Misattribution of memory
[4] For example, a person may falsely recall creating an idea, thought, or joke, not intentionally engaging in plagiarism, but nevertheless believing to be the original source of memory.
[6] In one particular case of source confusion, a female rape survivor falsely accused a memory doctor of being her rapist.
Verbatim traces are the surface details of physical stimuli, which encompass the clear visual images and source information of an experience.
[16] Fuzzy-trace theory thus proposes that misattributed memories arise due to the short lifespan of verbatim traces, being that the quality of source information is rapidly declining.
[2] The misattribution error reflects an adaptive memory system in which information that does not require people to remember all the specific details is lost.
[2] The use of semantic gists may be a fundamental mechanism of memory, allowing people to categorize information and generalize across situations, a function associated with higher intelligence.
Additionally, patients with amnesia or Alzheimer's disease have a reduced level of false recognition, believed to be caused by taking too many trials to create the semantic gist information needed for the attribution error.
Similar to the study by Henry L. Roediger and Kathleen McDermott, subjects were read a list of associated words before they went into the PET scanner.
Monitoring the blood flow in the brain revealed there were in the left medial temporal lobe for both veridical and illusory recognition.
T. Awipi and L. Davachi sought to provide evidence of competing subregions in the medial temporal lobe (MTL) that differed on the type of content they encoded.
In one of the earliest studies involving misattribution, the Canadian cognitive psychologist Bruce Whittlesea presented subjects with a list of common words.
One such study from Stanford University in 1993 monitored subjects' memory for solutions found to a word puzzle game when paired against a computer opponent.
In an extension of this test, after each puzzle solution was generated, participants were asked one of two questions: is this word greater than 3 letters long?
While the same correlation of confidence level and error type were seen, participants were much more likely to plagiarize answers after making a physical judgement as compared to a semantic one.
[3] Researchers Henry L. Roediger and Kathleen McDermott conducted an experiment in 1995 that dealt with a procedure developed by James Deese.
[20] In 1996, Ira Hyman Jr. and Joel Petland published a study showing that subjects can falsely 'remember' anecdotes from their childhood, based on suggestions from the researcher and corroboration of these fictitious events from family members.
In a similar study, researchers convinced participants that they had played a prank on a first grade teacher involving toy slime.
[22] Thus, the presence of specific personal details from a participant's life greatly increase the chance that a false memory is successfully implanted.
Examples of flashbulb memories include how one remembers learning about the explosion of the Challenger shuttle, the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, or any other severely traumatic or outstanding event in a person's life.
[23] Early research done by Brown and Kulik (1977) found that flashbulb memories were similar to photographs because they could be described in accurate, vivid detail.
In this study, participants described their circumstances about the moment they learned of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy as well as other similar traumatic events.
Neiser and Harsh (1992) gave participants a questionnaire about the 1986 Challenger explosion at two periods of time: 1) The day after the incident, and 2) Three years later.
While individual differences exist, it is widely accepted that young children are highly susceptible to leading questioning and biased interviewing techniques, due to their insufficient cognitive development.
[1] Hence, researchers have applied techniques to minimize misattribution by encouraging individuals to focus on distinctive characteristics, rather than on properties that may elicit the influence of personal attitudes.
[30] One important question under consideration, is whether people confuse misleading suggestions and personal attitudes for their real memories of a witnessed event.
researchers have focused on determining the circumstances under which misattribution might occur, and the factors that could increase or decrease these errors, in an eyewitness situation.
Cohen and Faulkner discovered similar age-related source confusion errors ten years earlier when studying short events rather than word lists.
[36] Participants were asked to carry out, imagine, or watch a series of short events (placing a fork on top of a plate, putting a pen inside a mug, etc.).
[35] This may shed some light on the common phenomenon of Alzheimer's patients mistaking frequently presented non-famous faces as being those of celebrities[37] or asking the same question repeatedly.
Patients may recognize faces or identify that the subject of the question is important and was discussed recently, but they have no memory for the meaning attached to these common stimuli and so will misattribute this familiarity or simply ask again.
