Essays --

Read analyzes the possibility of manipulating a persons’ memory by simply allowing the persons’ own skills of relating memories against them. When a something influences what a person remembers the resulting effect is false memories. A false memory is the seeming recall of an instance that did not actually happen. A person usually associates words and items together, making intrusions of false words easy. Subjects often hold confidently that the words they recall were all actually on the list read to them. Read demonstrated the ability to create these false memories in people by doing two experiments. In his first experiment Read read a list of 12 words to his subjects; a class of 41 introductory psychology students. The list was comprised of slumber, tired, rest, night, dark, comfort, sound, eat, bed, snore, dream and awake After the reading of the list there was a five minute filled pause before the participants were then asked to recall as many words from the list as possible in three minutes. The participants were asked to rate between a one and a five for each word in order to reflect their confidence that the word was actually in the list of 12; one being no confidence and five being extremely confident. Like other experiments done in the past Read asked the participants to specify whether the actually recall hearing the word or, instead, simply knew that it had been part of the list. The third thing that was asked of the participants was to state whether or not they remembered something strange about how the list of words was said, such as the sound, timing of when each word was said, and placement in the list. To finish this first experiment Read had the participants assign a number between one and twelve to each recall... ...ter than the experimenter. I do not doubt the findings that Read found; because I believe this study to be reliable and valid. Though I think the actual writing out of the results could have been done in a more strategic way so that they were easier to follow. I think the Read went wrong when he did not go into detail about his participants; because of this it is hard to determine generalizability. Even with these desired changes I believe that overall this article and study to be an educational benefit to those who read it. References Don Read, J. (1996). From a passing thought to a false memory in 2 minutes: Confusing real and illusory events. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 3(1), 105-111. Retrieved from http://download.springer.com/static/pdf/439/art%3A10.3758%2FBF03210749.pdf ?auth6 6=1392479326_b7da4d31e7b890f8d493e4c278ce1ed9&ext=.pdf