#14085 - False Memory - Psychology

What do memory illusions tell us about the nature of human memory and what are the practical implications?

What evidence suggests the people exhibit false memories? Why do these false memories arise?

Why do false memories occur? What are the practical implications

False memories

Definition: A memory that is either partly or wholly inaccurate but is accepted as a real memory by the person doing the remembering

-It is a characteristic of normal rather than pathological remembering

-Roediger and McDermott 1995- developed a paradigm that could induce high levels of false recall and false recognition

-Participants are read a list of words that are semantically related to a critical word that is never presented. At test participants claim to remember many of the critical words

-E.g bed, night, tired- many of the subjects heard sleep which is the critical word that was not presented sleep- Subjects claimed to remember similar amounts of non-presented words and they did with words that were actually presented

-When test is repeated with a longer list of words- there Is a greater rate of false recall rate

Mechanism

Causes of false memories

Reyna and Lloyd (1997) set out to compare and evaluate explanations offered by contemporary theories of false memory: constructivism, source monitoring, and fuzzy-trace theory

-Implicit associative response that doesn’t come to conscious attention- E.g implicit association with the word sleep so when they see sleep later they state they recognise seeing the item when they had actually generated it themselves. Studies have shown that more similar the presented and associative words are the more likely it is that a false recognition error will be made

-Earlies theories of false memory is constructivism-Bradford, Barlay, Franks- 1972

-This theory describes that people remember what they perceive to be the meaning of the experience- so after events are experienced they are then interpreted and integrated into semantic structures and the actual content of the memory/surface form disappears. However this has been disconfirmed by studies that show that the surface form can be retained in memory for longer than a few mintues

-Schema theory- memories are stored into different subcategories determined by previous experiences

-Schema describes neural networks that form a mental structure of preconceived ideas – contradictions to the schema are interpreted as exceptions or are distorted to fit schemata.

The presence of schema was shown by Barlett- asked participiants to read Native American folk tale- war of ghosts and recall it a year later- all the participants transformed the details of a story in such a way that is reflected their cultural norms and expectation

Lastly,Ronald Cotton legal case study also shows that schema theory works. This case study shows that pictures that were shown to the eye-witness in the line-up significantly influenced her memory of the criminal. Since the real rapist was not presented in the line-up, the eye-witness picked the one that resembled the criminal the most and from that moment her memory was changed. In her memory, was now her rapist Ronald Cotton even though he was totally innocent. Later on even though she saw her real rapist, Bobby Poole, she did notrecognizehim because in her memory the rapist was now Ronald Cotton.

-Fuzzy trace theory- is based on the idea that surface form and meaning content of an experience are processed in parallel

-The surface form of memory is item specific information and is related to as verbatim traces

-Meaning content of an experience which are representations that are semantic are called gist traces.

-Once the verbatim and gist traces are processed in parallel they are stored separately

-Fuzzy theory predicts that because the storage of verbatim and gist traces are dissociated their retrieval is also dissociated which can cause them to work as opponents in false memory

-True memory verbatim and gist traces work as convergent processes both supporting recognition and recall in subjects. In false memory gist and verbatim traces work as divergent processes with retrieval supressing false memory and gist retrieval supporting it

-Gist retrieval supports false memory because the meanins seem familiar but verbatim retrieval supresses false memory by neutralising meaning familiarity. As acess to verbatim memory deteriorates more quicly over time than gist memory, Fuzzy trace theory predicts that false memory will positively correlated with amount of time that has passes between presentation of material and memory test

-As more time passes- participants will have more acess to gist memory which supports false memory and less acess to verbatim memory

-Source monitoring theory

Neuroimaging

PET scanner-When looking at the brain activity during the true and false recognition tasks- it was very similar. Most of the brain activity was in the left medial temporal lobe. Key differences is that during false recognition part of the frontal lobe showed greater activity when presented with false recognition than with ture one- this shows that were some discrepancy but were overcome by powerful memory illusion

Practical implications

Children eyewitness testimony: Young children are highly susceptible to leading questions and biased interviewing techniques due to insufficient cognitive development

-Sutides have shown the children become more accurate in their recollections with increasing age

-Young children are more prone to false memories- this is due to memory compensation stratetgies of imagery and imagination. As children age, other memory strategies such as auditory rehearsal or semantic relationsips replace reliance on imagery- leading to more reliable memories

Neuropsychology of confabulation

Confabulation is defined as the spontaneous production of false memories:...