Lost in the mall technique

The "Lost in the Mall" technique, or the "lost in the mall" experiment, is a memory implantation technique used to demonstrate that confabulations about events that never took place – such as having been lost in a shopping mall as a child – can be created through suggestions made to experimental subjects. It was first developed by Jim Coan, an undergraduate student of psychologist Elizabeth Loftus as support for the claim that it is possible to implant entirely false memories in people. The technique was developed in the context of the debate about the existence of repressed memories and false memories (see False memory syndrome).

Study methodology

As a junior at the University of Washington, Coan designed the first lost in the mall experiment as an extra-credit assignment for a course in cognitive psychology. The professor--Loftus--invited her students to design and execute an experiment implanting false memories in subjects. Coan enlisted his mother, sister and brother as subjects. He assembled booklets containing four short narratives describing childhood events, and instructed them to try to remember as much as possible about each of the four events, and to write down those details over the course of six days. Unbeknownst to the participants, one of the narratives was false; it described Coan's brother getting lost in a shopping mall at around the age of 5, then being rescued by an elderly person and reunited with his family. During the experiment, Coan's brother unwittingly invented several additional details of the false narrative. At the conclusion of the experiment--during a tape-recorded debriefing--when told that one of the narratives was false, Coan's brother could not identify which one and expressed disbelief when told.

Coan later refined the study methodology for his senior thesis, in collaboration with Loftus and graduate student Jacqueline Pickrell. In their experiment, they adapted the methods Coan used on his brother in a formal study with 24 participants, 25% of whom reported remembering the false event. The memory for the false event was usually reported to be less clear than the true events, and people generally used more words to describe the true events than the false events. At the end of the study when the participants were told that one of the 4 events was false, some people (5 out of 24) failed to identify the lost in the mall event as the false event and instead picked one of the true events to be false. Loftus calls this study "existence proof" for the phenomenon of false memory creation and suggests that the false memory is formed as a result of the suggested event (being lost in a mall) being incorporated into already existing memories of going to the mall. With the passage of time it becomes harder for people to differentiate between what actually happened and what was imagined and they make memory errors.

The lost in the mall experiment has been replicated and extended with different ages of subjects. About 25 percent of the participants not only "remembered" the implanted memory but also filled in the missing details.

Criticisms of methodology and conclusions

The Lost in the Mall technique is generally accepted as a memory implantation study that is useful for investigating the effect of suggestions on memory. However some people have argued that this is not generalizable to memories for traumatic events. An article in the journal Child Development by Pezdek and Hodges described an extension of the experiment. By using the subjects' family members to do the interviewing, their study was able to replicate Loftus' findings that memories of being lost in the mall could be created and were more likely to occur in young children. However, a much smaller number of children reported false memories of another untrue incident: that of a painful and embarrassing enema. Another article by Kenneth Pope in the American Psychologist suggested possible confounding variables in the study as well as questioning whether the technique's ability to generate a false memory could be compared with the ability of a therapist to create a pseudomemory of childhood sexual abuse. In still another article (in the Journal Ethics & Behavior) two people who had recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse, Lynn Crook and Martha Dean, also question Loftus' Lost in the Mall-study, arguing that the methods used are unethical and the results not generalizable to real life memories of trauma. Loftus responded to Crook and Dean's criticisms pointing to the exaggerations, omissions and errors in Crook and Dean's description of the technique and their mistakes about the study's representation in the media. Loftus makes it clear that the Lost in the Mall study and other studies using memory implantation techniques in no way try to claim that all memories of childhood sexual abuse discovered in therapy are false, they merely try to show how relatively easy it is to manipulate human memory. Loftus also accuses Crook of writing the article as part of a long series of efforts to discredit her integrity as a researcher and her work. In 1995, Crook filed an ethics complaint with the American Psychological Association charging Loftus with misrepresenting Crook’s successful recovered memory lawsuit in a media interview with Psychology Today ("Dispatch from the Memory War").

See also

• Reconstruction of automobile destruction
• Memory implantation
• Memory conformity