Memories people no longer believe in can still affect them in helpful and harmful ways.

ABSTRACT: People can come to "remember" experiences they never had, and these false memories-much like memories for real experiences-can serve a variety of helpful and harmful functions. Sometimes, though, people realize one of their memories is false, and retract their belief in it. These "retracted memories" continue to have many of the same phenomenological characteristics as their believed memories. But can they also continue to serve functions? Across four experiments, we asked subjects to rate the extent to which their retracted memories serve helpful and harmful functions and compared these functions with those served by "genuine" autobiographical memories. People rated their retracted memories as serving both helpful and harmful functions, much like their genuine memories. In addition, we fo

SUBMITTER: Burnell R 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9365748 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature