Cognitive Psychology False Memory Essay

We have such strong memories of these false things because we are mashing multiple real things together inside our heads.  An example of this is how many people remember a genie movie from the 90's called Shazaam starring a comedian named Sinbad. This movie never existed, but many have vivid memories of this movie and the plot. Reddit member EpicJourneyMan explicitly remembers viewing the movie at work at a movie rental

Research prior to Deese’s 1959 study saw few account s of false recognition from a list. This created the idea that more coherent materials were needed to create false memories. Deese was interested in determining why some lists gave rise to false recognition when others didn’t. His general conclusion was that lists where the associations went in both backward and forward directions tended to elicit false recall (Deese 1959 as cited in Roediger & McDermott, 1995). Deese’s study that used a single trial, free recall paradigm which Roediger and McDermott used to try and replicate his results, which found that people were often accurate in remembering lists after one trial. Roediger and McDermott (1995) examined the false recall and false recognition of

Another argument against the Memory Theory involves it’s circular nature if fake memories are implanted within a person who did not actually experience what the memories are about, and only ‘seems to remember’, via brainwashing for example.

In summary, the discussion about the false memory syndrome is far from being complete. False memory syndrome makes it difficult to judge the viability of an event and is very hard to banish from ones memory. A small false creation embeds in the mind for a very long time. Once an individual creates a false memory, it becomes part and parcel of his or her life. Therapeutic sessions should be taken with care so as to reduce false memory implanted to reduce

This method is appropriate to observe one’s false memory since it is designed bias the participants to recall particular words that was not in the sequence that they were presented with. These particular distractor words were sleep, needle, sweet, chair, mountain, and rough and they were presented one at a time. The sequence of words When the participants report that one of these particular distractor words was in the sequence, then that is the evidence that the participants have created false memories.

A psychologist named Elizabeth loftus has studied for how easy the brain is to manipulate into believing false things. She essentially believes the brains can be manipulated to a point where someone else can alter our memories that make one, them. She says that false memories that there could be a benefit to false memories because it's like a system that allows us to update our memories when errors are found in a memory.false memories. The problem is that the system could be used against us and there is no defense to counter it.

The phenomenon of explaining false memory occurrences is rising. Researchers have developed a paradigm known as “Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm” in efforts to examine false memories in depth (Dehon, Laroi & Van der Linden, 2011). In the DRM paradigm, participants are introduced to and asked to memorize a list of correlated words congregating towards a vital subject word that is never introduced (Dehon, Laroi & Van der Linden, 2011). The rate that participants recall this false decoy is alarming. Researchers have provided several explanations to explain for the false memories in the DRM paradigm (Dehon, Laroi & Van der Linden, 2011). The two most notable in explaining false memories in the DRM paradigm are the fuzzy-trace theory and the activation/monitoring theory (Dehon, Laroi & Van der Linden, 2011). While the two theories are particularly dissimilar, they both sustain that information developing throughout list encoding attributes an essential part in false memory construction (Dehon, Laroi & Van der Linden, 2011).

False memories created by non-presented akin words demonstrating the vulnerability of memory to being interfered.

Neurobiological studies show that both suppression and recall and the creation of false memories are possible. (Kandel, 1994) In this paper both sides of the debate will be analyzed and evaluated.

In cognitive psychology, the Activation/ Monitoring Theory (AMT) and the Fuzzy Trace Theory (FTT) are frameworks which account for the false memory findings in the DRM paradigm. Roediger & McDermott, (1995) define false memories as “...either remembering events that never happened or remembering them quite differently from the way they happened” (p. 803). The DRM paradigm refers to an experiment; in which participants are given a list of closely related words to learn, for instance: ‘duvet’, ‘pillow’, ‘pyjamas’. Subsequently, in a recall or recognition task, participants often falsely recall/

The materials used for the experiment was a website called Coglab: The online cognition lab. The scores were conducted simply by using the website and doing the “False Memory” lab and a computer. Participants were asked to read the instructions in the Coglab website.

False memories have been the subject of many studies since Deese (1959) investigated their effects.

In the first follow-up interview, roughly eighteen percent remembered the false event and in the second follow-up, twenty-five percent remembered the false event (Hyman, Husband, & Billing 1995). As this study indicates, memories are more susceptible to modification when the passage of time allows the original memory to fade. Being lost, however, is not the same as being abused. Another crucial component involved in the formation of false memories is the imagination inflation. Loftus (1997) found that the more often an individual imagined an unperformed action, the more likely they were to later on remember having performed it.

Memory facilitates necessary functions in daily life activities, but it is not a perfect mechanism in operation. Goldstein (2011) states that memory is, “…the process involved in retaining, retrieving, and using information about stimuli, images, events, ideas, and skills after the original information is no longer present” (p.116). There are many adaptive functions within the complexities of the human memory system and the interlinked constructs between each function leave room for doubt in the accuracy of recollection. Study of the human mind has opened avenues of discovery on the inner workings of our brains and the resulting knowledge suggests that humans are prone to creating false memories and even remembering things that never actually happened. A great deal of information has been written explaining the nature of memory errors and within the following pages a real-life case offers a glimpse into how recall distortions and memory errors can wield unpleasant consequences. Memory errors can be avoided with a significant effort, but the truth remains that no one is perfect and memories are subject to individual bias.

When people think of memory problems, their first thought is probably forgetting. However, that is just a small portion of memory problems as a whole. For example, in a study done at Boston University, students were shown a set of pictures of situations such as a careless student leaning back in his chair, a man taking an orange from the bottom of the pile, and a grocery bag ripping and spilling groceries. 68% of the students involved in the experiment claimed they remembered seeing the so-called cause picture of the bag ripping. The problem was that there was no cause photo for the spilled groceries. When the students saw the effect and not the cause, they made an assumption. This proved that inferences can cause us to think we remember something that never actually happened. Therefore, memories can actually be illusions. Recent memory research has focused on why we have memory problems such as remembering the first letter of a word but not the whole word. A