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Memories people no longer believe in can still affect them in helpful and harmful ways

People can come to “remember” experiences they never had, and these false memories—much like memories for real experiences—can serve a variety of helpful and harmful functions. Sometimes, though, people realize one of their memories is false, and retract their belief in it. These “retracted memories...

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Autores principales: Burnell, Ryan, Nash, Robert A., Umanath, Sharda, Garry, Maryanne
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Springer US 2022
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9365748/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35701575
http://dx.doi.org/10.3758/s13421-022-01328-9
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author Burnell, Ryan
Nash, Robert A.
Umanath, Sharda
Garry, Maryanne
author_facet Burnell, Ryan
Nash, Robert A.
Umanath, Sharda
Garry, Maryanne
author_sort Burnell, Ryan
collection PubMed
description People can come to “remember” experiences they never had, and these false memories—much like memories for real experiences—can serve a variety of helpful and harmful functions. Sometimes, though, people realize one of their memories is false, and retract their belief in it. These “retracted memories” continue to have many of the same phenomenological characteristics as their believed memories. But can they also continue to serve functions? Across four experiments, we asked subjects to rate the extent to which their retracted memories serve helpful and harmful functions and compared these functions with those served by “genuine” autobiographical memories. People rated their retracted memories as serving both helpful and harmful functions, much like their genuine memories. In addition, we found only weak relationships between people’s belief in their memories and the extent to which those memories served perceived functions. These results suggest memories can serve functions even in the absence of belief and highlight the potential for false memories to affect people’s thinking and behavior even after people have retracted them. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.3758/s13421-022-01328-9.
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spelling pubmed-93657482022-08-12 Memories people no longer believe in can still affect them in helpful and harmful ways Burnell, Ryan Nash, Robert A. Umanath, Sharda Garry, Maryanne Mem Cognit Article People can come to “remember” experiences they never had, and these false memories—much like memories for real experiences—can serve a variety of helpful and harmful functions. Sometimes, though, people realize one of their memories is false, and retract their belief in it. These “retracted memories” continue to have many of the same phenomenological characteristics as their believed memories. But can they also continue to serve functions? Across four experiments, we asked subjects to rate the extent to which their retracted memories serve helpful and harmful functions and compared these functions with those served by “genuine” autobiographical memories. People rated their retracted memories as serving both helpful and harmful functions, much like their genuine memories. In addition, we found only weak relationships between people’s belief in their memories and the extent to which those memories served perceived functions. These results suggest memories can serve functions even in the absence of belief and highlight the potential for false memories to affect people’s thinking and behavior even after people have retracted them. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.3758/s13421-022-01328-9. Springer US 2022-06-14 2022 /pmc/articles/PMC9365748/ /pubmed/35701575 http://dx.doi.org/10.3758/s13421-022-01328-9 Text en © The Author(s) 2022 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) .
spellingShingle Article
Burnell, Ryan
Nash, Robert A.
Umanath, Sharda
Garry, Maryanne
Memories people no longer believe in can still affect them in helpful and harmful ways
title Memories people no longer believe in can still affect them in helpful and harmful ways
title_full Memories people no longer believe in can still affect them in helpful and harmful ways
title_fullStr Memories people no longer believe in can still affect them in helpful and harmful ways
title_full_unstemmed Memories people no longer believe in can still affect them in helpful and harmful ways
title_short Memories people no longer believe in can still affect them in helpful and harmful ways
title_sort memories people no longer believe in can still affect them in helpful and harmful ways
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9365748/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35701575
http://dx.doi.org/10.3758/s13421-022-01328-9
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