There were no statistically significant differences between the groups for the virtual reality scenarios, a result that Kloft says may indicate memory decay over time in all participants.Ĭognitive neuropsychopharmacologist Manoj Doss, a postdoc at Johns Hopkins University who was not involved in the study, has used word association and other tasks in his own research to demonstrate that tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the main psychoactive ingredient in cannabis, increases false memories when participants attempt to retrieve information they’d previously learned. As before, they found lower memory accuracy in the word-association test in those who had been intoxicated compared with sober participants.
They also re-interviewed the subjects about the VR scenarios using a combination of old and new questions. To look for longer-term effects of cannabis, the experimenters called the subjects back a week later and tested them again on the word lists, this time with a few different dummy words thrown in. When researchers interviewed the participants afterward using a combination of leading and non-leading questions, those who were intoxicated showed higher rates of false memory for both the eyewitness and perpetrator scenarios compared with controls. “One person even ran away so quickly that they ripped out the whole VR setup and it fell to the ground,” she says. Some participants laughed and talked to the virtual characters in the scenarios, Kloft reports, while others became paranoid and required assistance in stealing the purse.
The researchers observed a range of effects associated with cannabis as the intoxicated subjects interacted in these virtual environments. In the “perpetrator scenario,” participants entered a crowded bar and were instructed to commit a crime themselves-to steal a purse. In the first, the “eyewitness scenario,” participants observed a fight on a train platform, after which a virtual co-witness recounted the incident but with several errors, including falsely recalling a police dog that wasn’t part of the altercation.
Hoping to imbue these tests with more real-world relevance than a list of words, Kloft and colleagues designed two immersive virtual reality scenarios involving common crimes. In the next two tasks, the researchers wanted to see if they could induce false memories by providing misinformation to the participants. But while the sober participants mostly falsely remembered words that were strongly associated with words on the original lists, the intoxicated participants also selected less-related and completely unrelated terms. As expected, both the sober and the intoxicated participants falsely remembered some of the dummy words. In the first task, the team asked the volunteers to memorize lists of words, and then to pick out those words from test lists that also included dummy words. After that, the researchers tested them in three different tasks designed to induce false memories. Participants, who were occasional cannabis users, were given a vaporizer containing either cannabis or a hemp placebo and then told to inhale deeply and hold their breath for 10 seconds.
CHILDHOOD MEMORIES WHILE HIGH SERIES
In order to further investigate the connection between cannabis and false memory formation, Kloft and collaborators recruited 64 volunteers for a series of experiments. Some participants laughed and talked to the virtual characters. Consequently, the growing acceptance of cannabis worldwide raises questions not only about how the drug affects memory, but also about how law enforcement officials should conduct interviews with suspects, victims, and witnesses who may be under the influence or regular users of the drug. This kind of false remembering can pose difficulties for people gathering reliable testimony in the event of a crime, says Kloft, a PhD student in psychopharmacology and forensic psychology at Maastricht University in the Netherlands.
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