Misattribution of memory
In psychology, the misattribution of memory or source misattribution is the misidentification of the origin of a memory by the person making the memory recall. Misattribution is likely to occur when individuals are unable to monitor and control the influence of their attitudes, toward their judgments, at the time of retrieval. Misattribution is divided into three components: cryptomnesia, false memories, and source confusion. It was originally noted as one of Daniel Schacter's seven sins of memory.
Components of misattribution
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. Inadvertent plagiarism takes two forms. The first involves the plagiarizer regenerating a previously seen idea, but believing the idea to be novel. In the second form, the plagiarizer recalls the ideas of other author's as their own. For example, a person may falsely recall creating an idea, thought, or joke, not intentionally engaging in plagiarism, but nevertheless believing to be the original source of memory.False memory
False memories are memories that individuals believe and recall as true that, in fact, never occurred. Often, people form false memories for details of events after hearing others mistakenly report information about an event. For example, participants who watch a video of a crime featuring a blue car but hear the car misleadingly referred to as white after the fact may create a false memory of a white car present at the scene of the crime, rather than a blue one. 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.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. It is believed that associative responses never come to conscious attention, thus the activation of the concept is assumed to be implicit. An implicit associative response has shown to arise when seeing a word such as "car", might cause people to unconsciously think of an associative such as "truck". If the word truck is later presented to them, they may state they recognize seeing the item when they had actually generated it themselves. It is believed that the activation from the shown word may also activate the associative word, allowing the information to be easily accessible to the mind. 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.Gist-based similarity, the robust encoding of semantic information rather than distinctive encoding, is another cause of false recognition. When studying a list of numerous related words, there is a high level of semantic overlap between memory items. The inability to keep each concepts separate and distinct from one another makes it difficult to recollect specific details, subsequently causing people to make responses based on memory gist's rather than specific details. People may form a well-organized idea of what the semantic gist is, and anything that is semantically similar to that idea may be falsely recognized. Gist-based similarity has also been shown to occur in circumstances in which implicit associative responses are an unlikely source of misattribution. The false recognition error also becomes evident when a time pressure is presented during a recognition decision. 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.
It has also been noted that misattribution may be a product of adaptive features of memory, rather than a product of a flaw in the memory system. The misattribution error often leads to conclusions of an inefficient memory system, however some researchers believe that the error is a cost associated with the benefits of a functioning and adequate memory system. The misattribution error reflects an adaptive memory system in which information that does not require people to remember all the specific details is lost. Specific details would only be preserved in situations where the specific details need to be remembered, such as memories of a highly emotional experience. The use of semantic gists may be a fundamental mechanism of memory, allowing people to categorize information and generalize across situations, a function associated with higher intelligence.
Neurological causes
Neurological basis of false recognition
Brain-damaged patients have provided useful insights into the underlying biological mechanisms involved in false recognition. Results from studies comparing levels of false recognition between patients with frontal lobe damage and age-matched controls, showed a significantly higher level of false recognition amongst the frontal lobe damaged individuals. The damage is believed to have caused disruptions in the adequate encoding of item-specific details or caused defective retrieval monitoring processes. These types of processes are needed to accurately recall the origins of memory representations, and without them, errors of origin can be made. Studies of false recognition in amnesic patients with damage to either the medial temporal lobe or other diencephalon structures, have demonstrated that the same processes involved in accurate recognition, are also involved in false recognition. These cortices play a role in strategic monitoring processing, as they attempt to examine other cortical outputs. If these cortices were damaged, there would be no control over the cortical outputs, increasingly the likelihood of a false recognition error. Additionally, patients with amnesia or Alzheimer's disease have a reduced level of false recognition, believed to be caused by taking too many trials to create the semantic gist information needed for the attribution error.False memories and PET scans
A follow-up to the previous research was conducted by Daniel L. Schacter and colleagues. Similar to the study by Henry L. Roediger and Kathleen McDermott, subjects were read a list of associated words before they went into the PET scanner. During the first scan, subjects would make recognition judgments to determine what were the previous presented words. During the second scan, subjects had to make judgments about words that were not presented. For example: bed, rest, dream, tired, and awake would be in the list but not the word "sleep". As with the study by Henry L. Roediger and Kathleen McDermott, subjects claimed to remember similar amounts of non-presented words as they did the words that were actually presented. The researchers noted that brain activity during the true and false recognition tasks were very similar. Monitoring the blood flow in the brain revealed there were in the left medial temporal lobe for both veridical and illusory recognition.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. There seemed to be some discrepancy as subjects attempted to scrutinize the out-placed words, but were overcome by powerful memory illusion. This study demonstrates the ability of technology to help researchers understand to a greater extent the power of false memories.