Indeed, participants often elaborated on the original suggestion (e.g., the plane was already burning when it crashed). Although there was no film of the crash, there was considerable media coverage of the aftermath. ( 8) led participants to believe they had seen the moment an El Al Boeing 747 crashed into an apartment building, killing 43 people. ( 11) convinced people that they had witnessed a non-existent wounded animal in the film footage of the Moscow apartment bombings.
One line of research examines the impact of an external source of suggestion, such as suggestive questioning, on peoples’ memories for surprising, traumatic, and public events.
Several lines of converging evidence now document that people are susceptible to memory distortion for experiences of trauma, regardless of whether that trauma is a single event (such as a motor vehicle accident) or a sustained stressful experience that might involve multiple trauma types (such as military deployment). Critically, over time, those non-experienced thoughts and images may become just as familiar as those that were experienced, increasing the likelihood of source monitoring errors ( 3, 4). In either case, people may inadvertently generate additional imagery relating to those traces that fits with the experienced event. Sometimes, those thoughts and images will reflect genuinely experienced aspects of the event sometimes, however, they may be memory traces of similar events witnessed in the news or entertainment media. In addition, traumatic experiences are also frequently rehearsed in unintentional ways via intrusive images, thoughts, and memories the “re-experiencing symptoms” typically associated with PTSD. Each rehearsal opportunity comes with the potential for the inadvertent suggestion of misleading details. Many of those factors are an issue for traumatic experiences.įor example, traumatic events are highly likely to be rehearsed extensively in an intentional manner: victims will often make a statement to police, be exposed to media footage, and engage in conversations with other friends, family, doctors, or therapists ( 6). A significant body of research has investigated the factors that make source monitoring more or less difficult, and thus source monitoring errors more or less likely to occur ( 3, 4). For example, event details that have been repeatedly or vividly imagined can come to mind more easily over time, and – if there is no trace of the effort that went into imagining those details – people can easily mistake the accompanying sense of familiarity for the familiarity that we know accompanies genuine recollection ( 5). However, sometimes those heuristics fail us. Generally this approach is an appropriate use of our capacity-limited cognitive resources and we employ simple heuristics to judge the origins of a particular detail or entire memory. Put simply, the SMF states that memory distortion occurs because we do not store our memories with a label specifying the origins of each individual detail. In this review, we provide an overview of the source monitoring framework, the evidence for traumatic memory distortion, and the role that we propose source monitoring errors, particularly imagery-based errors, play in promoting traumatic memory distortion.įirst, let us briefly outline the tenets of the SMF ( 3, 4). Put another way, we suspect the mechanism underlying memory amplification is a failure in people’s source monitoring that ultimately results in memory distortion ( 3, 4). Specifically, we suspect people confuse the information generated after a traumatic event – both intentionally, for example, via conversation with others, and unintentionally, for example, via intrusive imagery – with what really occurred during the event. Our research program focuses on the mechanism by which memory amplification occurs. Importantly, memory distortion for traumatic events appears to follow a particular pattern: people tend to remember more trauma than they experienced, a phenomenon referred to as “memory amplification.” Unfortunately, memory amplification carries real consequences: the more amplification people demonstrate, the more likely they are to report the “re-experiencing” symptoms associated with PTSD, such as intrusive thoughts and images. People’s memories for traumatic events are – like their memories for more mundane events – easily distorted. Memory Distortion for Traumatic Events: The Role of Mental Imagery
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