Author Archives: Kenzo Le Vaillant

Are our memories really accurate ?

Accessible Science

This is the second part of the article :

The Seven Sins of Memory by Daniel L. Schacter

The second kind of problems humans memory has are different types of distortions.

Distortions

Distortions are when we remember the object or the event but not properly. It is also when we remember things that aren’t true.

Misattribution

One way of distortion is misattribution. This is connecting an idea, action or anything to a wrong source.

For example when we think something happened on a certain day but it was actually on a completely different day.

Misattribution itself has 3 categories.

The first is correct information linked to the wrong source.

This one is found more frequently in older people.

The next is the absence of a subjective experience of remembering.

In this case, we think of a memory to have been an imagination instead of something that happened in reality.

One example of this is the false fame effect.

False fame effect

An experiment in which participants were taught names of famous people and non famous people.

On a test the next day, non famous name were often mistaken as famous names.

The last is remembering something that didn’t really happen.

In most cases, the people remembering have as much confidence in it as a fact that actually happened. This can also be called the false recognition effect.

For the brain, damage in the frontal lobes are associated with a higher risk of false recognition and errors in the source of a memory.

However, this has been found to happens less in people suffering damage to the medial temporal lobes, such as amnesia patients, and people with alzheimers disease.

Medial temporal lobe

The inner part of the temporal lobes that contains the hippocampus, amygdala, uncus, dentate gyrus and the Parahippocampal gyrus.

It is important in memory and learning.

Suggestiblity

The second way of distortion is called suggestibility.

This isn’t caused by the individual but by other people who will create or change memories of the individual by using leading questions or comments during recall.

This is a big problem as it can and is causing many innocent people to become guilty of a crime.

Studies have been able to find correlations for the susceptibility to suggestibility with personality traits and scales that measure them.

The dissociation experiences scale and memory is positively correlated to the susceptibility to it. The same was found for the creative imagination scale.

Dissociation experiences scale

A scale that measures brief, temporary failures in cognitive functionning

Creative imagination scale

A scale that measures the vividness of the mental images of an indivdual.

This, however, doesn’t mean we can create false memories easily. There are limitations to the kind of memories that it can be done to.

Biases

The last version of distortion are biases.

These are changes that happen because of beliefs and knowledge held by the individual. Biases are unconscious, making it hard to prevent their effect.

However, there are patterns of biases and being able to recognise them can help a lot.

Emotional states and moods are also a part of this.

One example of a bias is the consistency bias. One may believe they have always liked a certain food or music when they started liking it only recently.

Consistency bias

The tendency to exaggerate how consistent something was in the past.

This bias can be blocked if the individual has a reason to believe it has changed in which case they may exaggerate how much they have changed. This is called the retrospective bias.

Related posts

Part 1

Part 3