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The Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) Task: A Simple Cognitive Paradigm to Investigate False Memories in the Laboratory
Published on: January 31, 2017
The false memory syndrome: experimental studies and comparison to confabulations
1Neurobehavior Unit, VA Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System, Los Angeles, CA 90073, USA. mmendez@UCLA.edu
Medical Hypotheses
|December 24, 2010
Summary
False memories are strongly believed but incorrect recollections. This study models them as internally-generated fantasies, influenced by suggestibility and emotion, differing from neurological confabulations.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Psychology
- Neuroscience
- Psychiatry
Background:
- False memories are factually incorrect recollections.
- They cause confusion for psychiatrists and neurologists.
- Confabulations are similar but stem from neurological disease.
Purpose of the Study:
- To propose a model for false memories.
- To compare false memories with confabulations.
- To identify factors contributing to false memory formation.
Main Methods:
- Utilized the Deese/Roedinger-McDermott experimental paradigm.
- Compared factors associated with false memories and confabulations.
- Reviewed neuroanatomical findings related to memory certainty.
Main Results:
- False memories correlate with memory integration, self-relevancy, imagination, familiarity, emotional facilitation, suggestibility, and sexual content.
- Confabulations share most factors but exclude emotional facilitation, suggestibility, and sexual content.
- Both involve abnormal certainty, linked to decreased ventromedial frontal lobe activity.
Conclusions:
- False memories are proposed as internally-generated, suggestible, and emotionally-facilitated fantasies.
- They are distinct from repressed memories.
- Both false memories and confabulations require an attenuated "doubt tag" in the right frontal lobe for certainty.
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