Foster Jeffrey L, Garry Maryanne
Victoria University of Wellington, School of Psychology, New Zealand.
Am J Psychol. 2012 Summer;125(2):225-32. doi: 10.5406/amerjpsyc.125.2.0225.
People can come to remember doing things they have never done. The question we asked in this study is whether people can systematically come to remember performing actions they never really did, in the absence of any suggestion from the experimenter. People built LEGO vehicles, performing some steps but not others. For half the people, all the pieces needed to assemble each vehicle were laid out in order in front of them while they did the building; for the other half, the pieces were hidden from view. The next day, everyone returned for a surprise recognition test. People falsely and confidently remembered having carried out steps they did not; those who saw all the pieces while they built each vehicle were more likely to correctly remember performing steps they did perform but equally likely to falsely remember performing steps they did not. We explain our results using the source monitoring framework: People used the relationships between actions to internally generate the missing, related actions, later mistaking that information for genuine experience.
人们能够开始记住自己从未做过的事情。我们在这项研究中提出的问题是，在没有实验者任何暗示的情况下，人们是否能够系统性地开始记住自己从未真正做过的行为。人们搭建乐高车辆，完成了一些步骤而未完成其他步骤。对于一半的人来说，在搭建车辆时，组装每辆车所需的所有零件都按顺序摆在他们面前；对于另一半人来说，零件则被藏起来不让他们看见。第二天，所有人回来接受一个突击识别测试。人们错误且自信地记得自己执行了并未执行的步骤；那些在搭建每辆车时看到所有零件的人更有可能正确地记住自己确实执行过的步骤，但同样有可能错误地记住自己未执行过的步骤。我们使用源监控框架来解释我们的结果：人们利用行为之间的关系在内心生成缺失的相关行为，随后将该信息误认为是真实经历。
