Visual Mandela Effect

Visual Mandela Effect

Reviewed by Faisal Zaidi

The Mandela effect for visual icons, such as a detail of a familiar character or emblem, measured in experiments by Prasad and Bainbridge.

What it is

In a first study, 100 participants picked the original version of 40 familiar icons from three options, and for some icons an altered version was chosen more often than the correct one. The 2022 experiments found the errors were consistent and specific, were not explained by attention or by how people had seen the images, and appeared spontaneously in recall.

In effect

In the article on the Mandela effect, it is the measured, laboratory form of the shared error.

What it does not say

It covers a small set of images that produce the effect; most familiar images did not.

Sources

  1. Prasad, D., & Bainbridge, W. A. (2021). The visual Mandela effect: Evidence for specific shared false memories in popular iconography. Journal of Vision, 21(9), 2121.
  2. Prasad, D., & Bainbridge, W. A. (2022). The visual Mandela effect as evidence for shared and specific false memories across people. Psychological Science, 33(12), 1971-1988.