Researchers Stumped By Our Collective False Memories

If you think of the character Curious George and see him with a tail, you are one of many people to suffer from the Mandela Effect—the name given to describe the phenomenon of collective false memories that are taken by many to be the real deal. Named for the collective false memory that Nelson Mandela died in prison in the 1980s, he actually died at his home in 2013. It’s actually quite common and a recent study currently available in pre-print was unable to figure out why.

The study asked participants to review three similar images and pick the correct original. Two were fake, one was real. They thought it might be an association thing, George doesn’t have a tail, but monkeys do so it would make sense to make that mistake. But that didn’t pan out.

Motivated by reports of misremembered images online, Bainbridge and Deepasri Prasad—a lab manager and research assistant in the Brain Bridge Lab—compiled images and their false-remembered counterparts—mostly from popular culture—from the online discussions. Added to this mix of previously reported misremembered images were other pop culture icons and characters that the researchers made small tweaks to that would further test their theory.

Participants were asked to choose the original image, rate their confidence in their choice, and guess how many times they had seen the image before. Curious George was among seven images named as “visual Mandela effects” or VMEs, because they were consistently misremembered despite the participants reporting much familiarity with and confidence in their choice.

Participants also wrongly recalled that the Monopoly Man wears a monocle, the Fruit of the Loom logo features a cornucopia, and Pikachu the Pokemon has a black tip at the end of its tail. What researchers found “remarkable” was that participants continued to choose the wrong image even after they were given the correct one to study for a time.

“This effect is really fascinating because it reveals that there are these consistencies across people in false memories that they have for images they’ve actually never seen,” said Asst. Prof. Wilma Bainbridge, a neuroscientist and principal investigator at the Brain Bridge Lab in UChicago’s Department of Psychology.

Schema theory, the idea that we fall back on associations, might explain why a person would recall the Monopoly Man with a monocle. After all, that accessory is associated with wealth. But it doesn’t explain why participants consistently recalled a cornucopia in the Fruit of the Loom logo. They could have instead chosen a logo featuring a plate, and “plates are more frequently associated with fruit,” University of Chicago researcher Deepasri Prasad says in a release.

One of the big questions in the Brain Bridge Lab is why people remember certain things over others. So far, the researchers have found that people tend to remember and forget the same things.

“You would think that because all of us have our own individual experiences throughout our lives that we’d all have these idiosyncratic differences in our memories,” Bainbridge said. “But surprisingly, we find that we tend to remember the same faces and pictures as each other. This consistency in our memories is really powerful, because this means that I can know how memorable certain pictures are, I could quantify it. I could even manipulate the memorability of an image.”

In finding that there’s an intrinsic ability in some images to create false memories, the research suggests we may also be able to determine what creates false memories.

Ultimately, “VME cannot be universally explained by a single account,” researchers write in the paper, which is due to be published in the journal Psychological Science, adding this raises “new questions on the nature of false memories.”

Source: https://bit.ly/3OAw8qq