The role of perception in false memories
How are false memories formed? Are they the result of imagination only, or a combination of newly perceived events and imagination? A study by Lyle and Johnson actually finds that perception might play a larger role than imagination Importing perceived features into false memories Keith B. Lyle and Marcia K. Johnson in Memory Volume 14, […]
How are false memories formed? Are they the result of imagination only, or a combination of newly perceived events and imagination? A study by Lyle and Johnson actually finds that perception might play a larger role than imagination
Importing perceived features into false memories
Keith B. Lyle and Marcia K. Johnson in Memory Volume 14, Number 2, p. 197 – 213
False memories sometimes contain specific details, such as location or colour, about events that never occurred. Based on the source-monitoring framework, we investigated one process by which false memories acquire details: the reactivation and misattribution of feature information from memories of similar perceived events.
In Experiments 1A and 1B, when imagined objects were falsely remembered as seen, participants often reported that the objects had appeared in locations where visually or conceptually similar objects, respectively, had actually appeared.
Experiment 2 indicated that colour and shape features of seen objects were misattributed to false memories of imagined objects.
Experiment 3 showed that perceived details were misattributed to false memories of objects that had not been explicitly imagined.
False memories that imported perceived features, compared to those that presumably did not, were subjectively more like memories for perceived events. Thus, perception may be even more pernicious than imagination in contributing to false memories.
