IImagine Monopoly Man.
Is he wearing a monocle or not?
If you pictured a character from the popular board game wearing one, you’d be wrong. really, she has never worn one,
If you are surprised by this, you are not alone. Many people have the same false memory of this character. This phenomenon also happens for other characters, logos and quotes. For example, Pokémon’s Pikachu is often thought to have a black tip on its tail, what he doesn’t have, And many people are convinced That the Fruit of the Loom logo includes a cornucopia. It is not.
We call this phenomenon of shared false memories for certain cultural symbols the “visual Mandela effect”.
People are shocked when they learn that they share the same false memories with other people. This is partly because they believe that what they remember and forget should be subjective and based on their own personal experiences.
However, the research we do shows that people do remember and forget the same pictures as each other, regardless of the diversity of their individual experiences. Recently, we have shown these similarities in our Memories extend even to our false memories,
What is the Mandela Effect?
Word The “Mandela Effect” was coined by Fiona Broome., a self-described paranormal researcher, to describe the false memory of former South African President Nelson Mandela’s death in prison in the 1980s. She realized that many others shared the same false memory and wrote an article about her experience on her website. The concept of shared false memories spread to other forums and websites, including reddit,
Since then, examples of the Mandela effect have been widely shared on the Internet. These include names such as the children’s book series “The Berenstein Bears”, which are erroneously remembered as “-ene” instead of “-en”, and characters such as C-3PO from Star Wars, who are referred to as two Falsely remembered with feet of gold instead of one gold and one silver leg,
The Mandela Effect became fodder for the conspirators – false memories so strong and so distinctive that Some see them as evidence of an alternate dimension,
Because of that, scientific research has only studied the Mandela Effect as an example of how conspiracy theories spread over the Internet. There has been little research looking at the Mandela effect as a memory phenomenon.
But understanding why these icons trigger such specific false memories can give us more information about how false memories are formed. The visual Mandela effect, which affects icons in particular, was the perfect way to study it.
a strong false memory phenomenon
To see if the visible Mandela effect really exists, we did an experiment In which we presented three versions of the same icon to the people. One was correct and two were manipulated, and we asked them to select the correct one. There were 40 sets of icons, and they included the C-3PO from the Star Wars franchise, the Fruit of the Loom logo, and the board game Monopoly Man.
In the results, which have been accepted for publication in the journal Psychological Science, we found that people performed very poorly on seven of them, choosing only the right one, or less than about 33%. For these seven images, people consistently identified a single incorrect variant, not just randomly choosing one of the two incorrect versions. In addition, participants reported high familiarity with these icons, despite being very confident in their choices and being wrong.
Put together, this is clear proof of the phenomenon people have been talking about on the Internet for years: the visual Mandela effect is a real and coherent memory error.
We found that this false memory effect was incredibly strong across several different methods of memory testing. Even when people saw the correct version of the icon, they chose the wrong version just minutes later.
And when they were asked to independently draw the markings from their memory, people included the same erroneous features.
no universal cause
What causes this shared false memory for specific marks?
We found that visual features such as color and brightness could not explain the effect. We also tracked the participants’ mouse movements as they viewed the images on a computer screen, to see if they had not scanned a particular part, such as a Pikachu’s tail. But even when people looked at the correct part of the image directly, they still chose the wrong version immediately afterwards. We also found that for most icons, it was unlikely that people had previously seen a false version and were simply missing that version instead of the correct version.
There may not be a single universal cause. Different images can achieve the visual Mandela effect for different reasons. Some may be related to prior expectations for an image, some may relate to prior visual experience with an image and others may have to do with something completely different from the images. For example, we found that for the most part, people only see C-3PO’s upper body portrayed in the media. Incorrectly memorized gold legs can be the result of using prior knowledge – the body is usually only one color to fill this gap.
But the fact that we can exhibit continuity in false memories for certain cues suggests that the part that drives false memories is dependent on our environment – and independent of our subjective experiences with the world.
Deepshree Prasad, PHD. student in cognitive neuroscience, Dartmouth College And Wilma BainbridgeAssistant Professor of Psychology, University of Chicago
This article is republished from Conversation Under Creative Commons license. read the original article,
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