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This chapter focuses on the scientific study of children's false memories and how susceptibility to false memories changes with age. It begins with a sketch of some historical facts about the law's treatment of child sexual abuse and about how research findings have figured in child sexual abuse prosecutions. It then analyzes the scientific literature, summarizing what has been discovered about children's false memories and the theoretical ideas that are used to explain those findings. The chapter concludes with suggestions on ways to avoid eliciting false recollections, especially in cases where abuse has occurred.

This chapter discusses false memory research in children. With children, it is not possible to make confident predictions using opponent-processes distinctions without making assumptions about ontogenetic trends in those processes. The assumptions supported by available research are discussed, followed by predictive control of the storage, retrieval, and forgetting stages of information processing. It is shown that age changes in verbatim memory and gist memory introduce an important new consideration into predictive control: developmental interactions. When a memory task is sensitive to underlying age variability, a manipulation that is known to have specific effects on the levels of false memory exhibited by adults or adolescents may have larger, smaller, or even opposite effects on the corresponding levels of false memory in children.

This chapter explores false-memory effects that fall out as predictions from the opponent-processes ideas discussed in Chapter 3. If opponent-processes distinctions provide the correct take on false memory, then armed with those distinctions, we should be able to exercise considerable control over false memories by predicting the sorts of variables that will increase or decrease them. The variables and predicted effects considered come from laboratory studies of false memory in adults, studies that make use of materials such as word lists, picture lists, or sentence lists that present those materials under controlled conditions, and that measure false memory under controlled conditions.

This chapter explores the question of false memory in psychotherapy. To establish the dimensions of the question, it first reviews some case studies of alleged adult recovery of repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse. These include examples of the classic form of this phenomenon: recovery of repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse committed by parents or Satanic cults; and recovery of repressed memories of sexual abuse committed by religious clergy. Some general conditions of psychotherapy that would be expected to set the stage for false memory reports of life experiences are considered. The chapter then examines whether it is possible, through procedures that are analogous to techniques that are used in psychotherapy, to instill convincing memories of traumatic experiences in people who never had those experiences.

This chapter considers what the near future of the science of false memory may hold by exploring some emerging areas of experimentation. It focuses on three specific areas: mathematical models of false memory, aging effects, and cognitive neuroscience.

This chapter describes nine modern paradigms, in their approximate order of historical appearance in the literature, and sketches some false-memory effects that are identified with each. List recall, list recognition, eyewitness memory, and false identification among others are discussed. These paradigms account for the great bulk of accumulated findings about false memory. The chapter concludes with a short integrative analysis of the nine paradigms. Their key similarities and differences are noted, and the paradigms are arranged along a dimension of relative suggestiveness.

This chapter examines false-memory phenomena in adult witness interviews and in eyewitness identification of suspects. The chapter is divided into two sections. The first section contains examples of police interviews of victims, witnesses, and suspects in a typical case. It presents an overview of the centrality of police interviews in criminal investigation and the dilemmas posedt, and it ends with a discussion of the suggestive properties of such interviews as they are found in police interviewing protocols, such as the widely used Reid technique. The second section begins with an overview of the basic methods used to secure eyewitness identifications in the field, accompanied by recent statistics on the reliability of such identifications. It continues with a taxonomy of 24 factors — some of which are storage factors, retrieval factors, forgetting factors, and enduring characteristics of witnesses — whose effects on the reliability of eyewitness identifications have been established in experiments. The section concludes with two sets of research-based guidelines for eyewitness identifications, one promulgated by a leading scientific society (American Psychology and Law Society) and the other by the US Department of Justice, both aimed at reducing the incidence of false memory responses in eyewitness identification.

This chapter begins with a precis of the recent history of how the law handles child sexual abuse allegations in the United States. It then discusses research on the suggestibility of children's memory reports. The chapter concludes by considering a major way in which the results of such research have benefited the investigation and prosecution of sexual abuse crimes — namely, the development of best-practice protocols for conducting forensic interviews of child victims and witnesses.

This chapter discusses research that shows how normal everyday people can come to produce confabulations. It argues that false memories can be considered to be a subset of the phenomena of confabulation: people confidently claiming to have had certain experiences that they never had. It describes research showing that false memories are an inevitable by-product of the completely normal way that memory works. As such, virtually everyone is susceptible to memory distortion and confabulation. When people remember the past, they reconstruct it; when people reconstruct the past, they might introduce errors from both external and internal sources, and they might confuse the sources of that information. Virtually everyone is susceptible to memory distortion and regardless of the content, the pathway to false beliefs and false memories is the same.

