Elizabeth Loftus and Jacqueline Pickrell's 1995 study tested whether a wholly fabricated childhood memory could be implanted through suggestion alone. Participants received booklets describing several real childhood events supplied by family members, plus one fabricated event, getting lost in a shopping mall around age five and being rescued by an elderly stranger, and were asked to recall details of each over several days. The technique and its later extensions have drawn methodological criticism.
Facts
Disputed
Key FindingAbout twenty-five percent of the twenty-four participants came to report remembering the fabricated lost-in-the-mall event as a real childhood memory, sometimes adding invented sensory detail, demonstrating that suggestion alone can implant a false autobiographical memory. 2 That a fabricated, mundane childhood event was implanted as a memory in a quarter of participants is not disputed; what is contested is how far that result generalizes to memories of genuinely traumatic events. Ethics Standing Replication Outcome Method
Study DesignControlled Experiment (Lab or Field) 1 Participants Connections
Associated With
Conducted By
In Branch
Source Wikipedia: Lost in the Mall Technique
In the Other Atlases
Found In
Also in Geography Atlas: where this subject is found.
Source Wikipedia: Lost in the Mall Techniquetier 2
Sources
1. Lost in the mall technique (Wikipedia)
2. Wikipedia: Lost in the Mall Technique
Wikimedia FoundationMethod and Criticism
He assembled booklets containing four short narratives describing childhood events, and instructed them to try to remember as much as possible about each of the four events, and to write down those details over the course of six days.
Article text
The lost in the mall experiment has been replicated using claims by older relatives and extended with different ages of subjects.
Article text, ethics standing
In a 1999 article in the journal Ethics & Behavior, Lynn Crook and Martha Dean, psychologists who made their career in part with recovered memories, questioned Loftus's Lost in the Mall study, arguing that the methods used were unethical and the results not generalizable to real-life memories of trauma.
In Branch: Forensic Psychology, Origin and creators section
It was first developed by Elizabeth Loftus and her undergraduate student Jim Coan, as support for the thesis that it is possible to implant entirely false memories in people.
View the Source Dissenting Readings (1 dissenting reading)
Key Finding
Kathy Pezdek and other memory researchers have challenged the study's generalizability, arguing that implanting a mundane, plausible false memory (getting lost in a mall) does not establish that the same technique can implant memories of genuinely traumatic or distressing events, and cautioning against applying the finding directly to disputes over recovered memories of childhood abuse.
A dissenting reading, from Kathy PezdekWikipedia: Lost in the Mall Technique, Wikimedia Foundation
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