Memória falsa

'We can implant entirely false memories'

You were abducted by aliens, you saw Bugs Bunny at Disneyland, and then you went up in a balloon. Didn't you? Laura Spinney on our remembrance of things past

• Laura Spinney
• The Guardian,
  In a study soon to be published, she and colleagues describe how a little misinformation led witnesses of a terrorist attack in Moscow in 1999 to recall seeing wounded animals nearby. Later, they were informed that there had been no animals. But before the debriefing, they even embellished the false memory with make-believe details, in one case testifying to seeing a bleeding cat lying in the dust.
  "We can easily distort memories for the details of an event that you did experience," says Loftus. "And we can also go so far as to plant entirely false memories - we call them rich false memories because they are so detailed and so big." --
  Elizabeth Loftus' research has obvious implications for the reliability of eyewitness testimony.
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