False memories have been defined as "either remembering events that never happened, or remembering them quite differently from the way they happened (Park, 2012). This topic opens many doors for research and raises questions about the reliability and susceptibility of people’s memory. Memory is the mental faculty of retaining and recalling past experiences. A repressed memory is one that is retained in the subconscious mind, where one is not aware of it but where it can still affect both conscious thoughts and behaviour.When memory is misleading or confabulated, the result can be what has been called the False Memory Syndrome (Stephanie D. Block, 2012) a condition in which a person's identity and interpersonal relationships are entered around a memory of traumatic experience which is objectively false but in which the person strongly believes (note that the syndrome is not characterized by false memories as such).
We all have memories that are inaccurate.Rather, the syndrome may be diagnosed when the memory is so deeply ingrained that it orients the individual's entire personality and lifestyle, in turn disrupting all sorts of other adaptive behaviour. The thing we call ‘memory’ is by no means a perfect record of the things we experience in our daily lives. There are many situations in which our memories of events or experiences do not match the reality of those events or experiences. This essay will describe and discuss empirical research that demonstrates the imperfect records of events and experiences that are our memories. Jutta Joormann, 2009) Argues that through diffusion activation, which is during encoding of a list individuals tend to recall items that are related to the list rather than those present.
(Jutta Joormann, 2009) Also states that false memories show insufficiency of memory when initial stimulation is stronger, the higher the likelihood of false recall. (Jutta Joormann, 2009) Shows the flaws our memories possess demonstrating the effectiveness of related items in the recalling and retrieving process our memories.However (Jutta Joormann, 2009)discovers that this conclusion was not adequate to false memory rather a second process of monitoring affects the false memory effect, which sees the participant select items that they do not remember seeing, even though they seem familiar. Thus, the activation-monitoring outline suggests that the likelihood of false recall is strength of item never being presented nonetheless related items and the monitoring process at retrieval added an irregular of the Deese–Roediger–McDermott (DRM) paradigm investigated whether mood affects the availability of lures at encoding or monitoring at recall.
Jutta Joormann, 2009) Concluded that critical lures were impossible to be available in the negative mood group than in the positive mood collection but that mood state did not have an effect on monitoring retrieval process. Depression may have an effect on both the activation and monitoring stages (Jutta Joormann, 2009). In detail, depression may be related with greater than before activation of negative lures at encoding due to being more prolonged ease of understanding of negative material or with reduced monitoring at retrieval (Jutta Joormann, 2009).This indicates that even if an individual is made conscious of the existence of false memories, they could still be liable to them.
This could apply to the existence of false child sexual abuse accounts. Even if people are made aware by a therapist that memories can be influenced, there is still a good chance that their therapist could influence their memory (Stephanie D. Block, 2012). Another possibility is that the recent post events were aware and were easily triggered a non-strategic process.In either case recent post events would trigger appropriate cues that do not match the targets which would recall for the original events In contrast marks and post events witnessed in the same session would share contextual cues so that triggering the post events would start contextual cues that match the targets Whether the cause is deliberate or not has consequences for increasing the amount that witnesses recall about a crime (Graf, 2012) (Carla C.
Chandler, 2001). In addition, people often trust their memories to be complete and true.After all, it would be distressing to think that the things that we recall to be true are in fact incorrect. The reality is, memory is not whole or complete.
In fact, most of our memories are entirely wrong and yet we hold onto them dearly. Witnesses are regularly questioned occasionally, and (Carla C. Chandler, 2001)shows witnesses often recover additional but precise information required in the second interview. A deliberate approach to search the recent interview for clues might be countered by initiating witnesses to disregard the previous interview and recall only the events that happened at the crime scene (Carla C. Chandler, 2001).
Although this has increased the recall of new information it is not reliable in terms of the longer intervals (Carla C. Chandler, 2001). Another possibility is that suggestions for recent post events are activated not deliberately due to the retrieval cues that tend to match the previous post events more enhanced than the original event. (Carla C.
Chandler, 2001) Argues that in fact it is not so much our memory but our ability to retrieve information in accordance to traumatic events which sees that our memories can actually be an unreliable source when it comes to crime scenes where seem to panic and lose sight of the events at hand Henry L. Roediger III, 1996) Look at producing false memory from a different perspective this study used the eyewitness paradigm the information from this study is important because it takes false memory production away from list learning and applies it to scenarios that are rather believable. If the slide presentation had been an actual event, such as an eyewitness to an accident, the time at which the individual is questioned is important, because delay could cause the individual to produce unintentional false accounts of the situation.The research on false memory production is very important, and can play a valuable role in our understanding of why our memories fail to recall accurate information when we are required to do so, also the believability of accounts made by individuals, whether it is sexual abuse, witnessing an accident, or just remembering small daily events (Jutta Joormann, 2009). The study of false memories is particularly important because these false claims based on false memories could lead to many difficulties in terms of justice, and issues with the reliability of a witness.
It is important to understand how to question someone without leading them or provoking a false response. Therefore, considerable research has been done with word associations, word lists, and various other paradigms to find the prevalence of false memories and the extent to which people are suggestible (Graf, 2012) Since the reliability of memories have come in to question in court cases and other scenarios requiring people to remember events or happenings since the tart of false memory studies, it is important to know that there could a significant difference in things people remember when they hear information versus when people see information. It would be interesting to take some research visual false recollection further to find fallibilities and strengths in people’s memory with visual information and to find paradigms that can accurately test our memories of visual perceptions. If visual information is actually remembered better than auditory information beyond using the DRM paradigm, then important information that needs to be remembered should probably be presented to a person visually.
Refelection I enjoyed the challenge that this task held I have learnt a lot more about how our recall and retrieval process works and how it can be affected by different stimuli. I thought the research part was useful in terms of getting to know more about your topic and the information required to write the essay. I believe I could have done a better job if I understood the articles a bit more some of the articles were difficult to make out hence I didn’t include the ones I would of preferred to use.
