Intro: What Are False Memories?
Have you every specifically remembered an event such as going to a basketball game then you were reminded by someone that you didn’t go because you were sick or something. If so, you have created a false memory. The study of false memories began in the early 1990’s when people started to report “recovered” memories of abuse (Laney & Loftus 1). To understand how false memories work, you first need a basic understanding of how the memory works. In general your brain stores memories in different ways depending on what type of memory they are. For example short term memories are most often stored in acoustic form but long term memories are stored by their meanings (Foster 3). Because of this, long term memories are more prone to errors. To be able to convert your short term memories into long term memories you use the diencephalon and hippocampal regions in your brain (Foster 3). This process is the reason that you are able to create and store your long term memories. The removal of one of the Hippocampus will not have much of an effect but if you are to remove both of them you could end up not being able to create new long term memories (Ornstein and Thompson 136). On the other hand memories are eventually forgotten because the brain can only hold on to so many things (Thean 1).
This understanding will help you better comprehend the creation of false memories. False memories are most simply the recollection of events that you believe to have happened when they truly did not. There are many ways scientists believe false memories are created. Some scientist conclude that every time you access your memory you rewrite it a little different so it will never completely be the exact recap of events that peo...
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...s." Technology Review 116.4 (2013): 48. MasterFILE Premier. Web. 2 Feb. 2014. .
Laney, Cara, and Elizabeth F. Loftus. “Recent Advances In False Memory Research.” South African Journal Of Psychology 43.2 (2013): 137-146. Academic Search Premier. Web. 15 Jan. 2014. .
Loftus, Elizabeth F. "Creating False Memories." Scientific American 277.3 (1997): 70. MAS Ultra - School Edition. Web. 18 Feb. 2014. .
Ornstein, Robert, and Richard F. Thompson. The Amazing Brain. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1984.
Thean, Tara. "Remember That? No You Don't. Study Shows False Memories Afflict Us All." Science Time. 11 Nov. 2013. Time Science and Space. Web. 21 Jan. 2014. .
Trafton, Anne. “Neuroscientists Plant False Memories In The Brain.” MIT News Office. 25 July 2013. MIT News. Web. 15 February 2014. .
Memories can be altered based on acquisition, storage, and retrieval. Acquisition is what we notice or perceive based on what we are paying attention to. Storage is what information gets stored into one’s memory. Retrieval correlates with the false memory syndrome, which is recalling a previous traumatic experience that is false but believed to be true. The false memory syndrome is often noticed during police interrogations and leads to coerced confessions, which is when the individual being interrogated is essentially pressured to confess.
Roediger III, H. L., & McDermott, K. B. (1995). Creating False Memories: Remembering Words Not Presented in Lists. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning Memory and Cogntion, 21, 803-814.
Steffens, M., & Mecklenbräuker, S. (2007). False memories: Phenomena, theories, and implications. Zeitschrift Für Psychologie/Journal Of Psychology, 215(1), 12-24. doi:10.1027/0044-3409.215.1.12
Minor consequences, might for instance, be confusing where one has placed something, like car keys. Such confusion can result in a simple inconvenience such as, the wasting of time. Although more serious consequence might for instance occur when one’s memory tricks the individual into giving false eyewitness accounts that might be costly to him, or other third parties. As such, it is important to critically analyze the dynamics of false memory formation and highlight methods that could be used to identi...
This study took place because if memories are believed to be inaccurate then why are things such as eyewitnesses’, in legal proceedings, taken so seriously when their memory can easily be false
Garry, M., & Palaschek, D. L. (2000). Imagination and Memory. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 9, 6-9.
There have been several experiments done to try to prove that false memories can indeed be formed. One experiment, for example, was tried with a 14-year-old boy. The boy was told four memories, one of which was falsely constructed but similar to that of a true memory. The memories that were suggested took place when the boy was about 10 years younger. As the false memory was retold to him, he was asked to explain in detail what he had remembered from that event. Surprisingly, he claimed to remember the event, even though it was falsely created by the interviewer and his brother, and went on to explain what he remember to have happened, details and all. After collecting everything he had said about the four memories, he was told that one of the suggested memories was made-up and he was asked to guess which one it may have been. When he couldn’t decide which one it was, he was told that it was in fact the memory of getting lost in a store. He was confused and had trouble believing the truth.
In recent years there has been a hot debate between "repressed" vs. "false" memories. Neurobiological studies show that both suppression and recall and the creation of false memories are possible. This paper evaluates the evidence but forth by both sides of the controversy and concludes that both are feasible and separate phenomenon, which occur at significant rates in our society.
False Memories are essentially, unintentional human errors, or a state of none-factual creativeness; which results in persons having declared memories of events and situations that did not occur in the actuality of their own lifespan reality history. If they were not unintentional errors they would be deception, which has the nature of a different purpose, morality and legality. False memories have no authenticity, realness or legitimacy, in the subject’s actual life. However they may not be complete false memories: more likely to be a combination of subjugation of previous memory cue’s; or imaginative inventive production, activated and initiated by an origination of external scenario additive as a prompt, indicator or sign, which fuses into memory recall. Therefore ‘False Memories’ are a genuine but inaccurate remembering of experimental data or recall of an genuine occurrences; both of which have rudiments of accuracy and inaccuracy in their transitive attention, giving most ‘False Memories’ partiality.
Roediger, H. L. III, & McDermott, K. B. (1995). Creating false memories: Remembering words not presented in lists. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 21, 803-814
...Dermott, K. B. (1996). Misinformation effects in recall: Creating false memories through repeated retrieval. Journal of Memory and Language, 5(2), 300-318. doi: 10.1006/jmla.1996.0017
...pporting details. At the conclusion of the article, the authors share their thoughts on how it might be virtually impossible to determine when a memory is true or false. I also like their willingness to continue the investigations despite how difficult it might be to obtain concrete answers.
In the text, we learned about memory, which is the ability to store and retrieve information. Looking further into memory, more specifically the seven “sins” of memory, it included memory misattribution. This is defined as the assigning a recollection or an idea to the wrong source. A part of memory is recalling when, where, and how information was acquired, commonly known as source memory. A type of memory misattribution is false recognition, a feeling of familiarity about something that hasn’t been encountered before. Although this is more common in people with damage to their frontal lobes, there is a subjective experience of this that occurs in everyday déjà vu experiences. Individuals with neurological damage
The findings of this research would reinforce findings of previous research specifically in relation to the robustness of false memories. The experiment undertaken by students will also be helpful to the study of false memories specifically to test the reproducibility of this type of experiment.