Confusing what you heard with what you did: False action-memories from auditory cues

Abstract

Creating a mental image of one's own performance, observing someone else performing an action, and viewing a photograph of a completed action all can lead to the illusory recollection that one has performed this action. While there are fundamental differences in the nature of these three processes, they are aligned by the fact that they involve primarily or solely the visual modality. According to the sourcemonitoring framework, the corresponding visual memory traces later can be mistakenly attributed to self-performance. However, when people perform actions, they do not only engage vision, but also other modalities, such as auditory and tactile systems. The present study focused on the role of audition in the creation of false beliefs about performing an action and explored whether auditory cues alone-in the absence of any visual cues-can induce false beliefs and memories for actions. After performing a series of simple actions, participants listened to the sound of someone performing various actions, watched someone perform the actions, or simultaneously both heard and saw someone perform them. Some of these actions had been performed earlier by the participants and others were new. A later source-memory test revealed that all three types of processing (hearing, seeing, or hearing plus seeing someone perform the actions) led to comparable increases in false claims of having performed actions oneself.The potential mechanisms underlying false action-memories from sound and vision are discussed.

The role of kinematic mental simulation in creating false memories

“…For example, false memories of self-performed actions can result from either imagining to perform an action (imagination-inflation effect, Garry, Manning, Loftus, & Sherman, 1996;Goff & Roediger, 1998) or observing another individual while performing the action (observationinflation effect, Lindner, Echterhoff, Davidson, & Brand, 2010). Most recently, it has been found that also creating a mental image of another person performing an action (Lindner & Echterhoff, 2015) as well as listening to the sound of someone performing actions (Lindner & Henkel, 2015) can trigger false memories of self-performance.…”

Testing the Motor Simulation Account of Source Errors for Actions in Recall

“…A source monitoring account can explain all features of the data in our experiments and has been previously suggested to account for false memories of self-performance after visualization of actions (for a discussion, see Henkel and Carbuto, 2008 ; Lindner and Henkel, 2015 ; also see Leynes and Kakadia, 2013 ). Firstly, a source monitoring account can explain why participants not only misremember observed actions as performed but also performed actions as observed.…”