Imagination inflation

Early research In 1996, Elizabeth Loftus, Maryanne Garry, Charles Manning, and Steven Sherman, conducted the original imagination inflation study. The study examined the effect of imagining a childhood event on childhood memories. This leaves open the possibility that imagination does not actually have any effect on beliefs about false past events, but instead helps people retrieve actual memories of true experiences. In 1998, Lyn Goff and Henry Roediger used a different method to study imagination inflation effect for events that could be confirmed. It also looked at the effect of imagination on recognition reports rather than confidence ratings. Participants performed certain actions (such as breaking a toothpick) but not others, then imagined doing other actions in the overall set, and finally were given a list of old actions encountered in the first two parts of the study and brand new actions. Participants were more likely to mistakenly say that they had performed imagined actions compared to unimagined actions. or paraphrase them. These findings suggest that vivid imagining is not always necessary for "imagination inflation" to occur; explanation or paraphrasing may function to make the false event seem more fluent and thus more familiar without producing a detailed image of it. Another found an effect when people imagined a highly unusual action such as kissing a vending machine or lying on a couch and talking to Sigmund Freud. Some people have developed false beliefs of having performed bizarre actions or experienced more ordinary events even after imagining somebody else, rather than themselves, performing them. ==Causes==

The cause of the imagination inflation effect is debated. There is evidence that source-monitoring framework, the familiarity misattribution theory, and the effects of sensory elaboration contribute to the formation of false memories through imagination inflation. It has been theorized that these effects, and other unknown effects, all contribute to the imagination inflation effect. Source-monitoring framework The source-monitoring framework, developed by Thomas et al., states that memories are not specified as real or imagined. Thus, under this framework, after imaging an event, it is difficult to distinguish whether the memory is real or not. Sensory elaboration Thomas et al. argue that perceptual components of imagining events confuse actual lived memories because of elaboration. When participants included sensory details while recalling imagined events, participants were more likely to falsely remember the imagined events. Participants were thought to confuse imagined events with actual events because of the specific and elaborate nature of their imagination. The results of the study argue that elaboration (in the form of vivid sensory details) leads to increased formation of false memories. ==Implications==

False confessions Imagination inflation has implications for the criminal justice system, in particular interrogation and interviewing procedures. Interrogators who ask suspects to repeatedly imagine committing a crime risk making their suspects more confident that they are the perpetrators, ultimately producing false confessions from innocent suspects. In another interrogation technique, interrogators ask suspects to explain how a crime might have been committed or how they themselves could have done it. This practice has been suggested as another cause of self-generated false confessions because it forces an innocent suspect to create a believable narrative of their own guilt. This is supported by research in which people explained how a false childhood event could have occurred, and, after, became more confident that it had really happened. ==Criticisms==

Regression to the mean A 2001 critique argued that the original findings of the 1996 imagination inflation study did not in fact reflect changed beliefs about the past via imagination, but were instead a product of regression to the mean. That is, events with confidence ratings at the extreme (low or high) ends of the scale at the first time of measurement happened to have such scores due only to observational error, so they became more moderate at post-test. pointing out several issues that they found in Pezdek's reasoning. In particular, they agreed that regression to the mean was present in their own data and contributed to the overall changes in confidence at the second test. But this could not explain the finding that imagining events that were low in confidence led to a greater increase in ratings than for unimagined low-confidence events, as regression to the mean should affect all events equally. == References ==