The Visual Mandela Effect as Evidence for Shared and Specific False Memories Across People

Abstract

The Mandela effect is an Internet phenomenon describing shared and consistent false memories for specific icons in popular culture. The visual Mandela effect is a Mandela effect specific to visual icons (e.g., the Monopoly Man is falsely remembered as having a monocle) and has not yet been empirically quantified or tested. In Experiment 1 ( N = 100 adults), we demonstrated that certain images from popular iconography elicit consistent, specific false memories. In Experiment 2 ( N = 60 adults), using eye-tracking-like methods, we found no attentional or visual differences that drive this phenomenon. There is no clear difference in the natural visual experience of these images (Experiment 3), and these errors also occur spontaneously during recall (Experiment 4; N = 50 adults). These results demonstrate that there are certain images for which people consistently make the same false-memory error, despite the majority of visual experience being the canonical image.

Memory, metamemory, and false memory for features of the Apple logo

“…This finding suggests that participants may have been unaware of their disruption in memory for the Apple logo. Prior research (Blake et al, 2015;Prasad & Bainbridge, 2022) reports similar results, where participants indicate high confidence, despite low accuracy for common visual stimuli. The primary explanation for this result is the presence of a gist-based representation of common logos.…”

“…Additionally, recent research suggests that people do not store details of common and familiar logos, which results in inaccurate recognition and a Visual Mandela Effect (Prasad & Bainbridge, 2022).…”

“…The primary explanation for this result is the presence of a gist‐based representation of common logos. Participants in the current research were overwhelmingly users of Apple products (see Tables 2 and 3), and most people report high familiarity with common logos, including the Apple logo (Prasad & Bainbridge, 2022). Given that participants feel familiar with the logo and likely have a gist‐based representation of the logo that fits within a schema of the brand, they may feel confident in their memory of the logo, despite poor memory for the details.…”

“…Hence, we may stop attending to the details of a highly prevalent stimulus—like the Apple logo—unless they suddenly become relevant, and we are required to effectively use the stimulus' details for achieving a particular goal. This reliance on more gist‐based and semantic representations for everyday objects may also influence our confidence, making us believe that we have a strong representation of the stimulus stored in memory despite poor performance when probed to recognize or recollect it in a task (Brewer & Sampaio, 2006; Murphy & Castel, 2021; Prasad & Bainbridge, 2022). Thus, our memory for everyday visual information may be susceptible to interference from schema‐consistent information.…”

“…Despite massive visual long‐term memory capacity and generally high familiarity and memory confidence for everyday iconography, recognition memory for everyday objects is subject to errors (Brady et al, 2008; Misra et al, 2018; Prasad & Bainbridge, 2022). In a study of the ubiquitous Apple logo, we sought to investigate the propensity for individuals to correctly recognize the canonical version of the Apple logo amongst other competing lures (i.e., manipulated Apple logos), and whether being shown the canonical version or a lure with one feature flipped (i.e., the bite appearing on the wrong side of the apple) prior to the surprise forced choice recognition task influenced subsequent recognition memory performance.…”