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INTRUSIONS, DISTORTIONS AND ILLUSORY MEMORIES

INTRUSIONS, DISTORTIONS AND ILLUSORY MEMORIES. The “fundamental attribution error” in memory

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INTRUSIONS, DISTORTIONS AND ILLUSORY MEMORIES

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  1. INTRUSIONS, DISTORTIONS AND ILLUSORY MEMORIES • The “fundamental attribution error” in memory • When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not; but my faculties are decaying now and soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the things that never happened.- Mark Twain's Autobiography • It’s never too late to have a happy childhood. - Shel Silverstein, author of Where the Sidewalk Ends • How do you know a memory is real?

  2. Intrusions, False alarms and misidentification • Similarity-based errors in recall and recognition (typically meaning-based) • Cases of false identification • Demjanjuk as Ivan the Terrible (Wagenaar, 1988) • Demand characteristics of lineups • Consulting on an EW case • Distortion and confabulation • Event (at encoding) or Cue (at retrieval) activates related semantic and episodic information that gets integrated into episode • War of the Ghosts (Bartlett, 1932) • Nancy & the Doctor (Owens et al. 1979) • Historical vs. Narrative Truth (Spence, 1984)

  3. Increasing vulnerability over time • Reder (1982): Ss read short stories: • [hamburger heir] • Speed of “studied” versus “plausible” decisions shifts over time: • “Fuzzy trace theory” (Brainerd & Reyna) • Encoding includes both verbatim and “gist” information • Verbatim, as “superficial,” is less distinctive and more vulnerable to forgetting

  4. Source amnesia • Cue activates correct target, wrong context • the misinformation effect (Loftus, 1985) • The famous-overnight effect (Jacoby, 1989) • Verbal overshadowing (Schooler ’90) • Failure to distinguish experienced from imagined events • Failures of reality monitoring (Johnson, 1985) • The false memory studies • Roediger & McDermott : How sweet it is (1995) • Loftus & Ketcham: Lost in a shopping mall (1994) • Hypnosis and confabulation • Evidence that hypnosis changes bias, not sensitivity • Increases in confidence • Accepting of sometimes bizarre “memories” as fact

  5. Delusions and confabulations in memory disorders • Etiology • Often associated with frontal lobe damage • Rupture of anterior arteries • Korsakoff’s syndrome • Frontal degenerative diseases • Symptoms • Intensity, frequency, plausibility of confabulations vary widely • Content is often based on “real” episodes • Not an obligatory “gap filling” • May be believed obsessively despite acknowledged contradictions • Theory • Loss of “executive control” over memory and metamemory functions • Impairment of memory for temporal order and context • Loss of “reality monitoring” and increase in source amnesia • Consolidation of false memories with rehearsal • Some case studies

  6. The case of John Demjanjuk • Ukranian immigrant, auto worker in Cleveland • On KGB list of German “war criminals” • Exported and convicted in Israel of being “Ivan the Terrible” of Treblinka, 1988 • Survivors confidently identified him as Ivan • Fall of USSR, KGB docs forgeries, 1991 • Acquitted and released, 1993 • Charged with similar crimes at other camps, 1999 • stripped of U.S. Citizenship and slated for deportation to Ukraine, 2005

  7. “I said the photo was not particularly sharp. It was older than the Ivan I knew, but it was still him. The frame, the round face, the short neck, the wide shoulders and the protruding ears. I told them this is the Ivan I remember,” Epstein said. (Reuters, 23 February 1987.) 

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