The Causes And Effects Of False Memory

Have you ever heard of a person being convicted because of a witness testimony of events that didn’t actually happen? In many cases, a person is wrongly convicted because an eyewitness does not correctly remember what happened. In some situations, this is because the witness lied to authorities, but in other situations it is because of a false or modified memory. Memories are created all the time, but they are not always accurate. We conclude our past from information that we store in our brains, but we also create memories from what we have expected, seen, heard, or imagined.

The study of creation of false memories has been a topic of interest since the 1930s when Bartlett (1932) conducted the first experiment on the topic. Though the results of this experiment were never replicated, they contributed greatly to research by distinguishing between reproductive and reconstructive memory (Bartlett 1932 as cited in Roediger & McDermott, 1995). Reproductive memory refers to accurate production of material from memory and is assumed to be associated with remembering simplified materials (e.g., lists). Reconstructive memory emphasizes the active process of filling in missing elements while remembering and is associated with materials rich in meaning (e.g., stories).

False memories are an apparent recollection of an event that did not actually occur. The reason why false memories happen are due to the fact that one's brains can only handle so much.There has been several experiment pertaining to the phenomenon, to find how it works.In the next part of the experiment the psychologist showed the participants a word list.False memories are very common and can happen to anyone. On very rare occasions false memories can be harmful to someone and the people around them.False memories are so common that they affect all of a person's memories. False memories can be made more clear by others memories or they could become more distorted. False memories have caused many wrongful convictions. A psychologist

The study found that those without the Alzheimer disease had more false memory when doing these tests. False memory is when a person recalls an event that didn’t actually occurred. I found it interesting that people seek to connect the characters and events in order give meaning to what they are looking at. This is when false memory can occur.

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).

The False Memory Task begins by giving examples of how memory of events can be incorrect, although we might not be aware of it. The goal of this task is to clearly show how easy it is for our memories to have false information. We are often convinced that our memories are correct, especially when they seem to be logical and contain a lot of detail. However, errors in memory are easily made and far more frequent than the majority of people realize. This ZAPS experiment approaches false memory errors in a way where it is easy to point out, and create, false memories.

Affect influences many areas of cognition and has a large impact on memory (Robinson, Watkins, & Harmon-Jones, 2013; Packard, Cahill, & McGaugh, 1994). It has been shown that extreme emotional stress can impair memory, while moderate levels of emotional stress can improve learning and memory (Packard et al., 1994). In humans, emotional content is remembered better than non-emotional content and is richer in details (Choi, Kensinger, & Rajaram, 2013). However, it is not totally clear how emotion influences false memories. Past research has examined the effect of emotion on false memories and has reported mixed findings where emotional intensity has increased and decreased false memory (Choi et al., 2013). Storbeck and Clore (2005) found definite results showing that negative emotional affect reduces false memories in adults. The goal of this research is to investigate how positive and negative affective states influence false memory in children and the effect of emotional regulation strategies on memory formation.

Human minds are filled with all different kinds of memories. From short term memory to long term memory, people’s every day routines are heavily influenced by the memories they possess. Remember the time in elementary school when you peed your pants, or the time in high school when you got to kiss your crush, or how about that time you saw your favorite celebrity star in the mall? What if these memories were not actually real? Are they memories or are they made up stories? Mendez and Fras (2011) suggest that false memories are just recollections of events that did not occur. These memories could be your imagination or a he said she said story heard through the grapevine. False memories can be created by misattributing the source of the information (Sternberg, 2011). Examples of confusion that could lead to false memories can consist of intentions turned into actions, imagination turned into perception, or something only heard about turned into perception (Sternberg, 2011). One of the ways researchers measure false memories is using the Deese/Roedinger–McDermott paradigm (DRM) (Mendez & Fras, 2011). Mendez and Fras suggest that the use of the DRM, “indicates that false memories are associated with the need for complete and integrated memories, self-relevancy, imagination and wish fulfillment, familiarity, emotional facilitation, suggestibility, and sexual content” (2011). Mendez and Fras also state that FMRI studies show that the area of the brain associated with false

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 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

Memory does not work like a video camera, smoothly recording every detail. Instead, memory is more of a constructive process. We remember the details that we find most important and relevant. Due to the reconstructive nature of memory, the assimilation of old and new information has the ability to cause vulnerable memories to become distorted. This is also known as the misinformation effect (Loftus, 1997). It is not uncommon for individuals to fill in memory gaps with what they assume they must have experienced. We not only distort memories for events that we have observed, but, we may also have false memories for events that never occurred at all. False memories are “often created by combing actual memories with suggestions received from

A complementary body of research has demonstrated that human memory is susceptible to making errors that could bring disorder when applied to the justice system (e.g.; Belli, 2012; Frenda, Nichols, & Loftus, 2011; Laney & Takarangi, 2013). In contrast, only occasionally has memory been found markedly resistant to distortion (e.g., Oeberst & Blank, 2012).

Memory attributions are based on various qualitative features of the mental experience. Previous studies have found that despite one experiences an intuitive sense of memory, in which the person believes to be an accurate recording of an encounter; empirical results have shown that this experience can be a reconstructive process, which can lead to the development of false memories (Farrants, 1998; Schacter and Addis, 2007). Past researchers have referred ‘false memories’ as memories that took place within experiments, but experiences that do not correspond to experimentally presented stimuli (Roediger & McDermott, 1995; McDermott, 1996; Payne et al., 1996; Read, 1996; Robinson & Roediger, 1997 cited in Gleaves, Smith, Butler & Spiegel, 2004).

One experiment which explained the theory of False Memory was conducted by Roediger & McDermott in 1995. The aim of the study was to replicate James Deese’s observations of false memory and find the it’s existence in a free recall task. The participants were 36 undergraduate students at Rice University. The independent variable was the addition of critical lures and random words and the dependent variable was the participant’s ability to recall the correct studied words. The results were calculated by finding the mean probability of recall of studied words (65), and of excluded words (.40). They concluded that categorically similar words, were recalled at the same rate as those presented. The participant's actions agreed with these

False memories include distorting features of events and situations or recalling facts and memories that never occurred at all (Roediger and McDermott, 1995).