Reflections on British False Memory Society cases, middle ground, and inferring internal mental processes

Abstract

Nachson's commentary (2025) reveals that although Israel has some differences in dealing with recovered memory cases, there are some similar concerns. On the one hand, Israel deals with such cases with professional judges, and not juries as is usually done in the UK. Nachson notes that these professional judges can be affected by the emotional testimony of the accusers, as opposed to the less emotional accused. This may be a similar dynamic in the UK, but just with jurors. Nachson also relays the fascinating example from an Isreali court case in which an expert witness for the prosecution elevated the memory evidence to such a degree that it trumped other considerations. As we reflect on our data in light of Nachson's comments, it occurs to us that we should point out that out of the total 2364 cases shown in our Table 1 (Patihis & Felstead, 2025) only 227 were found guilty in a court of law, which is 10% of cases. In other words, the legal system may work well in most cases, though the number found guilty out of those in which police pursue a case was 27%. We appreciate Nachson's (2025) concurrence on objective truth in cases, which clarifies his meaning Nachson (2025-a).

Krackow et al.'s (2025) commentary mentions that to reduce wrongful convictions as false memory stories go out of fashion in the media, that regular reminders of the problem be communicated to the public. This is a good idea that could be extended to legal professionals as well. Their second suggestion of false memory societies recording eating disorders, self-harm, and therapy use, are excellent and insightful of the qualitative pattern we have seen in the cases in the caseload files. Almost all cases involved therapy, though we did not quantify that in our data. Krackow et al.'s final suggestion is perhaps the unarticulated conclusion of our data: that practitioners should avoid using memory recovery or enhancement techniques.

To round out our commentaries, we return to a central point we made in the discussion of Patihis and Felstead (2025). The idea of a middle ground can be useful in the sense that a group of well trained scientists might hash out questions of prevalence of a problem in society, size of effects, point out each other's confirmation biases, and so on. Nevertheless, the idea of a middle ground can be a little relativistic about whether there is an objective truth to approximate to.

In this regards, we think those promoting dissociative amnesia as a mental process are not being scientific, and that is as true as Freud in the 1890s, or an esteemed psychiatrist today at an elite university. A solid approach to science involves great caution in assuming invisible internal mental processes that are a step too far beyond a measurable behavior. The behaviorists were fruitful in scientific discovery, and the cognitive psychologists subsequently were admirably cautious in inferring internal mental processes, and also achieved tremendous scientific fruitfulness. Cognitive process that are proximal to a measurable behavior are defensible, but not processes that infer too much. In this regard, assuming memory processes (such as storage, retrieval, consolidation, errors, etc) from behavioral responses is in the realm of science, but the concept of dissociation or dissociative amnesia are just inferring too much from the observed behaviours. Memory-report behaviors (verbal, written, keypress, etc) or neural activation in a brain area, are just not proximal enough to the very complex proposed invisible processes such as dissociation or dissociative amnesia, and these processes cannot be inferred from such data.