Lost in the mall technique

The "Lost in the Mall" technique is a controversial procedure that proponents believe can be used to create false memories. The technique was first developed by psychologist Elizabeth Loftus in an effort to explain how normal people can claim to have recovered memories of improbable experiences. Loftus and her student Jacqueline Pickrell performed an experiment in which they gave participants short narratives, all supposedly provided by family members, describing childhood events, and asked them to recall the events. Unbeknownst to the participants, however, one of the narratives was false. It told of the person, as a child of 5 or 6, being lost in a shopping mall for an extended period of time before finally being rescued by an elderly person and reunited with his or her family. In the study, nearly 25% of the small sample of participants reported to be able to remember this event, even though it never actually occurred. Many people were able to provide embellishing details that were not supplied by the investigators. Loftus interpreted this to mean that the act of imagining the events led to the creation of false memories.

Criticisms of methodology and conclusions

Several studies and authors have found significant flaws in the Lost in the Mall study. A similar study by Pzedek in 1995 found that while researchers were able to duplicate the lost in the mall results with 15% of their subjects, none of the study participants accepted an erroneous memory that they had received a painful enema as a child. [cite journal |last=Pezdek |first=K |coauthors=Hodge, D. |year=1999 |month=July-August |title= Planting false childhood memories: The role of event plausibility |journal= Child Development |volume=70 |issue=4 |pages=887–895 |url= http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0009-3920%28199907%2F08%2970%3A4%3C887%3APFCMIC%3E2.0.CO%3B2-G&size=LARGE&origin=JSTOR-enlargePage |accessdate= 2008-01-30 |quote= This experiment tested and supported the hypothesis that events will be suggestively planted in children's memory to the degree that the suggested event is plausible and script-relevant knowledge exists in memory. |doi= 10.1111/1467-8624.00064] K. Pezdek, Planting False Childhood Memories: When Does It Occur and When Does It Not? paper presented at the 36th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomics Society (Nov. 10-12, 1995) cited in Murphy, Wendy J. (1997)." [http://fmsf.com/murphy.shtml Debunking "false memory" myths in sexual abuse cases] ."Trial: Journal of the Association of Trial Lawyers of America, November, 1997. Retrieved June 05, 2008] Crook states that the Lost in a Shopping Mall study’s application to therapy situations appears to be “limited to a narrowly defined and perhaps even unlikely situation” and states that the study’s “internal scientific methodological errors cast doubt on the validity of the claims” of the study.cite journal |last=Crook |first=L. |year=1999 |title=Lost in a Shopping Mall--A Breach of Professional Ethics. |journal=Ethics & Behavior. |volume=9 |issue=1 |pages=39–50 |url=http://users.owt.com/crook/memory/ |accessdate= 2008-01-18 |quote=An analysis of the mall study shows that beyond the external misrepresentations, internal scientific methodological errors cast doubt on the validity of the claims that have been attributed to the mall study within scholarly and legal arenas. The minimal involvement——or, in some cases, negative impact——of collegial consultation, academic supervision, and peer review throughout the evolution of the mall study are reviewed. |doi=10.1207/s15327019eb0901_3] [http://users.owt.com/crook/memory/] Crook also states that it has been demonstrated that the “methods, data, and assumptions in the mall study have not been subjected to rigorous scientific scrutiny” yet its results have been reported to the media to support the claim that “therapists can implant false memories of childhood trauma.” [http://users.owt.com/crook/memory/] Pope also questions the study. He questions the analogy of a memory of being lost in the mall as being equivalent to that of child rape. He also talks about the problem of confounding variables in the study. If an older family member claims to have seen the “false” memory, can a therapist make the same claim? And should this research be applied to “false” memories in therapy? [cite journal |last=Pope |first=K. |year=1996 |title=Memory, Abuse, and Science: Questioning Claims About the False Memory Syndrome Epidemic |journal=American Psychologist |volume=51 |url=http://www.questia.com/googleScholar.qst;jsessionid=HvMJ8y7hTLwzJKhQcXtBzn5T7hD51pStTy7SkQkzTNz51hB3Shgg!1063769811?docId=96531378 |accessdate= 2008-01-31 |quote=Does the trauma specified in the lost-in-the-mall experiment seem comparable to the trauma forming the basis of false memory syndrome? Loftus (1993) described the implanted traumatic event in the shopping-mall experiment as follows: "Chris was convinced by his older brother Jim, that he had been lost in a shopping mall when he was five years old" (p. 532). Does this seem, for example, a reasonable analogy for a five-year-old girl being repeatedly raped by her father?....Is it possible that the findings are an artifact of this particular design, for example, that the older family member claims to have been present when the event occurred and to have witnessed it, a claim the therapist can never make? To date, replications and extensions of this study have tended to use a similar methodology; that is, either the older family member makes the suggestions in his or her role as the experimenter's confederate, or the experimenter presents the suggestion as being the report of an older family member, thus creating a surrogate confederate. |doi=10.1037/0003-066X.51.9.957 |pages=957 ] [cite journal |url=http://kspope.com/memory/memory.php|title=Memory, Abuse, & Science: Questioning Claims about the False Memory Syndrome Epidemic |journal=American Psychologist |volume=vol. 51, no. 9 |year=1996|pages=pp957–974.] Others have also critiqued Loftus’ scholarship and accuracy [cite article |title=Consider the Evidence for Elizabeth Loftus' Scholarship and Accuracy "Remembering Dangerously" & Hoult v. Hoult: The Myth of Repressed Memory that Elizabeth Loftus Created |author=Jennifer Hoult, Esq. |url=http://www.rememberingdangerously.com/] or that Loftus’ has done research that may contradict her own beliefs of recovered memories. [cite article |author=Hopper, J. |title=Recovered Memories of Sexual Abuse Scientific Research & Scholarly Resources
url= http://www.jimhopper.com/memory/#el |quote=Loftus has conducted and published research which calls into question her public statements on recovered memories; her own study demonstrated that the conditions of amnesia and delayed recall for sexual abuse do exist]

References

*Loftus, E. F., & Pickrell, J. E. (1995). The formation of false memories. Psychiatric Annals, 25, 720–725.
*Loftus, E.F. (2003) [http://faculty.washington.edu/eloftus/Articles/AmerPsychAward+ArticlePDF03%20(2).pdf Make-Believe Memories] (PDF)