A larger sum of participants in the 'smashed' group declared that there was broken glass.

The responses to this question had shown that the difference between whether broken glass was recalled or not heavily depended on the verb used. The researchers then asked the participants if they had seen any broken glass, knowing that there was no broken glass in the video. The final group was not asked about the speed of the crashed cars. The second group was asked the same question as the first study, replacing 'smashed' with 'hit'. Those in the first condition were asked the same question as the first study using the verb 'smashed'. 150 participants were randomly assigned to three conditions. The second experiment also showed participants videos of a car accident, but the phrasing of the follow-up questionnaire was critical in participant responses. Instead, the word being used to describe the collision seemed to better predict the estimate in speed rather than the speed itself. If actual speed was the main factor in estimate, it could be assumed that participants would have lower estimates for lower speed collisions. Participants estimated collisions of all speeds to average between 35 mph (56 km/h) to just below 40 mph (64 km/h). Rather than 'smashed', other verbs used included 'bumped', 'collided', 'hit', or 'contacted'. The survey asked the question, 'About how fast were the cars going when they smashed into each other?' The question always asked the same thing, except the verb used to describe the collision varied. Afterwards, participants filled out a survey. In the first study, 45 participants were randomly assigned to watch different videos of a car accident, in which separate videos had shown collisions at 20 mph (32 km/h), 30 mph (48 km/h) and 40 mph (64 km/h). The experiment involved two separate studies. In 1974, Elizabeth Loftus and John Palmer conducted a study to investigate the effects of language on the development of false memory. Janet contributed to false memory through his ideas on dissociation and memory retrieval through hypnosis. Pierre Janet was a French neurologist also credited with great contributions into memory research. Some claim that his studies have been quite influential in contemporary memory research, including the research into the field of false memory.

įreud was fascinated with memory and all the ways it could be understood, used, and manipulated.

The false memory phenomenon was initially investigated by psychological pioneers Pierre Janet and Sigmund Freud. Suggestibility, activation of associated information, the incorporation of misinformation, and source misattribution have been suggested to be several mechanisms underlying a variety of types of false memory. In psychology, a false memory is a phenomenon where someone recalls something that did not actually happen or recalls it differently from the way it actually happened. For the novel by Dean Koontz, see False Memory (novel).

False memories synonym