ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews research into why some people are more prone to false memories than others, and also research comparing false memories created in the laboratory to those created outside the laboratory (e.g., autobiographical memory distortions). These two areas of inquiry are tightly coupled. Laboratory tasks are sensitive to a core set of mental capabilities that characterize each individual, and as such, performance on one task could be used to predict memory accuracy in other situations (e.g., eyewitness memory). The identification and measurement of individual differences in memory distortion has important practical applications, most notably in legal, medical, and clinical settings. The key is in determining the degree to which task performance is determined by stable individual differences in information processing, as opposed to more transient strategies or task-specific processes.
