Jan. 23, 2000
Contact: Jason L. JenkinsInformation Specialist(573) 882-6217[email protected]
TELLING THE TRUTH ABOUT "FALSE" MEMORY: MU RESEARCHERS DISCOVER THE BRAIN KNOWS THINGS YOU DON'T
COLUMBIA, Mo. -- Have you ever told a childhood tale of glory, only to have your mother discredit every fact about the event except your presence? Let's face it -- we don't always remember things how they actually occurred, especially over time. However, researchers at the University of Missouri-Columbia now can distinguish between true and "false" memories, which could lead to further discoveries about the human mind.
"Although people believe they remember events accurately, the human memory is error prone, creating memories of events that never happened," said Michael Stadler, MU associate professor of psychology. "Learning how true and false memories differ will allow us to better understand how memory works and fails, and how memories are stored and processed."
Stadler and Monica Fabiani, MU assistant professor of psychology, have worked for the past three years with graduate student Peter Wessels to find a method for distinguishing between true and false memory. Because the two types of memory are similar, they looked for differences in brain activity to see if the brain stores information about events that the conscience mind can't access. Their research was funded by a McDonnell-Pew grant and appeared in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience earlier this month.
"Memory retrieval involves the reactivation of sensory information present during an event," said Fabiani. "However, memories of events that never occurred have no sensory information to reactivate. By detecting this brain activity, we can differentiate between true and false memories."
To prove this, Fabiani and Stadler had to create false memories in the minds of test subjects. Each subject studied lists of associated words presented to the left or right side of a projection screen. After studying the words, subjects were tested while their brain activity was recorded. During the test, original words and specially selected lure words were presented at the center of the screen. Subjects were then asked to indicate which words were from the original lists and which were not. Although the tests revealed the subjects' memory for studied words was good, they also showed subjects remembered seeing many of the lure words that were never presented.
"Our tests showed sensory-related brain activity associated with the original words," Stadler said. "Activity took place in the brain's left hemisphere for words presented on the right and in the right hemisphere for words presented on the left. However, no sensory-related activity was associated with the lure words because they were never studied."
Fabiani and Stadler said their research is one of the first of many steps needed to learn how false memory works in the brain. They agree that what they learn ultimately could have significant effects on how human memory is understood, especially with regard to issues of law.
"Although what we have observed does not bear directly on the recovered memory issue, it does shed light on the general question of how susceptible we may be to memory errors," Fabiani said.
In their next study, the MU researchers will examine false memory using groups of related pictures instead of words.
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