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ELIZABETH F. LOFTUS looks at a way that false memories can arise.
ON one of those dreaded airport layovers during which I was too nervous about arriving at my destination on time to sit and read, I wandered among the airport shop trinkets and came upon something I really wanted to buy. It was a credit-card-sized piece of plastic with a sketch of Albert Einstein on the front, and several of his pithy sayings on both sides. `Imagination is more important than knowledge' is one of Einstein's most oft-cited musings. While I might not fully agree that a balance scale with 'Imagination' on one side and 'Knowledge' on the other would tip in favour of the former, there is at least one sense in which I am prepared to put some of my money on the power of imagination. Imagination has the power to change what we believe about our past, and what we think we know about ourselves.
My own foray into this particular power of imagination began when I was immersing myself in the large collection of writings aimed at survivors of childhood abuse and their therapists. I found a number of examples of mental health professionals encouraging patients who had no memories of abuse to imagine that they had had these experiences as children. Maltz (1991) explicitly advised readers to give rein to their imagination: `Spend time imagining that you were sexually abused, without worrying about accuracy' (p.50). And, in a survey of doctoral-level psychotherapists in the US and Britain, Poole et al. (1995) found that more than a fifth reported using instructions to give free rein to the imagination as a memory recovery technique with patients who couldn't explicitly remember childhood abuse. My colleagues and I wondered aloud: `What would such imagination activity do to people who had not had the experience in the first place?'
To address this question, we pre-tested participants on how confident they were that a number of childhood events had happened to them before age 10; events such as `broke a window with your hand' (Garry et al., 1996). Later some subjects got a script that said: `Imagine that it's after school and you are playing in the house. You hear a strange noise outside,...