Predicting who might develop false memories is the focus of a new project by a Canada Research Chair at Kwantlen Polytechnic University (KPU).
Studying false memory and personality is a new direction for the Lifespan Cognition Lab, which is based at KPU’s Surrey and Richmond campuses and conducts research on how thinking changes and develops across the child-to-adult lifespan.
“We’re hoping to identify personality characteristics that will help us predict who will form false memories – and false memories have lots of implications,” says Dr. Daniel Bernstein, Canada Research Chair in Lifespan Cognition in KPU’s department of psychology.
“So far the literature on this isn’t very impressive. Nobody has done this from a lifespan perspective. No matter where you look across the lifespan, across any age group, the literature is messy. It doesn’t show any consistent pattern where you could say yes, this personality type will lead this person to be more prone to develop false memories.”
A false memory is a recollection that seems real but is not. An example is a person believing they closed a door, only to discover later it’s open.
Research has shown false memory occurs in all age groups, says Bernstein, noting that can lead to faulty eyewitness testimony and wrongful convictions, such as those fought by the Innocence Project. The American nonprofit organization, which works to free those wrongfully convicted, has found 64 per cent of its 239 overturned cases involved eyewitness misidentification.
“You think you saw a blue car and it happened to be a red car. You think you saw the suspect flee the scene wearing a denim jacket but it actually was a tank-top. Little details make all the difference for whether you are believed on the stand and whether somebody is convicted and whether it’s corroborated.”
Another example of a consequence of a false memory is in cases where someone believes they were abused by a family member, and may cut contact with that person later in life even though the abuse may never have occurred.
“That’s a problem. It wrenches families apart, and there are lots of legal examples of families being wrenched apart by someone forming false memories about abuse,” he says. “So, we study false memories because they’re important and consequential, and we want to know whether we can predict who is going to develop false memories.”
While examining personality and false memory is new, previous work in KPU’s Lifespan Cognition Lab has studied the consequence of false memory and led to the production of a research paper showing false memory is not one thing, but many different things.
Collaborating with Bernstein on this latest project is Dr. Kyle Matsuba, co-chair of KPU’s psychology department, along with colleagues in the U.S., New Zealand and Australia. Funding the work is an Insight Development Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.
KPU’s Lifespan Cognition Lab trains 10 to 20 researchers each year. Most are undergraduate students at KPU. Those trainees learn valuable skills, including experimental design, participant recruitment and testing, data analysis and manuscript preparation.
Lab research focuses on thinking across the lifespan, including subjects of attention and perception, memory and cognition, perspective taking, judgment and decision making.