Three Components Of False Memory

An eyewitness claims to have seen a blue van drive away from the crime scene, but was the van really blue? If the eyewitness remembers seeing a blue van, but in reality, it was a white van at the scene, the witness may be experiencing a false memory. False memory is the changing of details of an event or remembering an event that did not happen. False memoires can have long lasting consequences and have been linked to important situations of high risk, like court room proceedings. There are usually three components of false memory. The first according to Bookbinder & Brainerd, is the remembering of events that never occurred, such as believing you were lost in a park as a child (2016). The second is that the false event involves a familiar …show more content…
Zhu et al., decided to test the volume of the hippocampus and fusiform gyrus in relation to differences in creation of true and false memories (2016). The participants were shown events while simultaneously listening to misinformation and asked to recall the correct details. The researchers tested memory of the events after one hour and 1.5 years and found that the hippocampus is time-limited, there was no significant correlation found after 1.5 years. True memory was significantly positively correlated with the size of each bilateral hippocampus after one hour memory recall. The right fusiform gyrus was found to be positively correlated with false long-term and short-term memory (Zhu et al., 2015). Now research has proven that there could be a biological difference in people that influences the formation of false memories. With this discovery, it may be possible that people with smaller fusiform gyri are at a disadvantage in terms of long-term memory susceptibility. Their memories may be easily manipulated to form events that are incorrect or never happened. These results only included young healthy adults so there is more to be said about unhealthy populations. In a different population, the sizes of unhealthy individuals structures may be altered changing the susceptibility of …show more content…
The participants were interviewed and told two stories about their youth. One was a true memory and one was false about either committing a crime or having an emotional experience. Later on, they were asked to recall both events (Stark, Okado & Loftus, 2010). There was a high rate of recall for the false memories and the participants provided a lot of details. The cues in the experiment given to induce the participants to recall the false information was thought to have passed the threshold of plausibility. It is thought that as long as that threshold is reached it is possible to believe most things to be true if they also come from a credible source (Mazzoni, Loftus & Kirsch, 2001). In the research done by Stark, Okado and Loftus, the participants were equally willing to accept both the false criminal and non-criminal accounts if they reached the plausibility threshold to become