How are false autobiographical memories created? This question is important because false autobiographical memory influences the self. An autobiographical memory is the memory we have of an event that happened at a particular time and place in our past (Walker, 2016, lec 3). Therefore, a false autobiographical memory entails peoples’ recall of events that they think they experienced when in fact that event did not occur (Simone, 2016, lec 3). Furthermore, in answering the question above, we look at cognitive explanations and social interactionist explanations. According to cognitive psychologists Devitt, Monk-Fromont, Schacter & Addis (2015), the memory system is flexibly constructive. Thus making it susceptible to occasional conjunction errors, whereby constituents of an event are real, but are falsely combined.
…show more content…
According to social psychologists, “the mind seems to be able to construct information from internal and external sources to generate a false picture of what occurred (Shaw & Porter, 2014). The purpose of the study by Devitt et al. (2015), was to better understand the essence of autobiographical memory conjunction errors by examining how imagination and phenomenological elements create this type of memory distortion. The experimenters hypothesized that by imagining an event which consists of recombined memory details, the acknowledgement of those details (conjunction lures) as belonging to a real episode would increase in correspondence to conjunction lures that were not imagined. This study consisted of two experiments. In the first experiment, there were twenty participants within the age range of 19 to 27, of which eight were male. They were all fluent in English and had no learning disabilities or neurological
According to social psychologists, “the mind seems to be able to construct information from internal and external sources to generate a false picture of what occurred (Shaw & Porter, 2014). The purpose of the study by Devitt et al. (2015), was to better understand the essence of autobiographical memory conjunction errors by examining how imagination and phenomenological elements create this type of memory distortion. The experimenters hypothesized that by imagining an event which consists of recombined memory details, the acknowledgement of those details (conjunction lures) as belonging to a real episode would increase in correspondence to conjunction lures that were not imagined. This study consisted of two experiments. In the first experiment, there were twenty participants within the age range of 19 to 27, of which eight were male. They were all fluent in English and had no learning disabilities or neurological