It's All Coming Back to Me Now
The NYT Magazine has a longish feature on Susan Clancy, a Harvard-educated psychologist who devised a test to gauge the accuracy of "recovered" memories.
Subjects were shown a list of words that contained a set of semantically related terms, like "candy," "sour," and "sugar." They were later shown a different list that contained new words from the same thematic category -- e.g., "sweet." The subjects were asked whether the new words appeared on the first list. As a group, persons who claimed recovered memories of child abuse were likelier than others (including abuse victims whose memories never flagged) to "remember" the new words from the original list, suggesting a proclivity to construct inaccurate memories.
When Clancy's study was published, some found what they perceived to be methodological flaws. For instance, what if childhood trauma itself produced lasting impairments in the functioning of human memory? Clancy's study could not eliminate the possibility that recovered memories might be accurate even though malformed.
Clancy responded by testing a group of persons with recovered memories of abduction by aliens. The new study yielded similar results. Thinking herself to have rebutted the methodological quibbles, Clancy submitted her new work to the Journal of Abnormal Psychology, where it survived a rigorous peer-review process and was published.
But Clancy promptly found herself facing a new round of objections: What if the study subjects were really abducted?
This all reminds me of a time in my own practice when the adversary's objections to my expert's methods proved impossible to silence by mere resort to brute fact. Indeed, I remember it as though it were only yesterday . . . .
Subjects were shown a list of words that contained a set of semantically related terms, like "candy," "sour," and "sugar." They were later shown a different list that contained new words from the same thematic category -- e.g., "sweet." The subjects were asked whether the new words appeared on the first list. As a group, persons who claimed recovered memories of child abuse were likelier than others (including abuse victims whose memories never flagged) to "remember" the new words from the original list, suggesting a proclivity to construct inaccurate memories.
When Clancy's study was published, some found what they perceived to be methodological flaws. For instance, what if childhood trauma itself produced lasting impairments in the functioning of human memory? Clancy's study could not eliminate the possibility that recovered memories might be accurate even though malformed.
Clancy responded by testing a group of persons with recovered memories of abduction by aliens. The new study yielded similar results. Thinking herself to have rebutted the methodological quibbles, Clancy submitted her new work to the Journal of Abnormal Psychology, where it survived a rigorous peer-review process and was published.
But Clancy promptly found herself facing a new round of objections: What if the study subjects were really abducted?
This all reminds me of a time in my own practice when the adversary's objections to my expert's methods proved impossible to silence by mere resort to brute fact. Indeed, I remember it as though it were only yesterday . . . .
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