Source Amnesia Research Articles

Vulnerability To Disinformation In Older Age

Disinformation poses a significant challenge to contemporary society, as it has the potential to undermine the stability of democratic systems, put public health at risk, and undermine the credibility of science. We explore the question of whether certain groups of people are especially exposed to disinformation and, in particular, we focus on older people. We examine the purported impact of cognitive and linguistic factors, such as source amnesia and the need for consistency, the decline of pragmatic skills in recognizing intentions and decoding figurative language, as well as motivational factors like the need for affiliation. Taken together, these empirical data suggest that there may indeed be specific vulnerabilities associated with older age. This hypothesis calls for finding ways to protect a category of people who already suffer from numerous other vulnerabilities.

Source information is inherently linked to working memory representation for auditory but not for visual stimuli

Failing to remember the source of retrievable information is known as source amnesia. This phenomenon has been extensively investigated in long-term memory but rarely in working memory, as we share the intuition that the source information of an item that we have encountered in the immediate past is always available. However, a recent study (Chen, Carlson, & Wyble, 2018) challenged this common sense by showing the source amnesia for simple visual stimuli (e.g., colored square) in the context of working memory when participants did not expect having to report source information, which indicated that the source information of visual stimuli was not automatically encoded into working memory. The current study sought to further examine this newly discovered phenomenon by testing whether it persists with complex and meaningful stimuli in the visual modality (Experiments 1, 4a & 4b), cross-visual-and-auditory modalities (Experiments 2a & 2b), and within-auditory modality (Experiment 3). Interestingly, the results revealed that short-term source amnesia was a robust effect in the visual modality even for complex and meaningful stimuli, whereas it was absent in the cross-visual-and-auditory or within-auditory modalities, regardless of reporting expectation. This indicates differences in working memory representations of visual and auditory stimuli, namely, the representation of auditory stimuli was stored together with the corresponding original sources, while that of visual stimuli was stored independently of its source information. These findings have crucial implications for further clarifying the longstanding debate regarding whether or not there is a modality-independent working memory storage system for different modalities.

Is source information automatically available in working memory?

We often remember information without its source (e.g., word or picture format). This phenomenon has been studied extensively in long-term memory but rarely in the context of short-term working memory (WM), which leaves open the question of whether source amnesia can result from a lack of memory encoding rather than forgetting. This study provided a series of striking and novel demonstrations showing participants’ inability to report the source of a color representation immediately after that color was used in a task and stored in memory. These counterintuitive findings occurred when participants repeatedly judged the congruency between two color representations from one single object (i.e., color and identity of a color word) or two distinct objects (i.e., color of a square and identity of a color word) and then were unexpectedly asked to report the source of one color representation. These discoveries suggest that source information is often not stored in WM.

Is Source Information Automatically Available in Working Memory?

We often remember information without its source (e.g., word or picture format). This phenomenon has been studied extensively in long-term memory but rarely in the context of short-term working memory (WM), which leaves open the question of whether source amnesia can result from a lack of memory encoding rather than forgetting. This study provided a series of striking and novel demonstrations showing participants’ inability to report the source of a color representation immediately after that color was used in a task and stored in memory. These counterintuitive findings occurred when participants repeatedly judged the congruency between two color representations from one single object (i.e., color and identity of a color word) or two distinct objects (i.e., color of a square and identity of a color word) and then were unexpectedly asked to report the source of one color representation. These discoveries suggest that source information is often not stored in WM.

Hypnosis and cognition.

This article summarizes the contributions of hypnosis to our understanding of cognition. These contributions have been especially salient in the study of memory, and include source amnesia and the distinction between episodic and semantic memory; the occurrence of semantic priming in implicit (unconscious) memory; and paramnesia (false memory). Posthypnotic amnesia shows that explicit and implicit memory can be dissociated even under optimal encoding conditions. The hypnotic alterations of perception may expand the scope of central executive control over “low-level” sensory and perceptual processes, and offer a new perspective on perceptual couplings. Implicit (unconscious) perception in hypnosis is not subject to the same analytic limitations encountered in masked priming. In the study of “high-level” thought processes, hypnosis has played an important role in understanding the formation of delusional beliefs, and of intuitions in problem-solving. Studies of hypnosis suggest that automatic processes can be “de-automatized,” as in the reversal of Stroop interference by suggestions for hypnotic agnosia. In social cognition, Orne’s analysis of demand characteristics laid the foundations for the cognitive revolution in social psychology, by underscoring the status of subjects—and people outside the laboratory—as active, sentient, problem-solving agents. The search for correlates of hypnotizability led to the incorporation of openness to experience as a major cognitive dimension in the structure of personality. One topic for future research is the relationship between hypnotizability in children and their development of a theory of mind. Studies of hypnosis in children may shed new light on the development of the imagination.

