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What is the effect on memory when seemingly innocuous photos accompany false reports of the news? We asked people to read news headlines of world events, some of which were false. Half the headlines appeared with photographs that were tangentially related to the event; others were presented without photographs. People saw each headline only once, and indicated whether they remembered the event, knew about it, or neither. Photos led people to immediately and confidently remember false news events. Drawing on the Source Monitoring Framework (Johnson, Hashtroudi, & Lindsay, 1993), we suggest that people often relied on familiarity and other heuristic processes when making their judgments and thus experienced effects of the photos as evidence of memory for the headlines.

A growing body of research shows that doctored photographs can change memories for events, and other work shows that genuine photographs have a powerful effect on memory in their own right (Brown and Marsh, 2008, Garry and Wade, 2005, Garry et al., 2007, Lindsay et al., 2004, Sacchi et al., 2007, Strange, Hayne and Garry, 2008, Strange et al., 2006, Strange, Wade and Hayne, 2008 and Wade et al., 2002). In one study, people heard a description of a fictitious childhood event while looking at their class photo. After a week, they were twice as likely to remember the event than people who only heard the description (Lindsay et al., 2004). In another study, priming people with photographs of various locations often led them, one to three weeks later, to believe they had visited those locations (Brown & Marsh, 2008). Genuine photographs can have remarkable effects on what we remember and believe. The Source Monitoring Framework (SMF; Johnson et al., 1993 and Lindsay, 2008) provides ways of thinking about these effects. For one thing, when people consider suggestions about a fictitious autobiographical experience, a related photograph can be a source of detailed images. Subsequently, combining these images with products of imagination can create compelling false memories. In other words, photographs can furnish the imagination with content resembling percepts, thereby fostering false memories (see Lindsay, 2008, for a review). The emphasis here is on the word subsequently: in these studies, photographs wield their effects over time. Can genuine photographs cause memory distortions immediately? That is the question we ask here. According to the SMF, the subjective experience of remembering arises from an (often unconscious) decision process. Mental events with properties characteristic of memories are likely to be attributed to memory, especially if they arise in a context that makes memory a salient source of thoughts and images (Johnson et al., 1993 and Lindsay, 2008). In other words, when people try to remember an event, true or false, they use what they know and believe about themselves and the world to run a mental simulation of the event, seeing whether they can conjure up related thoughts and images that add up to a memory. Generally, this strategy works: people are more likely to generate evidence of a prior experience if they really did have it. But false memories arise when mechanisms other than genuine prior experience produce similar (yet false) characteristics. They arise when people run mental simulations of a false event, manufacturing thoughts and images, and mistake them for remembering (see for example, Garry et al., 2007, Lindsay, 2008, Lindsay et al., 2004 and Wade et al., 2002). In the present experiment, we asked people to take a quiz about world events. News headlines appeared briefly on a monitor. The headlines described significant international or national events from the past few years (such as Bin Laden Offers Truce to Europe, Not US). On half the trials, the headline appeared with photos. The photos never depicted the event described in the headline; instead, the photo was tangential—such as a head shot of Osama Bin Laden. On other trials, no photo accompanied the headline. We asked people to read each headline and then tell us if they remembered the specific instance in which they first learned about that event, merely knew that it happened, or neither. The twist was that two of the headlines in the set were completely false—for example, Blair Under Fire for Botched Baghdad Rescue Attempt; Won't Step Down. Half the time these false headlines, too, appeared with a tangential photo (such as Tony Blair at the podium in Parliament). What should be the effect of seeing a photo paired with a true headline? The SMF suggests that people will use the photo to help them generate related thoughts and images. For example, seeing the true headline Bin Laden Offers Truce to Europe, Not US along with the photo of bin Laden should help people produce related thoughts (“Yes, he sometimes releases recorded messages”) and related images (such as politicians reacting to the message). Put another way, the photo should act as a kind of cognitive scaffolding, helping people to produce these mental products easily, while generating little detail about cognitive operations—two qualities that are typically associated with fluent processing and genuine experience ( Alter and Oppenheimer, 2009, Johnson et al., 1993 and Lindsay, 2008). The SMF predicts the same processes will also occur when people see a photo appear with a false headline. That is, seeing a photo of Tony Blair alongside the false headline Blair under fire for botched Baghdad rescue attempt; won't step down should help people to produce related thoughts (“Oh….that's right….some people in the UK were really angry with Tony Blair for participating in the Iraq war”) and to produce familiar images such as Tony Blair with military advisors, hostages, and protestors. In other words—and as with the true photos—photos should provide cognitive scaffolding, helping people generate details about temporal, spatial, and affective qualities, and very little detail about cognitive operations—all qualities associated with fluent processing and memories of genuine experience. These mental products, too, should be attributed to a real memory.