Remembering Deese's 1959 articles: The Zeitgeist, the sociology of science, and false memories

Two contemporaneous reports by J. Deese-one concerned with correct recall (1959a), the other with recall intrusions (1959b)-have differed dramatically in their citations to date. The differences represent an unusually compelling instance of the operation of the scientific Zeitgeist. The article dealing with correct recall was congruent with the Zeitgeist of memory research when it was published. Hence it flourished. Just the opposite was true of the article on intrusions, which by the mid 1970s had gone into eclipse. A markedly different Zeitgeist in the 1990s, however, led two investigators simultaneously and independently to adapt Deese's intrusion method to the investigation of false memories.