Alteraciones de memoria en daño cerebral

Frontal cortex is involved in important memory processes but its role is different from that associated with structures in the medial temporal lobe and diencephalon. While damage in the latter structures produces profound and global anterograde amnesia, damage to the frontal cortex is manifested by an specific group of memory impairments and distortions like confabulations, source amnesia, prospective memory and metamemory deficit, or impaired free recall. Frontal lobes is less involved in memory acquisition per se than it is in leading the strategic processes that support memory encoding, retrieval and monitoring.

Alteraciones de memoria en daño cerebral [Memory impairment in frontal brain damage

Frontal cortex is involved in important memory processes but its role is different from that associated with structures in the medial temporal lobe and diencephalon. While damage in the latter structures produces profound and global anterograde amnesia, damage to the frontal cortex is manifested by an specific group of memory impairments and distortions like confabulations, source amnesia, prospective memory and metamemory deficit, or impaired free recall. Frontal lobes is less involved in memory acquisition per se than it is in leading the strategic processes that support memory encoding, retrieval and monitoring.

Memoria y funciones ejecutivas

The terms 'executive functioning' or 'executive control' refer to a set of mechanisms involved in the improvement of cognitive processes to guide them towards the resolution of complex problems. Both the frontal lobes, acting as structure, and the executive processes, acting as function, work with memory contents, operating with information placed in the diencephalic structures and in the medial temporal lobe. Generally, we can state that many works find an association between frontal damage and specific memory shortages like working memory deficit, metamemory problems, source amnesia, or difficulties in the prospective memory.This paper is a critical review of the working memory concept and proposes a new term: the attentional operative system that works with memory contents. Concerning the metamemory, the frontal lobes are essential for monitoring processes in general and for 'the feeling of knowing' kind of judgements in particular.Patients suffering prefrontal damage show serious problems to remember the information source. Thus, the information is rightly remembered but the spatiotemporal context where that information was learned has been forgotten. Finally, the prospective memory deals with remembering to make something in a particular moment in the future and performing the plan previously drawn up.

Hypnosis, Memory, And Frontal Executive Functioning

According to the dissociated-control hypothesis forwarded by Woody and Bowers (1994), the effects of hypnosis are consistent with attenuated frontal lobe functioning. The present study was designed to compare the performance of participants with high and low hypnotic ability on a variety of memory tasks thought to be sensitive to frontal lobe functioning, as well as some control memory tasks not considered to be sensitive to such functioning. Results generally indicated that participants with high hypnotic ability have more difficulty with tasks sensitive to frontal lobe functioning, including free recall, proactive interference, and source amnesia tasks, both within and outside of the context of hypnosis. These differences, which were not found for nonfrontal tasks, are generally supportive of the dissociated control theory of hypnotic responding.

Developmental changes in source memory

Remembering how one learned a fact can be important in itself (e.g. for considering the value of information). However, source memory is also important, along with the temporal and perceptual information on which it is based, in giving memory an episodic or autobiographical quality. The present study investigated developmental changes in children’s ability to monitor source, in a paradigm adapted from Schacter, Harbluk and McLachlan (1984). This task, unlike previous source monitoring tasks used with children, has the potential to show the existence of a serious kind of source error called source amnesia. Children of 4, 6 and 8 years participated. They also completed measures believed to assess prefrontal function. Children showed a steady improvement with age in their ability to remember facts, but showed abrupt improvement between 4 and 6 years in their ability to monitor the source of those facts. Most notably, 4–year–old children displayed a great deal of source amnesia (i.e. errors of the kind committed by populations with frontal dysfunction), but 6– and 8–year–old children showed very few such errors. In addition, source memory was related, in some analyses although not in others, to behavioral measures often used to assess prefrontal functioning. The timing of the transition in source monitoring ability is discussed, including implications for childhood amnesia.

Source amnesia, misattribution, and the power of unconscious perceptions and memories.

Source amnesia, misattribution, and the power of unconscious perceptions and memories.

Source amnesia, misattribution, and the power of unconscious perceptions and memories.

Source amnesia, misattribution, and the power of unconscious perceptions and memories.

Memory, amnesia, and the issue of recovered memory: Neurobiological aspects

The main thesis of this article is that the debate about the credibility of “recovered memories”—reports by adults of recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse and trauma that were allegedly repressed for many years—can be usefully informed by considering the biological and behavioral facts and ideas about how memory works. Accordingly, the first section of this review describes current facts and ideas about the neurobiology and neuropsychology of memory and amnesia, including what parts of the brain are important for memory, distinctions between different memory systems in the brain, and the phenomena of infantile amnesia and source amnesia. The second section takes into account the information about the biological and behavioral bases of memory and addresses two questions about memory that have become a focus of debate in the recovered memory controversy, that is, whether memories for traumatic events change over time, and whether memories can be created for traumatic events that did not actually happen.

