Abducted by a UFO: prevalence information affects young children's false memories for an implausible event

APPLIED COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY
Appl. Cognit. Psychol. 23: 115–125 (2009)
Published online 14 March 2008 in Wiley InterScience
(www.interscience.wiley.com) DOI: 10.1002/acp.1445

Abducted by a UFO: Prevalence Information Affects
Young Children’s False Memories for an
Implausible Event
HENRY OTGAAR1*, INGRID CANDEL1,
HARALD MERCKELBACH1 and KIMBERLEY A. WADE2
1

Faculty of Psychology, Maastricht University, The Netherlands
2
Department of Psychology, University of Warwick, UK

SUMMARY
This study examined whether prevalence information promotes children’s false memories for an implausible event. Forty-four 7–8 and forty-seven 11–12 year old children heard a true narrative about their first school day and a false narrative about either an implausible event (abducted by a
UFO) or a plausible event (almost choking on a candy). Moreover, half of the children in each condition received prevalence information in the form of a false newspaper article while listening to the narratives. Across two interviews, children were asked to report everything they remembered about the events. In both age groups, plausible and implausible events were equally likely to give rise to false memories. Prevalence information increased the number of false memories in 7–8 year olds, but not in 11–12 year olds at Interview 1. Our findings demonstrate that young children can easily develop false memories of a highly implausible event. Copyright # 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Both recent studies (e.g. Pezdek & Hodge, 1999; Strange, Sutherland, & Garry, 2006) and legal cases have demonstrated that children can develop memories of events that never happened, so-called false memories (Loftus, 2004). A well-known legal case is the
‘McMartin Preschool’ trial in which several teachers were accused of ritually abusing hundreds of children across a 10-year period (Garven, Wood, & Malpass, 2000; Garven,
Wood, Malpass, & Shaw, 1998; Schreiber et al., 2006). Some of the children

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