Mechanisms Facilitating the Formation of False Memories

Factors facilitating the formation of false memories - Cognitive factor: Schemata

• Schemata represent “A stored framework or body of knowledge about some topic”

  • Help people understand incoming information, for example

    • Categories new instances of events

    • Infer additional attributes

    • Guide interpretation, attention and behaviour

  • Schemata don’t have accurate (e.g. stereotypes are type of schema that are inaccurate)

  • Help you to categories new events and figure out what is going to happen and how to behave

Cognitive factor: Schemata - How schemata shape memory

• When helping to process and organise events and information that we can come across, schemata can facilitate recall

• They can also distort recall, as we reconstruct events and information in way that’s consistent with the relevant schema rather than recalling them verbatim

Cognitive factor: Schemata - Example

• Bartlett and ‘War of the Ghosts’

  • Earliest research to demonstrate reconstructive nature of memory and how schemata can structure recall was Bartlett

  • Looked at what happens when information is passed from one culture to another

Cognitive factor: Schemata - Gender Schema

• Kleider et al. (2008) showed photos of man and woman performing either gender consistent or gender inconsistent actions

• P’ asked to recall which actions were performed by the man and woman

• When inaccurate recall occurred, often recalled someone performing gender consistent actions rather than the other way around

Cognitive factor: Schemata - Cultural life script schema

• Recently investigated type of schema is the cultural life script

• This is culturally shared representation of order and timing of major transitional events expected to occur in lifespan of typical individual in culture

• Berntsen and Rubin first demonstrated this with a Danish sample asking them to list 7 most important events of a Danish persons and what age each event would occur

Cognitive factor: Schemata - life script structures recall

• Acts as a cognitive schema regarding most important events of your life

• Therefore structures retrieval of important autobiographical memories (memory for events from ones life) by providing search descriptions for events that are in the script

• Evidence for influence of life script: Reminiscence Bump

  • Reminiscence bump refers to increase in autobiographical memoires from adolescence to early adulthood

Cognitive factor - Theories for reminiscence bump

• There are several theories attempting to explain the reminiscence bump

• Identity formation account holds that the bump can be attributed to a clustering of highly goal-relevant events occurring during adolescence and early adulthood as your form your identity ad an individual

Cognitive factor - Life script of reminiscence bump

• Alternative account holds that cultural life script produces the bump due to its influence on autobiographical memory

• Life script produces the bump as the life script demonstrates as a bump as well as life script events cluster in adolescence.

• Since life script events are especially memorable due to influence of life script on recall which leads to clustering of autobiographical memory from this period

Cognitive factor - Testing life script account of reminiscence bump

• Haque and Hasking asked set of Malaysian participants to estimated timing of 11 important life events in their culture both positive and negative to produce a cultural life script

• Asked another set of Malaysian p’s to indicated how old they were when the personally experienced each of the same events

• Compared the distribution of the events in the script to the same events in autobiographical memory

• Results

  • Where their was a bump in life script there also tended to be a bump in the memories

  • This suggests that the reminiscence bump in autobiographical memory is driven by bump in life script

Cognitive factor - Memory for fictional life stories

• Method

  • P’s read a fictional life story

  • Three types of events

    • High frequency life script events

    • Low frequency life script events

    • Non-life script events

• Results

  • Participants would have the best recall for high-frequency life script events, followed by low-frequency life script events.

  • When falsely recalling events as occurring in the story that didn’t actually occur in the story, these intrusions in recall would tend to be for life script events.

Cognitive factor - Practical implications for real world false memories

• Various type of schemata may lead to false eyewitness testimony

• For example, if eyewitness has stereotype that individuals of certain ethnicities, races or ages are more likely to commit crime then he may falsely recall culprit as fitting that stereotype

• Autobiographical memories for information we encounter are structure by schemata rather than representing a literal representation of events or information

Social factor: Perceived expertise of someone relating false information

• People are more likely to take on misleading suggestion from a speaker and incorporate it into their own recall if they perceive speaker to have some type of expertise or authority regarding the event or information

• Example

  • Smith and Ellsworth 1987 had p’s watch video about bank robbery

  • Asked misleading questions about crime but a knowledgeable ore naïve questioner

  • Misleading questions produced more false memories when posed by the knowledgeable questioner

Social factor - False Memories for educational related material

• People take on misleading suggestions from education-related material if they think the speaker is an expert

• Koppel et al (2014)

  • P’s read scientific text

  • Text had different categories each which included a number of terms as well as the definition of each term

• Results

  • For the material in the text that was inconsistent with the information in the lecture, found increased false memory for this material in the expert condition than in the non-expert condition.

  • when participants were told that the lecturer was an expert rather than a graduate student found that they would be more likely to incorrectly recall the text according to the misleading information in the lecture, rather than according to the text

Social Factor - Practical Implications for Real world false memories

• In legal system eyewitness more likely to have memories influenced by misleading post-evet information (that may be provide by perceived authority figure)

• In educational settings the presumed expertise that lecturers have for topic means if they are incorrect students are likely to falsely recall information that is consistent with lecturers’ incorrect account