Memorised wrongly - why we remember images wrongly
Many people misremember pictures of Mr Monopoly or Pikachu. The phenomenon has now been scientifically studied for the first time. How it comes about, however, remains unclear.
What does Mr Monopoly, the mascot of the classic board game, look like? Many remember the logo of an older man with a moustache, top hat and monocle. The memory is deceptive, however: Mr. Monopoly has never worn a monocle. Reports of misremembered logos and images are piling up on the internet. There, this observed phenomenon has been christened the visual Mandela effect. The name comes from the fact that several people falsely remember that the civil rights activist Nelson Mandela died in prison in the 1980s. Now, researchers Wilma Bainbridge and Deeprasi Prasad from the US University of Chicago have demonstrated for the first time that the effect exists - and that many people falsely remember in a similar way. Their findings have appeared in a preliminary paper, the final version of which will be published in the journal Psychological Science.
100 test subjects were asked to distinguish between original and manipulated versions of well-known symbols and pop culture figures. In addition to Mr. Monopoly, they were shown, among other things, the VW logo and the flagship Pokémon Pikachu from the Japanese anime series. In the majority of cases and out of conviction, the test persons opted for the altered images, believing that they were the originals. When they were asked to trace the logos from memory in another experiment, almost every second image contained the same falsely remembered features - such as Monopoly-san's monocle or Pikachu with a blackened tail tip.
How the Mandela effect comes about, however, the researchers could not clarify: The theory that the false memories arise due to imprinted ideas only applied to a few of the logos. An eye-tracking experiment also showed that the test persons looked at all the pictures with the same attention and in a similar way. Possibly, the researchers concluded, the Mandela images were simply more memorable than the originals.
Spectrum of Science
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Original article on Spektrum.deCover: © Sven Hoppe / dpa / picture alliance (detail). / An elderly woman plays the game Memory. She has to remember the position of identical pictures and put them together. (Symbolic image with photo model)
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