By: Laura LECRAC and Marine MORILLON
In daily life, memory mistakes can appear. Indeed, memories involve a reconstruction of events. This reconstruction can contain distortions, such as false memories. However, all individuals are not sensitive in the same way about false memories like elderly people. Therefore, this literature review takes an interest in the production of false memories, especially in normal aging.
According to Roediger & McDermott (1995) false memories are defined as memories of events which have never happened or memories of events whose content is different in comparison to real facts. In fact, false memories are characterised by the memory error. It could be an intrusion error or false recognition. To evaluate false memories, tasks of free recall or cued recall being used. Presence of non-presented items in participant’s production is called intrusion errors (Guyard & Piolino, 2006). False recognitions were the recall of non-presented items (Guyard & Piolino, 2006).
If false memories happen in daily life, we can also study them in laboratory like false recognition and intrusions. In fact, false memories are mainly studied through two paradigms: Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) and misinformation paradigm (Loftus, 1979). These two paradigms by their conception may lead participants to make false memories.
Indeed, DRM paradigm involves the presentation of lists of fifteen words related to a non-presented word : the critical lure. For example, words like “foot”, “crash”, “engine” and “drive” are presented to participants. All of these words are semantically related to the word “car”. “Car” is named the critical lure.
If in the recall or recognition task people recall or recognise this critical lure, participants make a false memory.
The paradigm of misinformation is more ecological than the DRM paradigm (Corson & Verrier, 2013). It consists of the presentation of an event followed by a questionnaire in which there is misleading information’s conducting individuals in error. Then, participants must determine which information was actually present in the event. (Loftus, Miller, & Burns, 1978).
Concerning the explanation of false memories, two theories may be highlighted. The first theory called « Fuzzy Trace » suggests that it exists two kinds of memories traces: Verbatim and Gist (Brainerd & Reyna, 2002). The verbatim refers to specific characteristics of items while the Gist refers to their significations (Corson & Verrier, 2013). Brainerd and Reyna (2002) explain that the Gist trace increase the feeling of familiarity for false memories while the Verbatim trace has for function to remove this feeling. Nevertheless, researchers suggest that the Verbatim trace declines more quickly than the Gist trace. False memories are ensued from most part of Gist trace and an impoverishment of the Verbatim trace (Guyard & Piolino, 2006).
False memories can also be explained by the activation-monitoring theory (Roediger, Balota, & Watson, 2001 ; Roediger, Watson, McDermott, & Gallo, 2001). It splits into two processes: activation and monitoring. False memories would be due to a spread of activation. Indeed, words of list in DRM converge on the critical lure. Thus, this lure is strongly activated in semantic network, strengthening his feeling of familiarity (Gilet et al., 2016 ; Taconnat & Rémy, 2006). During encoding, two kinds of processes can be occurred: a specific processing of items (processing more distinctive) or a relational processing (focus on relations between concepts and similarity). First process would reduce the probability to produce a false memory while the second process would increase this probability. Thus, these processes would have a repercussion on the recovery of these items (Rodediger, Watson and al., 2001). The monitoring process intervenes during the retrieval of critical lure in DRM task. If this process is deficient, individuals cannot control the source of information and so they are more likely to produce the critical lure (Johnson, Hashtroudi, & Lindsay, 1993).
False memories impact every population from the youngest to elderly people. Aging brings memory difficulties (Colette & Salmon, 2014). That’s why it is interesting to examine production of memory errors in normal aging. Although the quantity of information is lower in older adults, they make more memory errors (Taconnat & Rémy, 2006). According to Lövdén (2003), increase of memory distortions would be attributable to a drop of episodic memory.
