Suggestibility

Suggestibility, in the context of memory, is the tendency for a person's recollection of an event to be influenced or altered by information, questions or suggestions encountered after the event occurred, so that the resulting memory can come to include details that were suggested rather than originally experienced. The psychologist Elizabeth Loftus conducted foundational research on the phenomenon beginning in the 1970s, including studies showing that the specific wording of questions asked after witnessing an event, such as an automobile collision, could measurably alter what participants later reported remembering. Suggestibility is one of the memory phenomena most closely studied in relation to eyewitness testimony and the creation of false memories, since it demonstrates that memory is reconstructive rather than a simple, unaltered playback of past experience.