 1986, 1987; Cohler, 1994). In this
sense, constructing a version of the past that
allows future growth can be beneficial. It is
important to note that Spence saw this as one
goal of therapyto help individuals construct
functional narrative truths.
What the recent research on false childhood
memories adds to our understanding of the
changing self-concept is an understanding of
the size of some of these changes and thus a
challenge concerning what is constant about
the self. William James (1890) noted that I
know that I am the same person as yesterday
because I remember what I experienced yesterday. Unfortunately, those memories may be
someone elses suggestions that the self has
adopted. To the extent that memories change
over the course of a lifetime and in response to
suggestion, the self may be memorys greatest
illusion.
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