In their review of literature about false memories with age, Taconnat and Rémy (2006) note an increase of the number of false memories with aging. Older people have a tendency to falsely recall or recognise the critical lure in comparison with younger people during DRM paradigm (Balota & al., 1999 ; Tun, Wingfield, Rosen, & Blanchard, 1998). Besides compared to younger people, older people produce more critical lure and recall a lower proportion of studied items (Balotat & al., 1999 ; Dehon & Brédart, 2004 ; Schacter, Koutstaal, & Norman, 1997 ; Tun & al., 1998). Older people have more difficulties to discern items that have effectively been presented of those which are activated in memory but never presented (Balota et al, 1999 ; Dehon & Brédart, 2004 ; Schacter, Koutstaal, & Norman, 1997 ; Tun et al., 1998). According to Dehon and Brédart (2004), these findings can be explained by a deficit of monitoring process in elderly people. Besides, false memories in aging can result from a spread of activation in semantic network, this activation making false memories more easily accessible (Roediger, Balota, et al., 2001 ; Roediger & McDermott, 1995 ; Roediger, Watson, et al., 2001). Also, older people would more depend on general information of items of lists rather than the specificity of each item. This being so, critical lures (which are powerful semantic associates) are more likely to appear. Besides, participants recall them with a high level of certainty. In other words, they are sure that the critical lure has been present in the study list (Dehon & Brédart, 2004).
To conclude, older and younger people recall the same proportion of words but the difference between these two populations reside in the confusion that elderly people to distinguish the source of information (Dehon & Brédart, 2004). Activation process would be preserved but the monitoring process could be deficient.
References
Balota, D. A., Cortese, M. J., Duchek, J. M., Adams, D., Roediger III, H. L., Mcdermott, K. B., & Yerys, B. E. (1999). Veridical and false memories in healthy older adults and in dementia of the Alzheimer’s type. Cognitive Neuropsychology, 16(3–5), 361–384. doi:10.1080/026432999380834
Brainerd, C. J., & Reyna, V. F. (2002). Fuzzy-Trace Theory and False Memory. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 11(5), 164–169. doi:10.1111/1467-8721.00192
Collette, F., & Salmon, E. (2014). Les effets du vieillissement normal et pathologique sur la cognition. Revue Médicale de Liège, 69(5–6), 265–269.
Corson, Y., & Verrier, N. (2013). Les faux souvenirs. Bruxelles : De Boeck.
Dehon, H., & Brédart, S. (2004). False memories: young and older adults think of semantic. associates at the same rate, but young adults are more successful at source monitoring. Psychology and Aging, 19, 191-197. doi: 10.1037/0882-7974.19.1.191
Gilet, A.-L., Evrard, C., Colombel, F., Tropée, E., Marie, C., & Corson, Y. (2016). False Memories in Alzheimer’s Disease: Intact Semantic Priming But Impaired Production of Critical Lures. The Journals of Gerontology Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences. doi:10.1093/geronb/gbw032
Guyard, A., & Piolino, P. (2006). Les faux souvenirs: à la frontière du normal et du pathologique. Psychologie & NeuroPsychiatrie Du Vieillissement, 4(2), 127–134.
Loftus, E. F., Miller, D. G., & Burns, H. J. (1978). Semantic integration of verbal information into a visual memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory, 4(1), 19-31.
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Lövdén, M. (2003). The episodic memory and inhibition accounts of age-related increases in false memories: A consistency check. Journal of Memory and Language, 49(2), 268–283.
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Roediger, H. L., & McDermott, K. B. (1995). Creating false memories: Remembering words not presented in lists. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 21(4), 803-814. doi:10.1037/0278-7393.21.4.803
Roediger, H. L., Watson, J. M., McDermott, K. B., & Gallo, D. A. (2001). Factors that determine false recall: A multiple regression analysis. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 8(3), 385–407. doi:10.3758/BF03196177
Schacter, D. L., Koutstaal, W., & Norman, K. A. (1997). False memories and aging. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 1, 229–236. doi:10.1016/S1364-6613(97)01068-1
Taconnat, L., & Rémy, P. (2006). Les faux souvenirs dans le vieillissement normal: données empiriques et modèles théoriques. L’Année Psychologique, 106(3), 457–486.
Tun, P. A., Wingfield, A., Rosen, M. J., & Blanchard, L. (1998). Response latencies for false memories: gist-based processes in normal aging. Psychology and Aging, 13(2), 230-241.