This chapter looks at countermovement organizing, focusing on the False Memory Syndrome Foundation (FMSF). It highlights the struggles over the social construction of knowledge that came with the rise of the FMSF and its allies, and analyzing the political and cultural reasons for the movement's gains. It traces the frames used by the FMSF and analyzes the success of the frame emphasizing “memory science” and the unreliability of “recovered memories.” The chapter discusses the countermovement's tactics and its coalitions across the political spectrum, including with conservative, anti‐feminist, and progressive groups. It argues that the social construction of knowledge is an important part of social movements.

In laboratory studies of false memory development in normal populations, researchers have been studying a false memory phenomenon that we refer to as the ‘forced fabrication effect’. Unlike clinical confabulation, participants in the experiments start out fully aware that the events they have fabricated are mere inventions — they fabricate these fictitious events only because an interviewer coerces them into doing so. However, over time, some participants come to develop highly confident false memories of the fictitious events that they had been forced to fabricate knowingly at an earlier point in time. Hence, the forced fabrication effect provides a platform for understanding how, in non-impaired individuals, an accurate memory of having invented a falsehood evolves into a confidently held false memory. This chapter reviews the existing research and theory on the forced fabrication effect, with an eye toward extracting the implications of this research for understanding clinical confabulation.

This chapter describes the historical roots of false-memory research. Although the systematic study of false memory in normal subjects is a comparatively recent phenomenon, the history of psychology presents a few examples of connected programs of research on this topic. The three most comprehensive examples are discussed: Alfred Binet's career-long interest in the suggestive forms of questioning that are commonplace in the legal arena, Jean Piaget's studies of constructive memory in children, and F. C. Bartlett's studies of repeated recall of narrative text by adults.

This chapter reviews theory and evidence concerning the development of spontaneous false memories in childhood, including some recent developmental research that examines the neural correlates of true and false memory in children (eight- and twelve-year-olds). It then reviews the literature on children's implanted false memories of autobiographical events. For both sections, the developmental course of memory illusions is traced in typically developing children and then the evidence for children growing up in stressful and maltreating environments is considered. The penultimate section of the chapter examines the idea that false memories can also play a positive role in human cognition, having potentially adaptive significance in related tasks (e.g., problem solving), tasks that may be relevant to survival.

Episodic memory is prone to errors and distortions that can have important consequences for the law. This chapter considers research that has used functional neuroimaging techniques in an attempt to elucidate the nature and basis of true, false, and imaginary memories. The first section of the chapter discusses evidence showing that functional neuroimaging techniques can distinguish between true and false memories under controlled laboratory conditions. The second section focuses on a related and recently emerging line of work that compares the neural underpinnings of actual episodic memories of past experiences with imagined experiences (episodic simulation) of events that might occur in the future. The third and concluding section of the chapter discusses issues that arise when attempting to generalize results from the laboratory to everyday contexts, along with the possible implications of neuroimaging research on true, false, and imaginary memories for the legal system.

This chapter addresses the following questions: Why confabulating patients make errors when retrieving their pasts? Why is confabulation on some occasions indistinguishable from a true memory, whereas on other occasions it has such bizarre or semantically anomalous content? Is confabulation a pure memory disorder, or does the fact that it involves the patient's past, present, and future reflect a disruption of how personal temporality is experienced?

The reliability of confident eyewitness evidence is critical for the legal system, but conflicting evidence exists on the relation of confidence and accuracy in reports from memory. This chapter reviews four methods (and a fifth hybrid method) used to address this issue, and the chapter surveys evidence obtained by each method. Both positive correlations and zero correlations can be obtained between confidence and accuracy; in fact, a negative correlation between confidence and accuracy is possible in certain circumstances (when people are asked to judge events similar to the one originally viewed). Despite this wide range of possible outcomes, it is also true that confidence and accuracy are often positively related in forensically relevant studies. However, even under those conditions, high-confidence errors can and do occur. Like other types of evidence, confidence is a useful but imperfect indicator of truth. We recommend that eyewitness testimony be considered only one (fallible) indicant of guilt. The problem of high confidence errors or false memories (demonstrated in nearly all research on the topic) makes the sole use of eyewitness testimony in adjudicating guilt too risky.

This chapter explores an intriguing similarity between confabulation and delusion, namely the tendency in both for people to seek to justify their unjustifiable false memories or false beliefs when these are challenged. It begins with five examples that are very different from each other. What unites them is that all are examples of confabulation — a view that will be defended after presenting the examples.

The authors’ study is the first to reveal that survival-related information amplifies the susceptibility to suggestion-based false memories in both children and adults. So, although evidence is increasing that our memory is often better in a survival-related context, it also leads to increased flexibility, thereby creating memory illusions. Whether these memory illusions are truly adaptive or are merely simple byproducts of our memory is completely open for future research endeavors.