Impact of Suggestibility and Sleep Deprivation on Memory Distortions

One of the most interesting phenomenon related to memory is memory distortions. One way in which they occur is through suggestibility, where people begin to remember false experiences if researchers suggested to them that they experienced it (Sternberg and Sternberg, 2012). In real-life situations, this is caused in part by memory being constructive “in that prior experiences affects how we recall things and what we actually recall from memory” (Sternberg and Sternberg, 2012). People’s prior experiences, including their bias and expectations, may influence how they experience false memory formations; the formation of false memories is also affected by several possible factors, one of which may be sleep deprivation (Frenda, Patihis, Loftus,

However, there are few studies investigating the effect of sleep deprivation on false memory formation; these studies offer conflicting evidence and are based on the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) task—a test where participants memorize lists of words associated with a word not on the list and are tested on their memory—instead of more naturalistic stimuli meaning that the effect constructive memory retrieval would have on false memory formation is more diminished (Frenda et al., 2014). The purpose of the study by Frenda et. al was to gain stronger evidence for any relationship between sleep deprivation and false memory formation within real-life situations. The results from this study may have practical applications, especially in eyewitness testimonies (Frenda et al., 2014). Determining whether or not sleep deprivation causes false memory formations could be tantamount to verifying the accuracy of eyewitness testimony of the

According to Deffenbacher et al. (2004), stress causes the accuracy of both recall and identification to decline (Sternberg and Sternberg, 2012). Thus, mental stress caused by sleep deprivation likely influenced the increase in false memory and MCR rate. Another possibility is that sleep deprivation may have reduced the ability of the participants to engage in elaborative rehearsal, or elaborates the items by connecting them with prior knowledge (Sternberg and Sternberg, 2012). Sleep deprivation may have caused the morning-encoding group to be unable to effectively utilize elaborative rehearsal. Thus, less information may have been consolidated within the sleep-deprived morning-encoding group and a less complete mental representation of the events would form. When the group was exposed to the misinformation in the second step, their memories of the photo sets were called back into short-term memory. Because the mental representation is more incomplete, the memory of the photos, in this case, is more affected by retroactive interference which occurs when newly learned information inhibits the recall of older information (Sternberg and Sternberg, 2012). For the sleep-deprived morning group, the misinformation learned during the second step decreased the participants’ ability to accurately recall the original information. This theory also explains why sleep