What do memories look like

Others have argued that providing questionnaires that help people systematically examine the characteristics of their memories can slightly improve false memory detection Ost et al. However, this seems an incomplete answer to the differences between true and false memories, as research also shows that the realism of false memories depends on the method through which they were generated Jou and Flores, Most studies on false memories involve short timeframes, and false memories that are neither very complex, nor particularly emotional.

Research shows that the methodologies that use longer encoding periods, repetition, emotion, and a lot of detail and complexity create false memories that feel and look more real Jou and Flores, Such methodology is typical of studies that try to implant rich false memories of autobiographical events, through a method called the familial informant false narrative paradigm Loftus and Pickrell, This technique involves using a combination of trust, misinformation, imagination exercises, and repetition to convince participants that they experienced events that never happened.

By using this technique, individuals have been shown to generate complex false memories of autobiographical events Scoboria et al. An autobiographical false memory is an incorrect recollection of part of an event, or an incorrect recollection of an entire event. The person recalling a false memory believes that they are accessing a real memory — it is not an attempt to lie e.

Memories that have been implanted using the familial informant false narrative technique — and related techniques — include getting lost in a shopping mall Loftus and Pickrell, , spilling a punch bowl at a family wedding or being left in the car as a child and releasing the parking break so it rolled into something Hyman et al. More serious false memories that have been implanted include being punched or punching someone else Laney and Takarangi, , or being the victim of an animal attack Porter et al.

Additionally, researchers have implanted a number of false memories of committing crime, including of assault, assault with a weapon, and theft Shaw and Porter, Rich false memories of highly emotional or criminal events are of particular interest to applied psychologists, legal professionals, and law enforcement, as they can have catastrophic consequences. Because they can become distorted or fabricated evidence, such false memories can seriously threaten the integrity of a criminal investigation or legal case e.

Research on autobiographical false memories typically involves asking the participants themselves to rate the realism of their own false memories, and participants consistently report that such false memories feel incredibly real e. If autobiographical false memories feel largely the same as real memories, then they may also look like real memories to others. In perhaps the only study to directly examine this, participants were asked to watch videos of complex emotional true and false memories being recalled, to see if they could tell the difference Campbell and Porter, This study was the inspiration for the present research.

While there has been evidence to show that false memories of important emotional and criminal events can be created e. Two studies examined whether participants could correctly identify false memories. Study 2 adds an exploratory component to this, to examine whether it would make a difference if people could only see video with no audio , hear audio with no video , or see and hear video with audio the false memory accounts.

This was examined for two reasons. First, it is possible that visual cues are distracting, so participants might be better able to identify false memories when they only have audio and can focus on content. Conversely, in Campbell and Porter memory classification accuracy was better for those who relied on non-verbal cues, so perhaps verbal or content cues are distracting, which could make it easier to identify false memories without sound.

Additionally, evidence in legal cases is sometimes only available as audio recordings or as video footage with no sound, so examining this issue likely has practical applications. The present studies further our understanding of the realism of false memories, and whether false memories can be identified by observers.

Age categories were provided, and participants were age 18 to 24, the rest were over Mean number of psychology courses taken was 3. Participants were asked whether they had taken any related classes — indicated they had never taken a course on memory, had never taken a forensic psychology course, 97 had never taken either. The mean age was The breakdown from the United Kingdom government at the time was used to measure ethnicity; 46 participants were White, 16 Asian, 16 Black, 3 Mixed-race, and 1 person did not specify.

Participants were randomly assigned to one of two conditions; to watch a video of false memory of an emotional event or a crime. Participants were randomly assigned to one of three conditions; to watch memory videos with audio and video, as audio-only with no video , or video-only no audio.

This research used videos collected by Shaw and Porter The eight participants whose videos were used provided permission for the interviews to be used in future research. The videos used for the present research involve each participant recalling two separate accounts in structured interviews. The second account was generated through the familial informant false narrative procedure Loftus and Pickrell, , and each account was classified as a rich false memory by Shaw and Porter All videos included were also classified as false memories in the Shaw and Porter data re-analysis by Wade et al.

