ABSTRACT
False Memories became a hot topic for cognitive psychologists to study in the 1990s. Sustained interest in false memories was spurred, at least partly, by the thousands of contested cases in which people became convinced that they had been abused as children by someone close to them. Sometimes the “new-found memories” were so unusual and unlikely (e.g., memories of years of satanic ritual abuse or repeated alien abduction) that they defied understanding. How could normal, nonpathological people come to believe so strongly that such things had happened to them? Researchers became enamored of paradigms designed to inform us about how people develop false beliefs and memories. Some paradigms involved simple false memories (e.g., remembering that certain words had been recently presented when they had not). Other paradigms involved more complex false memories (e.g., remembering that there was broken glass at an accident scene when there wasn’t any). And yet other paradigms involved very rich false memories (e.g., remembering that one was a victim of a vicious animal attack as a child).
