We conducted two experiments to investigate if college students would create false memories of childhood experiences in response to misleading information and repeated interviews. In both experiments we contacted parents to obtain information about events that happened to the students during childhood. In a series of interviews we asked the students to recall the parentreported events and one experimenter-created false event. In the second experiment we varied the age at which we claimed the false event occurred. In both experiments we found that some individuals created false memories in these circumstances and in the second experiment we found no effect of age of attempted incorporation. In the second experiment we also found that those who discussed related background knowledge during the early interviews were more likely to create a false recall. Generalizations to therapy contexts are discussed.Can adults create false memories of childhood experiences in response to misleading information and the demands of an interview? Psychologists who work with people recovering from childhood abuse and trauma have contended that most memories recovered during therapy are accurate (Bass and Davis, 1988;Fredrickson, 1992;Olio, 1994). Memory psychologists, in contrast, have expressed concern that many recovered memories may be false memories (Kihlstrom, 1993;Lindsay and Read, 1994;Loftus, 1993). Thus investigation of factors that contribute to our understanding of the recovery of childhood memories is important. If adults can create false childhood memories, then therapists will need to exercise caution in their interviews with clients, and the courts may need to view memories recovered through therapy as having been contaminated by potentially biasing influences. Research on false memories may also provide information concerning the processes involved in memory creation-whether memory creation involves integration, source confusion, or some combination of both.The focus on memories of childhood experiences is an old concern in the psychoanalytic tradition (Erdelyi, 1990;Freud, 1957Freud, ,1974. Freud viewed childhood memories as an important source of information about an individual and he emphasized the interpretation of childhood memories. Freud was also interested in childhood, or Correspondence concerning this article should be directed to
Color has been incorporated in recent revisions of individually administered ability tests, yet, to date, no decisive evaluation of the effect that color has on test performance has been made. To this end, the Absurdities subtest of the Stanford-Binet, Fourth Edition (Thorndike, Hagen, & Sattler, 1986) and the Picture Completion subtest of the WISC-III (Wechsler, 1991) were administered in both a colored and a noncolored version to 80 children. The children were in either kindergarten/first grade or fifth/sixth grade and in either remedial assistance or regular educational placements. Grade differences in test performance were in the predicted direction; however, expected school placement differences were not obtained in all instances. For the Absurdities subtest, there were no differences between the colored and black and white versions; Picture Completion subtest results were complicated by several interactions. Clear student preferences existed for colored stimuli. In general, changing subtests to color appears advantageous.
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