What are the benefits of memory distortion?

Fernández, Jordi

doi:10.1016/j.concog.2014.09.019

Cited by 34 publications

(25 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…Recently, several lines of research have led to the view that false memories, including those produced by the DRM procedure, can result from adaptive processes typically associated with positive effects on memory (see Fernandez, 2015 ; Howe, Garner, Charlesworth, & Knott, 2011 ; Schacter, 2012 ; Schacter, Guerin, & St. Jacques, 2011 , for recent discussions of the adaptive nature of false memories). Studies that have taken an individual differences perspective have shown that ostensibly positive psychological traits can be associated with increased susceptibility to false memories.…”

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confidence: 99%

Adaptive false memory: Imagining future scenarios increases false memories in the DRM paradigm

et al. 2016

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Previous research has shown that rating words for their relevance to a future scenario enhances memory for those words. The current study investigated the effect of future thinking on false memory using the Deese/Roediger–McDermott (DRM) procedure. In Experiment 1, participants rated words from 6 DRM lists for relevance to a past or future event (with or without planning) or in terms of pleasantness. In a surprise recall test, levels of correct recall did not vary between the rating tasks, but the future rating conditions led to significantly higher levels of false recall than the past and pleasantness conditions did. Experiment 2 found that future rating led to higher levels of false recognition than did past and pleasantness ratings but did not affect correct recognition. The effect in false recognition was, however, eliminated when DRM items were presented in random order. Participants in Experiment 3 were presented with both DRM lists and lists of unrelated words. Future rating increased levels of false recognition for DRM lures but did not affect correct recognition for DRM or unrelated lists. The findings are discussed in terms of the view that false memories can be associated with adaptive memory functions.

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confidence: 99%

Adaptive false memory: Imagining future scenarios increases false memories in the DRM paradigm

et al. 2016

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“…This lack of perceptual information and the victim's frustration and inability to reproduce the chain of the events in a strict and coherent fashion frequently leads to case dismissal and significantly hinders legal outcomes that would be satisfactory to the victim. Fabricated memories of abuse cannot help the subject to achieve some emotional state that she is seeking to experience, or some understanding of her own current behavior and, if they do not cohere well with the rest of things that the subject remembers about the circumstances surrounding the alleged episode of abuse, and the things that she knows about the participants in that episode (Fernández 2015).…”

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confidence: 99%

Violence Without a Face: The Analysis of Testimonies of Women Who Were Sexually Assaulted During the War in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina

et al. 2019

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Background:This study examined testimonies of women who were sexually assaulted multiple times by multiple unknown offenders. In these testimonial narratives, it is possible to detect specific modalities of traumatic event expression. This expression lacks any spatial, temporal, auditory or emotional determinants of the event.Subjects and methods: These fourteen women (out of 17) were imprisoned and forcefully isolated in detention camps or private houses in the occupied territories of Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, during the war. At the same time, some of these women were raped by the offenders that were previously known to them. The average length of detention was 141 days among the seventeen victims (range of 7 to 395 days), while the average time from the first day of imprisonment to the first day of testimony was 311 days (range of 30 to 889 days).Results: Based on the narrative descriptions of the events acquired from these testimonies, our analysis showed that these expressions differed when the offender was known to the victim, contrasted to the situation when the offender was completely unknown. This finding has a significant implication in victim's testimony at judicial hearings. Specifically, women that were raped by unknown perpetrator(s) were often unable to provide persuasive testimony and their recollection of the events was deemed insufficient for the further prosecution. Testimonies in these cases substantially lacked in vividness and were devoid of visuospatial determinants of the rape event. Consequently, this often resulted in the case's dismissal.Conclusion: The unusual and problematic expression of these traumatic memories might indicate that these events were not properly stored in the conceptual form of memory. Ultimately, victims could not make any coherent recollection or reconstruct the cascade of events by using perceptual information. We argue that this could be due to an aberrant mechanism of memory storage and difficulties that emerge on the level of sensory input. This problem needs to be further examined and correspondingly accounted for since it can exert significant influence on judicial outcomes in the domain of sexual assault cases worldwide.

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“…Given the wide variety of conditions under which even a single type of memory error may arise, however, it is unlikely to be feasible to construct such a taxonomy (Hirstein, 2005). Second, recent accounts of memory errors (e.g., Bortolotti and Cox, 2009; Fotopoulou, 2010; Droege, 2015; Fernández, 2015) have tended to emphasize their potential adaptive benefits, and one might argue that the accounts discussed here do not acknowledge such benefits. The point of these taxonomies is not, however, to determine whether or not memory errors are adaptive.…”

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confidence: 89%

Confabulating, Misremembering, Relearning: The Simulation Theory of Memory and Unsuccessful Remembering

Michaelian

2016

Front. Psychol.

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This article develops a taxonomy of memory errors in terms of three conditions: the accuracy of the memory representation, the reliability of the memory process, and the internality (with respect to the remembering subject) of that process. Unlike previous taxonomies, which appeal to retention of information rather than reliability or internality, this taxonomy can accommodate not only misremembering (e.g., the DRM effect), falsidical confabulation, and veridical relearning but also veridical confabulation and falsidical relearning. Moreover, because it does not assume that successful remembering presupposes retention of information, the taxonomy is compatible with recent simulation theories of remembering.

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What are the benefits of memory distortion?

Cited by 34 publications

References 18 publications

Adaptive false memory: Imagining future scenarios increases false memories in the DRM paradigm

Adaptive false memory: Imagining future scenarios increases false memories in the DRM paradigm

Violence Without a Face: The Analysis of Testimonies of Women Who Were Sexually Assaulted During the War in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina

Confabulating, Misremembering, Relearning: The Simulation Theory of Memory and Unsuccessful Remembering

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