Lost in the mall technique
The "Lost in the Mall" technique, or the "lost in the mall" experiment, is a memory implantation technique used to demonstrate that confabulations about events that never took place – such as having been lost in a shopping mall as a child – can be created through suggestions made to experimental subjects that their older relative was present at the time. It was first developed by Elizabeth Loftus and her undergraduate student Jim Coan, as support for the claim that it is possible to implant entirely false memories in people. The technique was developed in the context of the debate about the existence of repressed memories and false memories.
Study methodology
Coan designed the first lost in the mall experiment as an extra-credit assignment for a course in cognitive psychology. The professor—Loftus—invited her students to design and execute an experiment implanting false memories in subjects. Coan enlisted his mother, sister and brother as subjects. He assembled booklets containing four short narratives describing childhood events, and instructed them to try to remember as much as possible about each of the four events, and to write down those details over the course of six days. Unknown to the participants, one of the narratives was false; it described Coan's brother getting lost in a shopping mall at around the age of 5, then being rescued by an elderly person and reunited with his family. During the experiment, Coan's brother unwittingly invented several additional details of the false narrative. At the conclusion of the experiment during a tape-recorded debriefing when told that one of the narratives was false, Coan's brother could not identify which one was false and expressed disbelief when told. Coan later refined the study methodology for his senior thesis where he reports "all subjects were able to identify the false memory". Coan, J.A.,, Creating False Memories, Senior Paper, Psychology Honors Program, University of Washington.In a follow-up experiment, Elizabeth Loftus and Jacqueline Pickrell adapted the methods Coan had used on his brother in a formal study with 24 participants, about 25% of whom reported remembering the false event. The memory for the false event was usually reported to be less clear than the true events, and people generally used more words to describe the true events than the false events. At the end of the study when the participants were told that one of the 4 events was false, some people failed to identify the lost in the mall event as the false event and instead picked one of the true events to be false. Loftus calls this study "existence proof" for the phenomenon of false memory creation and suggests that the false memory is formed as a result of the suggested event being incorporated into already existing memories of going to the mall. With the passage of time it becomes harder for people to differentiate between what actually happened and what was imagined and they make memory errors. However, it remains to be seen how an older relative verifying the lost incident applies to what might happen in therapy.
The lost in the mall experiment has been replicated using claims by older relatives and extended with different ages of subjects. About 25 percent of the participants not only "remembered" the implanted memory but also filled in the missing details.
Criticism of methodology and conclusions
The Lost in the Mall technique is generally accepted as a memory implantation study that is useful for investigating the effect of suggestions on memory. However, some have argued that it is not generalizable to memories for traumatic events.An article in the journal Child Development by Pezdek and Hodges described an extension of the experiment: by using the subjects' family members to do the interviewing, their study was able to replicate Loftus' findings that memories of being lost in the mall could be created and were more likely to occur in young children. However, a much smaller number of children reported false memories of another untrue incident: that of a painful and embarrassing enema. Another article by Kenneth Pope in American Psychologist suggested possible confounding variables in the study, questioning whether the technique's ability to generate a false memory could be compared with the ability of a therapist to create a pseudomemory of childhood sexual abuse.
In 1995, Lynn Crook—who had recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse and provided corroboration—filed an ethics complaint with the American Psychological Association charging Loftus with misrepresenting Crook's successful recovered memory lawsuit in a media interview with Psychology Today. Loftus resigned from the APA before the complaint could be investigated.
In a 1999 article in the journal Ethics & Behavior, Lynn Crook and Martha Dean, PhD questioned Loftus' Lost in the Mall study, arguing that the methods used were unethical and the results not generalizable to real-life memories of trauma. Loftus responded to their criticism, claiming "exaggerations, omissions and errors" in Crook and Dean's description of the technique and mistakes about the study's representation in the media. Loftus made it clear that the Lost in the Mall study and other studies using memory implantation techniques in no way tried to claim that all memories of childhood sexual abuse discovered in therapy are false; instead, they merely try to show how relatively easy it is to manipulate human memory if an older relative says they witnessed the incident. Loftus also accused Crook of writing the article as part of a long series of efforts to discredit her integrity as a researcher and her work.
In 2019, Blizard and Shaw published a critique of the methodology and conclusions in Loftus and Pickrell. They discussed how False Memory Syndrome, along with Parental Alienation Syndrome, were developed as defenses for parents accused of child abuse as part of a larger movement to undermine prosecution of child abuse. They allege that by examination of the research methods and findings of the study, no full false memories were actually formed. According to Blizzard and Shaw, the Lost in the Mall study did not provide a definition of what constituted a full memory and contained little explicit description of the methods of recruitment of subjects, experimental controls, and methods of rating full and partial false memories; furthermore, it contained nothing on the training of investigators. While the authors of the Lost in the Mall study reported that three subjects developed partial false memories and two others developed full ones, only one brief transcript of a response was offered to substantiate those conclusions. Blizzard and Shaw also pointed out that the Lost in the Mall study does not describe any subjects who unequivocally accepted the false story as true: instead, both subjects who were depicted as having formed full false memories disputed details of the false story presented.