False Memory Production: Can The DRM Paradigm be Used Visually?.
In the past couple of decades a very interesting topic has come into the spotlight, the existence and creation of false memories. False memories have been defined as "either remembering events that never happened, or remembering them quite differently from the way they happened" (Roediger & Mc Dermot, 1995, p.803). This topic opens many doors for research and raises questions about the reliability and susceptibility of people's memory.
One area where the possibility of false memories has been raised is in child sexual abuse cases (CSA). Now that there is evidence that memories can seem real to the individual despite being are false, caused by other factors such as suggestibility, there is a considerable debate about the reliability of people's accounts of CSA. There have been many cases where people who have claimed to be abused sexually, by parents or others, have been led to their beliefs by a therapist or other factors such as coping or defense mechanisms. For example, Kaplan and Manicavasagar have reported on three specific cases where people were falsely led to believe, by their therapist, they were sexually abused as children or as adults. This was done using leading questioning during hypnosis, posing hypothetical situations to their patients and insisting that their patients think about the abuse until they believe that it is real, or until they have a memory of the abuse (Kaplan & Manicavasagar, 2001).
The study of false memories is particularly important because these false accusations based on false memories could lead to many problems in court cases, and problems with the reliability of witnesses. It is important to understand how to question someone without leading them or eliciting a false response. Therefore, considerable research has been done with word associations, word lists, and various other paradigms to find the prevalence of false memories and the extent to which people are suggestible.