Ads Implant False Memories

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/05/ads-implant-false-memories/

by cwan • 15 years ago

104 35 15 years ago

Alex3917• 15 years ago

"It’s the difference between a 'Save' and the “Save As” function. Our memories are a 'Save As': They are files that get rewritten every time we remember them, which is why the more we remember something, the less accurate the memory becomes."

Wouldn't that be save? If you save a file it permanently alters the original, whereas 'save as' leaves the original file untouched.

antihero• 15 years ago

A better analogy would be opening a document that had partial bits missing, filling in the partial bits the best you can, and saving it.

noelchurchill• 15 years ago

Or better, the good ol' "copy of a copy" analogy.

Or you might compare it to re-compressing a jpeg over and over.

JoeAltmaier• 15 years ago

I'm suspicious of experimental method. Did the "false memory" students really not eat the popcorn? Really? Students? They didn't get their friend to sneak them some, or go in after the test and taste it? Surely they would not have revealed this 'cheat' to the interviewer a week later in any case.

hugh3• 15 years ago

Or maybe they were confused. There's no such thing as "Orville Redenbacher’s Gourmet Fresh Microwave Popcorn", but you can go down to the store and buy some "Orville Redenbacher Gourmet Popping Corn", so do the researchers really expect me to remember the difference?

nooneelse• 15 years ago

That is the thread of this that I would pull if I had a spare platoon of researchers to send into this territory. How distinctive a memory is "implantable"? As it is, I guess we will just have to wait until someone else does that work.

Speaking of... is there some good way to get notified when a paper is published which builds on some known body of work? Like can I get an email digest updating me if any of a set of papers are referenced in new papers?

Addendum: Yes... "Track Citation" on JSTOR does this (if one makes an account)... I doubt it does a pretty digest that helps me remember why I wanted to know about the new papers (what question about the original paper I was interested in having future research nail down), but it will have to do for now.

charlieflowers• 15 years ago

The way I read it, the false memory wasn't that they ate it last week ... it was that they have ever eaten it. And since the fake product name sounds so much like real product names, it sounds like they were just confused over the name. Which undermines the point of the study significantly.

Am I reading something wrong?

bena• 15 years ago

I'm also a bit wary of the results as well. Because it's a very trivial event, the recollection isn't important.

Did I eat popcorn last week? Dunno, don't care.

JonnieCache3• 15 years ago

Most memories in life are trivial though, so any findings are still useful.

klbarry3• 15 years ago

I am extremely doubtful of this result. I can't find the full paper available online, but I would like to see it.

Donald• 15 years ago

The full paper is available here: http://www.pi.edu.pk/660165.pdf

klbarry3• 15 years ago

Thank you. The paper makes a point clear that the article doesn't - they didn't ask kids if they ate the popcorn during the study, they asked if they had ever eaten that particular popcorn, which is a huge difference.

lurker14• 15 years ago

So, a better HN post title may be: Wired article implants false memories of what actually happens study.

JonnieCache3• 15 years ago

As problematic as the method in this study may turn out to be, I'm afraid their general claims about the confabulated/reconstructed nature of episodic memory are pretty valid, and have been extensively studied over the years due to their relevancy to the legal system in the area of eyewitness testimony.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Lost_in_the_m...

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Reconstructio...

And more generally:

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Eyewitness_me...

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Episodic_memo...

synnik2• 15 years ago

Marketing surely takes advantage of it, but I think this has more to do with the addictive, yet passive nature of TV, where we let it push images into our brains.

My favorite example (for which I've already given away the punchline) is the following:

Ask a random group of people to imagine that they are watching a baseball game. Give them a minute to think about it. Then ask them -- Are you in the stadium? Or watching it on TV? The amount of people who visualize TV as their first reaction can be frightening.

frozenflame• 15 years ago

I don't know that I agree with "frightening". I would guess people watch baseball games on TV much more often than they go to them, thus a question that asks about "watching a ... game" would trigger the more common of the two.

city41• 15 years ago

Your question is leading though. "Watching" heavily implies television. Being at the stadium involves much more than merely watching the game. I don't know of anyone who uses the verb watch in reference to actually going to an event.

JonnieCache3• 15 years ago

Yeah. You 'watch' the match on TV and you 'go to see' the match in the stadium.

synnik2• 15 years ago

That is where you and I disagree. I don't think the verb "watch" has any such inherent implication. Our society has given that meaning to the word in very recent times. Rather than dismiss my point, I think the modification of the meaning has proven it.

darwinGod• 15 years ago

On a related note-Read about Edward Bernays (wiki:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays) , nephew of Sigmund Freud, and his contributions/actions/in advertising..or check out this documentary- "Century of the Self" (http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/documentaries/features/century_... ), that BBC produced.

2_ghosts• 15 years ago

This is a terrific documentary, one of the most best I've ever seen. In my opinion Edward Bernays was one of the most (negatively) influential people of the 20th century.

klbarry3• 15 years ago

The man helped the NACP when it was somewhat Taboo to do so. When cigarettes were later proved to be harmful, he devoted an enormous portion of his energy and a lot of money to campaigns against it. And after all, persuasion is an incredibly important part of democracy; look back to ancient Greek, even the arguments against rhetoric were heavily rhetorical. He was not evil.

nikcub• 15 years ago

+1 for 'Century of the Self' - it is on Google Video and it is absolutely amazing. It starts slow, but stick with it, it becomes an amazing sequence of revelations and ideas.

s00pcan• 15 years ago

"Although I can’t remember much else about the night, I can vividly remember those sodas: the feel of the drink, the tang of the cola, the constant need to supress burps."

I was just telling my dad the other day that there was only one event I could remember from years of playing baseball at a particular field. It was when I went to go buy a drink from the concession stand - they only had RC cola.

forensic• 15 years ago

I'm amazed at the HN readers who are doubting this. Loftus and her colleagues demonstrated a long time ago that memory is a constructive process and it is incredibly easy to implant false memories in others.

Some of the factors that help implant a false memory:

1. If the person was distracted at the time of the memory.

2. If the false memory is plausible.

3. If there is social pressure indicating that the false memory is true.

4. If the person is reinforced in some way for recalling the false memory.

It's stupidly easy to make people remember stuff that never happened. Psychologists have known this for a long time and it's one of the most bulletproof findings in psychology.

scott_s2• 15 years ago

There's a difference between doubting the phenomena, and doubting this particular attempt at demonstrating the phenomena.

naner• 15 years ago

Sort of related:

Here[1] is an account of a psychologist who got held up at gunpoint for almost 20 minutes discovering how he misremembered many of the details he swore he knew.

1: http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2011/04/observations_afterwar...

lurkinggrue• 15 years ago

Humans use lossy compression.

shaggyfrog• 15 years ago

Lossy storage might be more accurate. Like a biological Amazon EBS.

Ads Implant False Memories

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