Project M2 : False Memory

Memory is one of the most critical parts of cognition. It is important because it is involved in almost every aspect of cognition including problem solving, decision making, attention, and perception. Because of this importance, people rely on one’s memory to make important decisions. The value of one’s memory in this society is so high that it is used as evidence to either save one’s life or kill one’s life during murder trials. But as many of the cognitive psychologists know, human’s memory can cause many errors. One of these errors is false memory which is either remembering events that never happened or remembering events differently from the actual event. This finding of false memory raised big interests among psychologists and

False memory, second to forgetting, is one of the two fundamental types of deformation in episodic memory (Holliday, Brainerd & Reyna, 2010). Simply stated, false memory is the propensity to account normal occurrences as being a fraction of a key experience that in actuality was not an element of that experience (Holliday, Brainerd & Reyna). False memories are something nearly everyone experience. Furthermore, false memory is defined as placed together, constructed representations of mental schemas that are incorrect (Solso, MacLin & MacLin, 2008). Individuals do not intentionally fabricate their memory. However, perceptual and social factors are a few things that a responsible for manipulating memory (Solso, MacLin & MacLin, 2008).

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

Phonological and semantic lists can cause high, strong rates of false memories. Phonological false memories would peat in shorter durations of a presentation, but semantic false memory rates would start to increase with more spread out presentation times. It is also theorized that the semantic and phonological lists are similar with spreading activation, but the processing could differ when it was the speed and depth. Semantic false memory requires deeper conceptual processing for the semantic false memory to activate. Shallow perceptual activation of phonological lures decay faster than semantic activation. When other factors are constant for false recall rates, the rates for phonological and semantic lists are similar. The False recognition rates for phonological lists are lower than semantic lists by twenty to thirty percent.

Human is smarter than other animals because we have a strong ability to learn and to remember. We have memories so we don’t need to relearn everything every time when we see have to use these knowledges. Then, if I ask a question, “Can you trust everything that you remembered?” Most people may say “Yes!”. However, according to the speech given by Elizabeth Loftus, a psychological scientist who studies false memory for decades, the truth might be different from what most of us think.

Although it may seem feasible for an individual to generate an inaccurate memory of an experienced event based on misinformation, it may not seem feasible for an individual to create a complete false memory of an event they have never experienced; however, research has shown that imagination can be a powerful source of false memories. In the imagination inflation effect, performed actions versus imagined actions are confused in hindsight. Humans also have the ability to imagine other people’s behavior. (Decety & Grezes, 2006).

As for the evidence of the working memory system, two British researches, Alan Baddley and Graham Hitch, have proposed a model in how to explain the working memory system. They have suggested that the system contains many different parts, and that the main working part of the system is the central executive. This central part is able to delegate tasks for the low-level “assistants” to handle, since these assistants are not able to actually analyze a situation on their own. The articulatory rehearsal loop is one of the assistances that allows a person to remember, and is the most beneficial in many ways. This assistant allows you to recall information that is previously stated by repetitively stating the information in our head, which is known as subvolcalization, or silent speech. Furthermore, Baddley and Hitch’s model suggest that we are able to see the existence of this working memory through “sound-alike” errors, because our bodies rely on this rehearsal loop or memory to recall information. In a study, there was a control group which was given a normal digit-span test. In the other group, people were asked to perform concurrent articulation when they took the test. Although this concurrent articulation is not difficult, it does affect the use of the articulatory loop and decreases the memory. With that being said, manipulation of a

This essay addresses the working memory model which was proposed by Baddeley and Hitch (1974 in Smith & Kosslyn, 2007) as a response to Atkinson and Shiffrins (1968 in Smith, 2007) multi-store model. According to Baddely and Hitch the multi-store model failed to explain most of the complexities of the human memory and viewed it as being too simplistic. They argued that the short term memory store must have more components rather it being a single inflexible store as suggested previously by Atkinson and Shiffrin (1968). The working memory model is therefore an enhancement of the multi store model. According to Baddeley and Hitch working memory is a limited- capacity system that stores and processes information.

False Memories are fundamentally, unintended human errors, which results in people having memories of events and situations that did not actually occur. It’s worth noting that in humans there are both true and false memories, these false memories occur when a mental experience is incorrectly taken to be a representation of a past event. For example, when people are asked to describe something that happened at a particular time, people rarely deliver accurate answers. Based on research, in eyewitness testimony, the confidence people show while recalling

Roediger and McDermott’ (1995), experiment based on Deese’s (1959) experiment renewed the interest in false memories and invented the Deese-McDermott-Roediger Paradigm which many studies surround. Their study focused on eliciting false memories through receiving lists of words and being asked to recall those that were present from a separate list that included a critical word that if recalled, showed presence of false memory effects. Notably many participants were sure that the

While these studies do not fully exemplify the harmful reality of false memories, they take a step towards understanding how these false memories might occur in real-world settings. As Loftus (1997) discusses, it is only natural to wonder whether or not this research is applicable to real-world situations such as being interrogated by law officers or in psychotherapy. What researchers have learned, and can apply to this practical problem is that there are social demands on individuals to remember and come up with detailed memories. Not only that, but memory construction through suggestion and imagining events has been shown to be explicitly encouraged when people are having trouble remembering events (Loftus, 1997).

The article is about false memory. The researchers are trying to find out the effect of planting positive false memory in an individual. The authors of the article are; Cara Laney from University of Leicester, Erin K. Morris from University of California, Irvine, Daniel M. Bernstein from Kwantlen University College and University of Washington, Briana M. Wakefield from University of

Two scientists successfully implanted fake memories into mince. The experience was simple. Mouse A was put in a box where his foot got electrocuted. It brain encoded memory of fear. Now mouse B is put in the box, encoded with mouse A memory, and reacted with fear. This behavior was recorded to be abnormal because mouse B never got shock. Several experiments was conducted to created false memory and they had indeed succeed.

Mrs. F is having difficulty following recipes while cooking as she is unable to mentally adjust the amount of each ingredient called for in order to make only two portions. This is because of a deficit in her memory, specifically her working memory (WM). While memory is defined as the “storage of things learned and retained from an organism’s activity or experience” (Merriam-Webster, 2015), WM can be described as the cognitive systems that are required to temporarily store and manipulate information (Baddeley, 2012). This report provides an overview of the theoretical multicomponent WM framework as well as an in-depth look at one component of the framework, termed the phonological loop (PL).

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.