Misattribution of memory

Cryptomnesia Cryptomnesia is a form of misattribution. It involves the unconscious influence of memory that causes current thoughts to be wrongfully attributed as novel. In other words, individuals mistakenly believe that they are the original generators of the thought. When cryptomnesia arises in literature or scholarly ideas it is often termed 'inadvertent plagiarism', inadvertent because the subject genuinely believes the idea to be their own creation. The first involves the plagiarizer regenerating a previously seen idea, but believing the idea to be novel. False memories can range from small details about an event to entire events that never happened, such as being lost in a crowded shopping mall as a child. Source monitoring theory postulates that memory errors occur when perceptual information is incorrectly attributed as being the source of a past experience. This may take place because one event shares the characteristics of another source. When a person has many sources of perceptual information about an event, their brain is easily able to evoke a memory of that event, even if they did not experience it, thus creating a misattributed memory. An additional example of source confusion involves Ronald Reagan. In this instance, Ronald Reagan tells a story about a heroic pilot to whom he personally awarded a medal. ==Causes==

Cognitive causes Causes of cryptomnesia Cryptomnesia is a source-monitoring error in which people often have difficulty determining whether a concept was internally generated or experienced externally. People occasionally misattribute the creation of a novel thought or idea as their own, when in fact they are retrieving it from a previous experience. Some individuals fail to establish memories with enough detail to generate a source attribution, causing a misattribution of memory to the wrong source. People often truly believe that the information they plagiarized was actually that of their own. Unintentional plagiarism is greater for information generated by others than ourselves. Researchers believe this may due to having better memory and associations for words we generate, as self-generated information is better remembered later. Moreover, cryptomnesia increases when information is generated by others before a self-generated idea. This may be due to the likelihood that people were thinking of their next response, rather than processing the source of the information. Causes of false memories False recognition can occur as the result of making an implicit associative response, an automatic association between two concepts in memory. Research has also shown that the more similar the presented and associative words are, or the more similar list items there are, the more likely it is that a false recognition error will be made. Processes that work to discover a source for the basis of recognition take time to execute, as a result of a lack of time, false recognitions errors are made more often. Fuzzy-trace theory, an opposing theory to source monitoring error, stipulates that memories are composed of two components; gist and verbatim traces. Verbatim traces are the surface details of physical stimuli, which encompass the clear visual images and source information of an experience. Though both traces are encoded simultaneously, they are stored in separate regions of the brain, allowing for each trace to posse a distinct lifespan. Verbatim traces, though readily available when a memory is first encoded, deteriorate quickly. Fuzzy-trace theory thus proposes that misattributed memories arise due to the short lifespan of verbatim traces, being that the quality of source information is rapidly declining. The misattribution of memory is therefore more likely to occur as the time between the encoding of an experience and the recall of the subsequent memory increases. That is not to say that there were not differences. While monitoring blood flow in the brain during false recognition, a part of the frontal lobe that is thought to be a key monitor of memories actually showed greater activity when presented with a false recognition than with a true one. The researchers found that perirhinal cortex activation was greater for objects recalled, and parahippocampal cortex activation was greater when scenes were recalled. The results provide evidence of distinct encoding activation in the subregions of the medial temporal lobe. The first subregion is the perirhinal cortex, which encodes item information. The second subregion, the parahippocampal cortex, is involved in source information. The evidence provides support for the role of the right perirhinal cortex in attributing an object to the right source. As decreased activation was associated with poorer performance, decreased activation of the right perirhinal cortex could be a possible mechanism for source confusion. ==Experimental research==

