[Lanny_McDonald]

Originally Posted by PepsiFree

Isn’t one of the tools to identify false memories a lack of corroborating evidence?

How exactly do you test for that? Someone has a memory of standing in a meadow on a warm sunny day. What corroborating evidence would you be expecting the individual to produce and how would it be produced? Pressed flowers? Deer #### on their shoes? How exactly would you be able to test for that? Not everyone collects souvenirs when they create a memory, especially negative or repressed memories. /snark

What are some of the others psychologists use?

There are a number of ways to test memory. Episodic memory and episodic knowledge are the function likely going to be explored in this case, so neurophysiological testing for these functions. Likely doing verbal and visual testing pertaining to events and then probing the representations of moments in a person's life, looking for both memory traces and possible cognitive impairment. False memories are betrayed by the lack of episodic knowledge pertaining to those memories. Behavioral testing can also be used to validate episodic memories of events, relying on relations between behaviors and mental processes. Inconsistencies betray the validity of the memory.

I know that in many cases, false memories can be affirmed based on repetition, so someone who repeats a false memory or an imperfect memory often may be able to fill in a lot of details and keep those details consistent, but that it is not an indicator that the event happened as remembered.

Repetition is indeed a powerful driver in false memory formation, but not so much in episodic memory. The episodic knowledge associated with the sensory register of the memory is hard to recreate. Smells, sounds, tastes, are all hard to create after the fact and are what can betray false memory. So while a false memory may focus on some specific detail like a color or location, the environmental components are lacking or missing all together.
It's why these environmental components are so powerful in memory recall, even in subjects who may be suffering from some type of cognitive impairment like dementia or Alzheimer's disease. The interesting thing about false memories is they are much more susceptible to augmentation through suggestion, but because of their reliance on semantic constructs, easier to determine as false.