Brandeis Associate Professor Angela Gutchess (PSYCH) published research in the online journal Brain and Cognition along with two graduate co-authors, demonstrating that older adults were more likely than younger adults to believe a lie they had told 45 minutes earlier, according to an article from BrandeisNOW.
The study found that older adults had less accurate memories for items that they lied about compared to younger adults, according to the study’s abstract. The study’s electroencephalography (EEG) data also showed that lying engaged the brain process responsible for working memory, according to BrandeisNOW.
The abstract of the study described the main findings, saying, “These findings demonstrate that lying is another source of misinformation and influences memory differently across the lifespan.”
Laura Paige (Ph.D.’18), the paper’s first author said that, for older adults, “once they’ve committed to a lie, it’s going to alter whether they remember doing something,” to BrandeisNOW.
The findings suggested that telling a lie confused older people’s memory, causing them to have a harder time
recalling what actually happened, according to BrandeisNOW.
Paige also described the finding that lying engaged the same brain process responsible for memory to BrandeisNOW, saying, “Lying alters memory.” She continued, “It creates a new memory for something that didn’t happen.”
The study of 42 young adults (between ages 18 and 24) and older adults (between ages 60 and 92) took a questionnaire that asked the participants whether they had done certain actions the day before, including having a conversation with someone they hadn’t met before or pressing snooze on their alarm clock, among other things, according to the study.
The participants were instructed to tell the truth or to lie on a randomly selected half of the 122 total questions. After 45 minutes they completed the same questionnaire again. The researchers found that the older adults had less accurate memories for the questions they lied about than the younger adults, according to the study.
The study adds to existing research on the malleability of memory and on false memories, or memories of events that never happened or happened differently from how they actually occurred. It investigates a less researched side of this topic, focusing on deliberately inconsistent information that is immediately present, rather than false information presented after an event.
The study was authored by Paige, Eric Fields (a postdoctoral fellow) and Gutchess. The study was sent to the online journal in April and, after being revised, was published online on Oct. 22. The study is associated with Brandeis University and Boston College.
