ABSTRACT
Photos are powerful because people ascribe them more credibility than they often deserve. They can also make an event feel more familiar than it really is and promote vivid visual imagery, which can affect a number of common cognitive tasks. Memory researchers have known for a long time that childhood memories are prone to error. One of the earliest attempts to plant a wholly false childhood memory in adults involved a procedure in which adult subjects were given short narrative descriptions of four childhood events and were asked to remember as much as they could about each experience. Subjects in the hot-air balloon study and in follow-up experiments typically developed false memories slowly over the duration of the study. Children can develop wildly implausible false memories too with the aid of doctored photos. Further research has shown that photographs don’t have to infer a particular outcome to create havoc in memory.