Misattribution In one of the earliest studies involving misattribution, the Canadian cognitive psychologist Bruce Whittlesea presented subjects with a list of common words. Each word was briefly displayed to the subject. The task required the subject to judge whether a target word was semantically related to any word in the list. Unlike Whittlesea's first experiment involving the recognition of target words, this study involved the manipulation of processing fluency through the conceptual context of the target word, rather than the physical context. In 1996, Ira Hyman Jr. and Joel Petland published a study showing that subjects can falsely 'remember' anecdotes from their childhood, based on suggestions from the researcher and corroboration of these fictitious events from family members. Subjects' parents were interviewed to create a list of memorable childhood events (vacations, instances of being lost, etc.), to which one false event was added, namely spilling a bowl of punch at wedding reception. For each event, subjects were provided with several cues to aid in memory (age at the time, location, nature of the event, etc.) and asked to describe the situation in as much detail as possible. If a participant was unable to recall any event, they were asked either to quietly think about the event for about a minute and then provide any additional information remembered (control condition) or imagine the event happening and describe the people who would have been involved, what the location would have looked like and how the event might have occurred (imagery condition). After three interviews in this fashion, 25% of participants from the imagery condition reported remembering the false situation of spilling the punch bowl, as compared to fewer than 10% of subjects in the control condition. In the experimental condition, researchers added self-relevant details to the story (obtained from the participants' parents), such as the name of the participant's first grade teacher and childhood best friend; in other conditions, the participants were told a more generic version of the story. When interviewed, 68.2% of participants in the self-relevant details condition reported mental images and memories of the false event, compared to only 36.4% of participants in the more generic condition. Early research done by Brown and Kulik (1977) found that flashbulb memories were similar to photographs because they could be described in accurate, vivid detail. In this study, participants described their circumstances about the moment they learned of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy as well as other similar traumatic events. Participants were able to describe what they were doing, things around them, and other details. However, this data was collected just once, years after the event, and Brown and Kulik were not able to compare the accuracy of those recollections to previous descriptions to see if their memories were indeed comparable to photographs. Later studies used a research technique called repeated recall to gauge the accuracy of repeated descriptions of traumatic events. Neiser and Harsh (1992) gave participants a questionnaire about the 1986 Challenger explosion at two periods of time: 1) The day after the incident, and 2) Three years later. They found that there were often large discrepancies between the first and second descriptions. For example, many initially reported that they heard the news while sitting in class, but later said that they remember seeing the news on a television broadcast. While the participants were confident in their reports, it became evident that their memories of these emotionally charged events were prone to being manipulated with time, and that false memories of details make their way into memory. One explanation of why false details exist in memories is that people are influenced by life experiences, and they therefore recall memories with insights from other non-related events. ==Applications==

Eyewitness testimony in children In legal testimony, the fact that witnesses are under oath does not preclude the occurrence of unintentional false reports: false memory and cryptomnesia present a significant problem in cases of alleged child abuse, in which the principal witness is already at a memory disadvantage. While individual differences exist, it is widely accepted that young children are highly susceptible to leading questioning and biased interviewing techniques, due to their insufficient cognitive development. A wide variety of studies on the subject have revealed that children become more accurate in their recollections with increasing age and their ability to ignore biased questioning practices increases substantially until age 12. As a result, neutral wording is encouraged where a young child's testimony must be relied upon. However, the fallibility of children's memories is a complicated issue: memory does not strictly improve over time, but varies in the number of errors made as different skills are developed. Young children are very prone to suggestibility and false memories, even for false story-situations which they provided themselves. This is likely due to memory compensation strategies of imagery and imagination employed at an early age. Eyewitness testimony in adults As noted, misattribution is likely to occur when individuals are unable to monitor and control the influence of their attitudes at the time of retrieval. One important question under consideration, is whether people confuse misleading suggestions and personal attitudes for their real memories of a witnessed event. Moreover, misattribution of memory has been especially well investigated in terms of its application to cases of potential eyewitness suggestibility. Currently, researchers have focused on determining the circumstances under which misattribution might occur, and the factors that could increase or decrease these errors, in an eyewitness situation. In this context, children are assumed to have poor memory capabilities. Eyewitness testimony in adults differs from that of children in a few other ways. Firstly, adults tend to provide more recalled information, whether accurate or inaccurate, to a legal case. Although, the general pattern is to have an increase the amount of correctly recalled information with age. Lastly, objective questions are more accurately answered with less influence of suggestibility in adults. Larry Jacoby of New York University (1999) demonstrated how common these errors can become, lending a better understanding to why recognition errors are particularly common in Alzheimer's disease. In Jacoby's study, participants were given two lists of words: one to read and one which they would hear read aloud. All subjects were then given a "test" list which contained some words they had read, some they had heard, and some novel words; the subjects had to determine which words were which. Participants were asked to carry out, imagine, or watch a series of short events (placing a fork on top of a plate, putting a pen inside a mug, etc.). They were later asked whether specific events were familiar and how they happened. The study revealed that elderly subjects were more likely than younger subjects to claim that they recognized events that never happened. or asking the same question repeatedly. Patients may recognize faces or identify that the subject of the question is important and was discussed recently, but they have no memory for the meaning attached to these common stimuli and so will misattribute this familiarity or simply ask again. == References ==