Misattribution Theory

By and large, researchers assert that the customary understanding regarding research and the subsequent views garnered through the research of memory can straightforwardly provide justification for the understanding of false memories (Schacter, 1999). As a starting point it is easy to interpret the understanding of this theoretical paradigm by accepting that the reconstructive nature of memory was grounded in research by Bartlett’s 1932 study (as cited in Gleaves, et. al, 2004) in which he established that an individual’s experiences or occurrences are reconstructed in the light of present views, using available schemas, that is, knowledge structures. In fact, such schemas guide not only the retrieval of events, but even their storage (Straube,

As such, they have been aptly referred to as source monitoring errors. Throughout research, studies have assembled a tri-part variant understanding regarding how source monitoring can come about, that is to say there are external, internal and reality misattributions in this theoretical paradigm (Johnson et al., 1993). External misattributions are explained as when an individual attributes the source of a genuine experience or occurrence having been attributed to another actual experience or occurrence. Through progressive research, this understanding has been suggested as a viable rationale in regards to the cause of numerous incorrect accusations stemming from inaccurate eyewitness testimony (Lindsay, 2007). This is explained as occurring because rather than choosing the correct perpetrator in police line-ups or police identification photographs it has been found that the witness is prone to choose a recognized individual instead (Lindsay, 2007). Put plainly, the memory of the individual in the police line up or picture is wrongly attributed to the memory of the crime. The understanding of internal source monitoring is defined as the aptitude of discriminating amongst what an individual actually thought and what she or he actually said (Johnson, 1997). There is a high likelihood that individuals could confuse what they think that they

Brainerd, & Reyna, (1998) propose that human memories are stored as two opponent traces. Verbatim traces collect item-specific surface characteristics of information, and gist traces stock meanings of the information being processed. Therefore, in this conceptual classification, false memories are generated generally because of a dependence upon the gist traces because the verbatim traces lose strength and ultimately wane, which makes them less obtainable in memory (Brainerd, & Reyna, 1998). This ultimately suggests that false memories take place as a result of an incapability to isolate both gist and verbatim traces at the initial encoding