WHATEVER GAVE YOU THAT IDEA? FALSE MEMORIES FOLLOWING EQUIVALENCE TRAINING: A BEHAVIORAL ACCOUNT OF THE MISINFORMATION EFFECT

Abstract

The misinformation effect is a term used in the cognitive psychological literature to describe both experimental and real‐world instances in which misleading information is incorporated into an account of an historical event. In many real‐world situations, it is not possible to identify a distinct source of misinformation, and it appears that the witness may have inferred a false memory by integrating information from a variety of sources. In a stimulus equivalence task, a small number of trained relations between some members of a class of arbitrary stimuli result in a large number of untrained, or emergent relations, between all members of the class. Misleading information was introduced into a simple memory task between a learning phase and a recognition test by means of a match‐to‐sample stimulus equivalence task that included both stimuli from the original learning task and novel stimuli. At the recognition test, participants given equivalence training were more likely to misidentify patterns than those who were not given such training. The misinformation effect was distinct from the effects of prior stimulus exposure, or partial stimulus control. In summary, stimulus equivalence processes may underlie some real‐world manifestations of the misinformation effect.