Biography becomes autobiography: Distorting the subjective past

VERONIKA NOURKOVA
Moscow State University

DANIEL M.BERNSTEIN
University of California at Irvine

ELIZABETH F.LOFTUS
University of California at Irvine

This work addresses whether creating a biographical sketch for afictional adolescent can increase confidence that one personally experienced these details in adolescence (memory distortion)and whether susceptibility to such distor- tion depends on whether adolescence is considered part of one 's subjective past or subjective present.We divided the subjective past and present using the point at which a person experienced the last life event that changed his or her per- sonality significantly.We operationalized the subjective past as events associat- ed with the period before the last life-changing event and the subjective present as events associated with the period after that event.Participants ' confidence in their own autobiographical memory increased after they wrote a brief story about a fictional character.This increase occurred only for those who considered adolescence to be part of their subjective past.These results indicate that subjective time (in addition to objective time)may be a valuable factor in determining who is susceptible to memory distortion.We discuss these findings in terms of famil- iarity attribution and source monitoring.