RESEARCH HINTS FAKE MEMORIES COMMON.

Byline: Daniel Q. Haney Associated Press 

Given a few bogus details and a little prodding, about a quarter of adults can be convinced they remember childhood adventures that never happened.

The experiment is one of a series of exercises psychologists have developed that can plant false memories in the brain. Once they take root, these thoughts often become as real as genuine ones - indeed, perhaps even more so.

``Over time, people may forget things that did happen and remember things that didn't,'' said Henry L. Roediger III of Washington University in St. Louis.

Roediger and other psychologists described their memory experiments Saturday at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Together, they say the work demonstrates the malleability and fallibility of memory, the human willingness to recall things that make sense or should have happened, even if they didn't.

``All of us to some extent are susceptible to these kinds of contamination'' of memory, said Elizabeth Loftus of the University of Washington in Seattle, who pioneered the field in the 1970s.

The researchers say that young children, the elderly and people with short attention spans appear most likely to concoct false memories. But even college students - who presumably spend much of their time remembering what they read and hear - can be easily tricked into swearing they recall things that never happened.

In one experiment, Loftus asked parents to list some incidents in their adult children's pasts. Then she told the children she wanted to compare their memories with the parents'.

She walked each study subject through a series of real incidents and then threw in a fake one: As a young child, the person had been lost in a shopping mall and was frightened and cried until found by an elderly person who then located the parents.

With just a little gentle coaxing, Loftus said, about one-quarter of the study subjects agree this happened to them. Some even go on to provide new details. The false memory can become so fixed that they refuse to believe it is untrue when the experiment is over.

In another experiment, volunteers are asked to look over a list of possible childhood events, such as falling and breaking a window with their hand, and then rate on a scale of 1 to 8 their certainty of whether they happened.

Two weeks later, they are asked to spend one minute creating mental images of some of the events they said they had never experienced. Then they fill out the list again. After imagining breaking the window, 24 percent become more certain such an event actually occurred.

Loftus has been a strong critic of psychologists who supposedly help people recover memories of suppressed traumas, such as child abuse. Such memory recovery has been crucial in trials of adults accused of sexual assaults on children.

Loftus contends the techniques of some therapists to bring out blocked memories are similar to the ones she used in her experiments to create fake ones.

Roediger said his work suggests that ``illusions of memory,'' as he calls them, happen often.

In one experiment, he asked students to look at a list of 15 words that included ``bed,'' ``dream,'' ``blanket,'' ``doze'' and ``pillow.'' Afterward, more than half said the word ``sleep'' was on the list, even though it wasn't. More remembered ``sleep'' than some words actually on the list.

``People are confused between what happened in the outside world and what happened inside their own heads,'' Roediger said.