Lost in The Mall Technique - Study Methodology

Study Methodology

The idea of the lost in the mall technique was first developed and tested on a few individuals by Loftus and Ketcham. It was first used in a formal study by Loftus and her student Jacqueline Pickrell in 1995. In their experiment they gave 24 participants four short narratives describing childhood events, all supposedly provided by family members. The participants were told they were participating in a study looking at memory for childhood events and were instructed to try to remember as much as possible about each of the four events. If they could not remember anything about the events they were instructed to be honest and say so. Unbeknownst to the participants, one of the narratives was false. This narrative described the person being lost in a shopping mall at around the age of 5. According to the narrative the person was lost for an extended period of time before finally being rescued by an elderly person and reunited with his or her family. The narrative was based upon actual family shopping trips and incorporated plausible details provided by the relative such as the name of the mall they would usually go to when the person was a child and who would be likely to be present when they went shopping. The participants first had to fill in what they remembered about each event in a booklet, and were then called in for two interviews where they were asked about details of the events. In the study, 25% of the participants reported to be able to remember the false event. The memory for the false event was usually reported to be less clear than the true events, and people generally used more words to describe the true events than the false events. At the end of the study when the participants were told that one of the 4 events was false, some people (5 out of 24) failed to identify the lost in the mall event as the false event and instead picked one of the true events to be false. Loftus calls this study "existence proof" for the phenomenon of false memory creation and suggests that the false memory is formed as a result of the suggested event (being lost in a mall) being incorporated into already existing memories of going to the mall. With the passage of time it becomes harder for people to differentiate between what actually happened and what was imagined and they make memory errors.

The lost in the mall experiment has been replicated and extended with different ages of subjects.