False Memories, And Why Might We Experience Such Memory Illusions

         Fantasies of future events rarely requires mental accuracy about reality. However, it is recalling past happenings that has the possibility to confuse memory of the actual events. There is a way in which recognition, storage, post event misinformation and can lead to inaccurate, illusionary memories. Explicit and implicit memory, semantic and episodic memory, post event misinformation, and illusionary memories are all linked in numerous ways. This essay will define these terms, and cite memory experiments designs and outcomes. Particularly, it will answer what false memories are and why we might experience such memory illusions.

           False memories have their origins in recognition processes of recall and familiarity. Recalling involves consciously recovery of contexts and elaborations given to items when initially studied. Familiarity is the relatively automatic judgement that something was previously encountered. These dual recognition processes run in parallel, with familiarity being faster than recollection but is rapidly decreasing. These processes can be the basis of why observers may collect data inaccurately. Signal Detection Theory experiments are useful tools for analysis of accuracy of observers. The design of the classical signal detection experiments require a “yes” or “no” responses regarding the presence of a stimuli on every trial. Positively indicating presence of a signal is called  a hit,  while correct indication of absence is referred to as correct rejection. Moreover, indicating absence while there is a presence of a signal is called a miss. The two dimensions of the observer of concern are their sensitivity and response bias. Research signal detection there found that response bias is affected by various factors such as consequences for each outcome. Similarly, sensitivity is is affected only by operations that change the level of ambiguity.

           A lot of what is retrieved from memory passes through schemas. These organizational web helps us remember but could also lead to false memories due to momentary expectations. Orienting tasks experiments on recall by Graf, squire, & Mandler were designed to investigate effects on both incidental and intentional conditions. Semantic and non-semantic memory combined with the pleasantness found that recall was higher under semantic conditions and after ratings of pleasantness. Another experiment, Deese, Roediger and McDermott (DRM) lists was designed to study false memory conveniently in a laboratory set up.