alse Memories False Memory An interesting phenomenon called false memory can be induced by powerful imagination of events that did not take place at all. Surprised? Let us look at one such study carried out by Garry, Manning and Loftus in and understand the features of false memory. Initially they presented before the participants of their experiments, a list of events that could have occurred in their lives.
In the first phase of this experiment, they rated the likelihood that each of these events actually took place in their lives to the best of their childhood memories. Two weeks later, they were invited again to the laboratory and were asked to imagine those events and visualise as if they actually happened to them. In particular, events which were rated low in terms of their likelihood of occurrence, were chosen for the task of visualising and imagining. This was the second phase of the experiment.
Finally, in the third phase, the experimenters pretended that they had misplaced the event likelihood ratings which they had obtained during the first phase and therefore requested the participants to respond to the list, once again. Interestingly, events which were rated low on likelihood in the first phase but were later visualised and imagined as real were now rated high. The participants reported that those events actually took place in their lives. These findings suggest that memory can be induced and implanted through imagination inflation — a finding that provides useful insights into memory processes.
Information which has been encoded and stored in the form of images leads to the development of mental models. There are many routine tasks which require mental models. For example, following a road direction, assembling a bicycle or even preparing to cook an exotic dish from instructions given in a cookery book require that spatial mental models are created from verbal descriptions. Mental models, therefore, refer to our belief about the manner in which our environment is structured and such beliefs are formed with the help of concrete images as well as verbal descriptions.