People sometimes falsely deny having experienced an event. In the current experiments, we examined the effect of false denials on forgetting and false memory formation. In Experiment 1, participants were presented with emotionally-negative and neutral associatively related word lists known to engender false memories. After encoding, half of the participants had to falsely deny having seen the words while the other half had to tell the truth. During a final memory test (recall or source monitoring task), participants who falsely denied forgot that they discussed certain words with an experimenter. Furthermore, the act of falsely denying reduced the formation of false memories. These results were partially replicated in Experiment 2 where participants also had to re-learn several words and received a second memory task. This latter design feature diminished the effect of false denials on false memory creation. Our experiments suggest that false denials not only have negative consequences (forgetting), but can have positive ones too (reduction in false memories).

Victims of abuse might deny their traumatic experiences.We studied mnemonic effects of simulating false denial of a child sexual abuse narrative. Participants (N = 127) read and empathized with the main character of this narrative.Next, half were instructed to falsely deny abuse-related information while others responded honestly in an interview. One week later, participants received misinformation for the narrative and interview. In a final source memory task, participants' memory for the narrative and interview was tested. Participants who falsely denied abuse-related information endorsed more abuse-unrelated misinformation about the event than honest participants. Abuse-related false memory rates did not statistically differ between the groups, and false denials were not related to omission errors about (1) the interview and (2) narrative. Hence, victim's memory for abuse-related information related to their experience might not be affected by a false denial, and inconsistencies surrounding the abuse-unrelated information are more likely to take place.

We dedicate the current work to Alan Scoboria, a brilliant memory researcher and dear friend, who passed away too soon.

No abstract

We examined the mnemonic effects of falsely denying a self-performed action. Specifically, participants (N = 30) performed, imagined, or received no instruction about 24 action statements (e.g., “cross your arms”). Next, their memory for whether they had performed, imagined, or did nothing (i.e., received no instructions) with these actions was tested. Subsequently, participants were instructed to repeatedly deny an action they had performed (false denial) and to repeatedly claim to have performed an action they had only imagined (false admission). In a final sorting memory task, 54% (n = 16) of participants erroneously indicated, after false admissions, that they had performed the imagined action. None of the participants indicated that they had only imagined an action after false denials, showing that it might be difficult to forget a performed action, even after repeatedly denying it. The current experiment sets the stage for future research to investigate why it seems to be difficult to forget performed actions.

The current study examined the effects of different delivery modes of misinformation on false memory creation in adolescents and adults. Forty adolescents (14-15 year olds) and fifty-three adults (over 18) were instructed to watch a video. Following this, half of the participants were given direct-with interaction misinformation, in which misinformation was delivered by the experimenter and participants (co-witnesses) were able to interact before their memory was tested. The other half of the participants were given directwithout interaction misinformation, in which they listened to a narrative read aloud by the experimenter, without interacting. Lastly, all participants completed a memory test. We found that participants in the direct-without interaction group were more likely to report false memories compared to the direct-with interaction group. Furthermore, adolescents endorsed more misinformation details than adults. Our results provide a new perspective about the role of social factors in the occurrence of false memories.

People lie on a frequent basis. However, when a victim of maltreatment lies by denying the abuse, lies can become forensically relevant. We have reviewed the relevant literature on the prevalence and memory consequences of such false denials. The way forensic interviewers proceed in the face of denying children will be shaped by their beliefs about the frequency with which truly abused children deny abuse. We discuss that estimates of the prevalence of false denials among abused children vary but that such false denials do happen. When falsely denying children eventually come forward with their experiences, a second issue lingers: how valid are maltreated children's statements after a false denial? We review the literature indicating that false denials can negatively affect memory for the investigative interview during which the lie was told. Yet, memory for the denied experience itself seems to be mostly preserved, and some research even found potential protective effects of false denials. We conclude that denials should always be handled with care in the court room, since the ground truth usually is not known, but that statements should not be dismissed based solely on previous denials.