Associative Memory Illusions

Distortions of memory arise from many causes. Several types of memory illusions reviewed in this volume are created from external sources. In recollecting some target event from the past, people will often confuse events that happened before or after the target event with the event itself. (These confusions are examples of proactive and retroactive interference, respectively.) On the other hand, the illusion described in this chapter involves the remembering of events that never actually occurred. This erroneous information is internally created by processes that would otherwise lead to good memory for actual events. As such, these errors are part and parcel of the natural memory process, and they are extremely difficult to avoid. Although most of the research reviewed here involves a tightly controlled laboratory paradigm using word-lists, we believe (and will cite evidence to support) the claim that similar processes occur whenever people try to comprehend the world around them – reading a newspaper or novel, watching television, or even perceiving scenes with little verbal encoding at all (Roediger & McDermott, 2000b).