ABSTRACT
Suggestion and imagination have the power to influence one's recollections of the past. One measure that appears to be related to the construction of false memories more generally is a measure of the extent to which a person has dissociative experiences, or lapses in attention and memory. Test items present a description of an experience to subjects and ask them for the percentage of time this kind of experience happens to them. Some items deal with amnesia and dissociation. Other items concern absorption and imaginative involvement. A different way of inducing people to believe they had experiences that they did not have involves enlisting relatives to help persuade family members about a counterfactual past. Imagination can also make people believe that they have done things in the recent past that they did not in fact do. During the initial encoding session, subjects listened to a list of action statements as they were read aloud.
