| Abstract: | When people imagine performing simple actions they can sometimes become confused about whether they actually performed the actions or only imagined doing so. In the present study participants performed, imagined, and heard groups of actions. During a second session participants imagined some of the earlier actions as well as some entirely new actions. On a later memory test participants sometimes falsely indicated that they had performed actions that they had only imagined and this tendency was a positive function of number of imaginings. We also found that true and false memories differed in terms of degree of perceptual detail, associated thoughts, emotions, contextual information, and kinesthetic detail. Differences between true and false memories were smaller when the action was imagined five times but were not entirely eliminated. These findings suggest that false memories produced in this paradigm can be both compelling and yet subtly different from true memories. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. |
