Ebbeson, E. B., & Rienick, C. B.  (1998).  Retention interval and eyewitness memory for events and personal identifying attributes.  Journal of Applied Psychology, 83, 745-762.

Lampinem, J. M., Meier, C. R., Arnal, J. D., & Leding, J. K.  (2005).  Compelling untruths: Content borrowing and vivid false memories.  Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition, 31, 954-963.

These             The researchers are analyzing the effects of content borrowing on false memories.  There were fifty-one participants who entered this study to fulfill a psychology class requirement.  On the first experiment, they were presented a 64- item recognition test that was broken down into 32 items consisiting of items on the list that participants studied, and 32 were based on control lists.  The participants were asked whether the item was new or old.  If it was old, they then were required to make a remembered judgment.  Members had to think out loud while being tape recorded while being asked questions, and remembering word lists.  They then were asked to study a list of famous celebrity names and rate them on their pleasantness based on a five point scale. They then completed the same task, but now the word lists and had to take the test the same way as the celebrity test.  They then were tested on both tests, where they also had to think out loud.  Doing this helped from more of a semantic meaning of the word.  On the second experiment, the role of delay was examined in producing content borrowed errors.  The second experiment contained forty individuals and was run exactly as the first experiment except half of them were tested 48 hr. later and half were tested that day, while thinking out loud.   Some findings were that by requiring participants to think out loud, they found that they were taking pieces of their true memories to support their false memories through content borrowing.  When presented with these words, people often forget that the lure was only thought about and not presented.  The other mechanism responsible for producing false memories was the Implicit Associative Response.  The two editing mechanisms that were found for the rejections during memory editing were recollection rejection and the distinctiveness heuristic.

                        I consider this experiment valuable because it presents an explanation for the creation of false memories.  I think that because this holds true, it allows us to look at false memories in the general population.  To incorporate this finding into its ecological validity is that when an adult claims to report a recovered memory, they might be getting confused an actual event with a false or made up one.  This memory would of course be vivid and they would therefore consider it to be true.  I think that people need to pay more careful attention at what is going on around them because developing false memories is easy and therefore memory is at risk for being inaccurate.

Leippe, M. R., Manion, A.P., & Ramanczyk, A.  (1992).  Eyewitness persuasion: How and how well do fact finders judge the accuracy of adult’s and children’s memory reports?  Journal of personality and Social Psychology, 63, 181-197.