Lost in The Mall Technique - Criticisms of Methodology and Conclusions

Criticisms of Methodology and Conclusions

The Lost in the Mall technique is generally accepted as a memory implantation study that is useful for investigating the effect of suggestions on memory. However some people have argued that this is not generalizable to memories for traumatic events. An article in the journal Child Development by Pezdek and Hodges described an extension of the experiment. By using the subjects' family members to do the interviewing, their study was able to replicate Loftus' findings that memories of being lost in the mall could be created and were more likely to occur in young children. However, a much smaller number of children reported false memories of another untrue incident: that of a painful and embarrassing enema. Another article by Kenneth Pope in the American Psychologist suggested possible confounding variables in the study as well as questioning whether the technique's ability to generate a false memory could be compared with the ability of a therapist to create a pseudomemory of childhood sexual abuse. In still another article (in the Journal Ethics & Behavior) two people who had recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse, Lynn Crook and Martha Dean, also question Loftus' Lost in the Mall-study, arguing that the methods used are unethical and the results not generalizable to real life memories of trauma. Loftus responded to Crook and Dean's criticisms pointing to the exaggerations, omissions and errors in Crook and Dean's description of the technique and their mistakes about the study's representation in the media. Loftus makes it clear that the Lost in the Mall study and other studies using memory implantation techniques in no way try to claim that all memories of childhood sexual abuse discovered in therapy are false, they merely try to show how relatively easy it is to manipulate human memory. Loftus also accuses Crook of writing the article as part of a long series of efforts to discredit her integrity as a researcher and her work.