Alien Abductions

In the article “Memory Distortion in People Reporting Abduction by Aliens” the Researchers are looking at how memory distortion effects people who report recovered memories of traumatic events that seem unlikely to occur. The researchers first examined recall and recognition in more likely events such as childhood sexual abuse and from the findings created four hypotheses to test on their experiment about memories of alien abductions. In the experiment they created three groups of individuals in which to test their hypotheses. Once the groups were selected the researchers used the Deese/Roedier-McDermott paradigm to test the groups false recall and false recognition. After this the researchers concluded that two out of their four hypotheses

The study here showed how memory distortion in people that were in more unlikely traumatic situations such as alien abductions can play since we use source monitoring and sometimes the sources can get confused as in if the memory actually happened to us, in their example actually being abducted by aliens or that the memory in reality was that we were only watching a movie on alien abductions and we confused how that memory came to be. Like in any study there will be mistakes made or things that could have been done differently but the study tried to keep those aspects to a minimum and did mention a few of the draw backs themselves of that study. But all in all the researchers were able to form a conclusion by finding evidence through their study and through a similar topic that helped argue their

With these hypotheses shown in the experiment to be true this show that source monitoring is an important part in false recall as “remembering how, when, and where a memory is acquired. Recollections perceived events can be confused thereby producing distorted memories”

My critiques of this study are that unfortunate the studies sample size was small making projecting these findings on a larger population more difficult. Using alien abductions as the unlikely event makes it difficult, as we are not sure if their events actually happened and to what degree happened and what made the participant think it was aliens. The article dose note some of these critiques and some of their own as in studies there are always things that you could have done but didn’t in hindsight or that were too impractical to