The neuropsychology of false memory

This article reviews recent research into the neuropsychology of false memory as revealed by studies of individuals who have suffered lesions to the frontal lobes. It is shown that frontal lobe damage gives rise to confabulation along with a number of laboratory-based demonstrations of memory error including source amnesia and impaired metamemory. It is further shown that frontal lobe damage gives rise to a disorder known as pathological false recognition in which patients produce large numbers of false alarms during recognition testing. It is argued that the most plausible account of these various findings is that frontal lobe damage serves to prevent the creation of an appropriate and properly focused retrieval context which may arise because either retrieval or encoding factors have been compromised.

Adult Age Differences in Source Recall: A Population-Based Study

Age differences in source recall were investigated in a population-based sample of healthy adults aged 35 to 80 years (N = 1000). Participants, who were screened on a variety of demographic, psychological, and biological variables, studied facts about well-known and unknown persons that were presented in four different ways, depicting four different sources of item information. An age-related deterioration of both item and source recall was observed, with source recall being more impaired than item recall. Source error analyses revealed an increase of source amnesia in subjects aged 75-80 years. Individual differences in background variables, age, gender, and word comprehension were related to source recall of well-known items, whereas age and years of formal education were related to source recall of unknown items. Source amnesia was accentuated in the two oldest cohorts and related to word comprehension. The age-related tendency to forget the source even when the fact is retained is suggested to be a specific feature of cognitive aging.

Repression: Active Censorship of Stressful Memories vs. Source Amnesia for Self-Consciously Dissociated Memories

Three groups of subjects were presented solvable and unsolvable anagrams, along with clues that were either perceived or imaged. For the two groups in which failure was made stressful, the perceptual clues from failed anagrams were most likely to be misremembered as imaginal clues. This finding suggests that the repression of past failure is manifested primarily as source amnesia, and is a passive aftereffect of having dissociatively experienced failure as “not real” as well as not imaginary in source. Such a suggestion challenges two key Freudian assumptions: that repression is universal, and that it entails active censorship.

Memory for facts, source, and context: Can frontal lobe dysfunction explain age-related differences?

Age-related differences in memory for facts, source, and contextual details were examined in healthy young (18-35 years old) and old (65-80 years old) volunteers. In all tested memory functions, decline over time was greater in the elderly than in the young. A time-dependent increase in the prevalence of source amnesia errors was clearly associated with old age. Contrary to several recent reports, measures of frontal lobe functions did not predict source memory. Nevertheless, some of these putative frontal function measures were related to memory for contextual details. The number of perseverative responses on the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test was inversely related to performance on both factual and contextual memory tests, but the association with contextual memory was stronger. Difficulties with response selection on a Stroop task predicted poor contextual memory in young but not in old adults.

Flashbulb memories in older adults.

In this study of age differences in flashbulb memory, groups of young and older adults gave detailed accounts of how they heard the news of the resignation of the British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. They were tested within 14 days after the event and again 11 months later. They also gave ratings for the encoding variables (surprise, emotion, importance, knowledge, and interest) and for frequency of rehearsal. Memories that met a strict criterion of consistency between the original and delayed responses were classified as flashbulb memories. Although 90% of young Ss had flashbulb memories, only 42% of the elderly met the criterion. The age groups also differed in the type of details remembered and in the relationship between the encoding and rehearsal variables and the occurrence of flashbulb memory. The age-related deficit in flashbulb memory is related to source amnesia and to a deficit in memory for context.

Flashbulb memories in older adults.

In this study of age differences in flashbulb memory, groups of young and older adults gave detailed accounts of how they heard the news of the resignation of the British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. They were tested within 14 days after the event and again 11 months later. They also gave ratings for the encoding variables (surprise, emotion, importance, knowledge, and interest) and for frequency of rehearsal. Memories that met a strict criterion of consistency between the original and delayed responses were classified as flashbulb memories. Although 90% of young Ss had flashbulb memories, only 42% of the elderly met the criterion. The age groups also differed in the type of details remembered and in the relationship between the encoding and rehearsal variables and the occurrence of flashbulb memory. The age-related deficit in flashbulb memory is related to source amnesia and to a deficit in memory for context.

The relationship between fact and source memory: Findings from amnesic patients and normal subjects

Amnesic patients and normal subjects were presented 20 obscure facts to learn, and, after a 2-h delay, were given tests of fact recall, fact recognition, and source recall. The subjects were also given a recognition memory test in which they were asked about the learning session itself (event memory test). The amnesic patients exhibited marked impairment on all tests. Impaired source recall (i.e., source amnesia) appeared to be unrelated to impaired fact or event memory. That is, patients who made source errors remembered the facts and the learning session as well as did patients who did not make source errors. In a second experiment, normal subjects were tested 1, 3, 6, and 8 weeks after learning. Source recall dropped sharply after a 6- or 8-week retention interval, demonstrating that source amnesia can occur in normal subjects when they are tested long after learning. For the normal subjects, fact and source memory were correlated. Thus, in normal subjects, source amnesia can reflect the loss of fact memory, event memory, and associations between them. However, in amnesic patients, source memory impairment was unrelated to the severity of impaired fact or event memory. Source memory impairment may reflect a specific deficit in the association of facts with their contexts.