When bilinguals perform a memory task in their second rather than their first language they are less likely to confuse lures for real memories or to agree with false information shared by another eye-witness, reports a study in Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.
We generally have the impression that our memories are a reliable representation of things that we experienced in the past. But research, for example in the context of witness testimony, has shown that our memories can be malleable; memories that we are confident are true may not be accurate at all. If our memories are not internal picture-perfect copies of our past, that raises the question: when do we (mis)remember?
Leigh Grant and colleagues at the University of Chicago reasoned that since the language can affect how we think, what language we use may also affect whether we misremember something1. The interesting idea the authors explored was whether participants’ would be more susceptible to recalling false memories in their first or second language. The authors hypothesized that using a second language may suppress quick, intuitive responding and thus reduce the number of false memories.
Across two studies, the researchers found that participants were less likely to fall for misleading information in their reported memory when they responded in their second language: they were more likely to catch items that were similar to previously presented stimuli but had not been encountered and were less likely to agree with false information shared by another eye-witness of a previously witnessed event.
The study raises a host of new questions. Testing for the replication of the effect in more applied settings will be important to understand the implications of the work.
Reference
Grant, L. H., Pan, Y., Huang, Y., Gallo, D. A. & Keysar, B. Foreign language reduces false memories by increasing memory monitoring. J. Exp. Psychol. Gen. 152, 1967–1977 (2023).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
About this article
Cite this article
Schiffer, M. Cognitive Psychology: First language and false memories. Commun Psychol 1, 16 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44271-023-00015-y
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s44271-023-00015-y