Experimental psychology has much to offer in the current debate about memories for childhood abuse.
However, laboratory scientists, with their enormous cognitive authority to define reality for the rest of the population, must be especially conservative when arguing that laboratory results on memory generalize to contested memories of abuse. An even more important difference is the purported similarity of the false item to the true items. In most cases of contested memories, one side argues that the memories are not just false in detail, but false in essence. She can actually see or hear or feel an event that never occurred. That Newsweek leapt from reporting PET results showing various patterns of brain activation for remembering true and very similar words on a list to making such a claim is clearly worrisome.