Remembering what wasn't there…

Abstract

Human memory is neither a camera nor a tape recorder – almost everyone has imagined ‘remembering’ something that never took place, and when witnesses do so in court, problems arise. Work on so-called false memories has shown that when people are asked to think of common objects, but without being shown a picture of them, they sometimes later falsely remember seeing a picture. In recent work using event-related potentials to study brain activity associated with false memories, Gonsalves and Paller presented names of objects with or without corresponding images [Gonsavles, B. and Paller, K.A. (2000) Nat. Neurosci. 3, 1316–1321]. In a subsequent test, subjects had to recall whether the name was accompanied by a picture. When no picture was presented during the memorization phase, brain activation in occipital and parietal cortex was higher when subjects later misremembered having seen a picture. Because these brain areas are associated both with visual perception and visual mental imagery, these findings lend credence to the notion that confusion between mental and visual images can lead to false visual memories. MW learning performance on a vast array of multi-variable Boolean concepts, many of which have never been studied before.