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False Memories

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Fact vs. Fiction: The Truth About False Memories
Memories are important cognitive processes that are utilized every day. Research indicates that humans have both true and false memories. The question is: how do they differ? True memory enables individuals to recall past experiences with little distortion, while false memory allows individuals to recant situations and occupy any memory gaps with external information in order to truly believe that an event has occurred. In a day and age where memory distortion or memory loss is quite common, many people believe that it is quite easy to implant false memories. However, research has proven quite the opposite. Although it is possible, planting false memories is a difficult, time-consuming task, …show more content…

During the process of reconsolidation, memories are often altered and stored as less accurate representations of the past experience. Inaccurate memories are very common, due to the wide variety of influences that are constantly presented in every day life. Both constructive and reconstructive processes produce encoding and remembering, which create both true and false memories (Johnson et al., 2012). The failure to recall a specific memory is often associated with the failure to recall a memory in its originally stored form. However, there are distinct functional differences between the two.
False memories are the result of actual memories combining with influential suggestions from an outside source. During the creation of false memories, retrieval is altered when the original memory that is impaired becomes overwritten by the interpretation of the influence from misleading information (Roediger, Jacoby, & McDermott, 1996). While forgetting is an error of omission (failure to provide a response or action), false memories are errors of commission (incorrect actions or …show more content…

Cryptomnesia is described as “when a person thinks he or she has come up with a new idea, yet has only retrieved a stored idea and failed to attribute the idea to its proper source” (Gazzaniga et al., 2011, p.305). This type of misattribution is contextualized in every day life by occurrences of unintentional plagiarism. Unintentional plagiarism occurs very frequently and in most instances, is indistinguishable because it encompasses the unconscious impact of memory.
The third category of misattribution is false recall and false recognition, which is “when individuals falsely recall or recognize items or events that never happened” (Schacter, 1999, p.189). Considering recognition and recall as they pertain to psychology, recognition is described as memories that do not require a great deal of mental effort to attain information, where as recollections are memories that are placed in long-term storage and require a greater depth of processing. When analyzing false recognition and false recall, false memories appear to stem from both an encoding and retrieval

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