DOMINIC W. MASSARO, editor
University of California, Santa Cruz

The Truth About False Memories

False Memory Creation in Children and Adults
Edited by David F. Bjorklund. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2000. x + 254 pp. Cloth, $59.95.

What exactly is a false memory? Although we may all have some intuition about the properties of false memories, we may not be able to specify with great exactitude what they are. Nor can we very readily discriminate a false memory from a true memory, certainly not with any degree of certitude (this is the perennial problem faced by our judicial system in recent years). This is particularly poignant in that false memories, like true memories, contain both fact and fiction. That is, both true and false memories contain information about things that actually happened or could happen along with things that did not or could not have happened. If we accept the argument that even "true" memories are not literal representations of experience but instead reflect the in- fluence of the rememberer (e.g., previous knowledge, current expectations, wishes, and desires) as well as the remembering context at encoding, during retention, and at retrieval (e.g., Bartlett, 1932; Dewey, 1920), then the distinction between "true" and "false" memories blurs. Perhaps it is the relative composition of the trace that matters, with more constructed traces being relegated to the false pile and less constructed traces being relegated to the true pile. Unfortunately, this does not amount to much of a solution because it simply changes the domain of fuzziness but does not eliminate it.