Claim to fame coming. My freshman seminar was focused on false memories and so we covered a lot of Loftus' work on memory, including the anecdote about how she was driving with a friend (also a Pysch prof) and her friend's young son while talking about whether it was possible to create false memories.

So her friend tested it out, convincing her son that he'd been lost at a shopping mall and that a security guard had found him. She supplied a lot of the initial memories but once he got started he added a lot of his own.

Must be wild to be the child of a psychologist because every time they want to skip the IRB they just test something on their family.

This anecdote became pretty well known in the area of memory.

Well, one day one of my friends walked into my dorm room, saw one of Loftus' books on my shelf, picked it up, said, "I'm in this book," and flipped to the story. He was the young son with the false memory of being lost at a shopping mall.

We're still friends. He and his family of much more well adjusted kids came to visit us last summer.