A famous experiment by Elizabeth Loftus in 1994 revealed that she was able to convince a quarter of her participants they were once lost in a shopping centre as a child. Another experiment in 2002 tricked half of the participants they had a hot air balloon ride as a child by showing them a photograph.
Which was then carried out by Kimberley Wade who also was asked to help Hopwood with his own experiemtns with the hot air balloon. Kimberley she says ‘I’ve been studying memory for more than a decade, and I still find it incredible that our imagination can trick us into thinking we’ve done something we’ve never really done and lead us to create such compelling, illusory memories.’
‘Our perceptual systems aren’t built to notice absolutely everything in our environment. We take in information through all our senses but there are gaps,” she adds. ‘So when we remember an event, what our memory ultimately does is fills in those gaps by thinking about what we know about the world.’
The hot air balloon photo Loftus showed to her participants:
Sophie Fowkes / Photo & Video Art 