For a discussion of this coding disagreement see Shaw Four criteria were used to select these eight participants from the 60 who took part in the original Shaw and Porter study. Each participant in the present studies saw the same person recalling a true and a false memory. This was done because there are individual differences in how individuals recall accounts. Had videos from different individuals been used e.

See Table 1 for a brief description of the nature of each video set used. Ethical clearance was granted by the University of British Columbia Okanagan research ethics board reference: H Participants scheduled an appointment using the university participant recruitment tool to participate in a lab-based study. This system enabled automatic exclusion of participants who had been part of the related, previous, false memory study that was conducted on the same campus Shaw and Porter, Article Google Scholar.

Zadbood, A. Cortex 27 , — Tompary, A. Neuron 96 , — Zeithamova, D. Neuron 75 , — PubMed Article Google Scholar. Cai, D. Download references. Article 10 NOV Technology Feature 01 NOV Outlook 27 OCT News 13 OCT Wellcome Sanger Institute. Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily. Advanced search. Skip to main content Thank you for visiting nature. Illustration by Andy Potts; Photos from Getty. You have full access to this article via your institution.

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Lashley concluded that our ability to learn and remember must be distributed across many parts of the brain instead of lying within a single region. Having suffered severe epileptic seizures for most of his life, Molaison agreed to a drastic experimental treatment. In , surgeons drilled holes into his brain and sucked out the areas responsible for the seizures — a seahorse-shaped region on either side of the brain called the hippocampus.

The operation was a success in that it largely cured his seizures, but Molaison was left with profound amnesia, unable to create new long-term memories. However, Molaison could remember most of his past up until a few years before the operation.

It was later discovered that he could also form procedural memories, a type of long-term memory responsible for knowing how to do something, like riding a bike. Hippocampus — An area of the brain that is vital to forming different kinds of memories. Famously resembles a seahorse.

Neuron — A cell that is uniquely suited to passing messages around the brain in the form of electrical activity. Our brains contain some 86 billion of them. Neurotransmitter — A chemical messenger that is released at the end of a neuron by the arrival of an electrical impulse. Neurotransmitters diffuse across the gap and make nearby neurons more or less likely to fire their own electrical impulse.

Semantic memory — A type of long-term memory of ideas and facts that is not drawn from personal experience, such as the name of a colour. Synapse — The gap between two neurons, which allows activity to flow from one cell to the next. Changes in these structures are integral to memory and learning. Researchers, including neuroscientist Prof Suzanne Corkin , continued to test Molaison regularly over the next 46 years — although for Molaison, each day they spoke was like the first.

Although Molaison was instrumental in convincing the research community that memory was not the responsibility of one sole region of the brain, it did not answer the question of how a memory is formed. Thanks to their work, scientists knew there were millions of neurons in the brain that pass messages to each other in the form of electrical impulses. When an impulse reaches the end of one neuron, it causes the release of chemical messengers called neurotransmitters, which pass across the gap, or synapse, and latch onto a neighbouring neuron.

This makes the second neuron more or less likely to fire its own impulse. But how these neurons formed long-term memories was still a mystery. That remained the case until , when Donald Hebb published one of the most influential theories of neuroscience in the last century. Their anatomy and physiology will change so that they form new connections or strengthen existing ones.

The activity in one, he said, will subsequently facilitate activity in the other. Simply put, if two concepts, say the smell of a rose and its name, repeatedly stimulate their respecting neurons in the brain at the same time, those neurons will change shape and strengthen that connection. But it is the amygdala, an almond-shaped mass of brain matter, that injects our memories with emotions like fear.

In recent years, scientists have learned a lot about the hardware in our brains that modulates our responses to fearful memories. At the Queensland Brain Institute in Australia, researchers are recording the electrical activity firing between these three brain regions in mice as they are conditioned to fear a particular sensation or noise.

Then it forms the memory of it. That conditioning can be exploited for good, too. If the mouse repeatedly hears that same tone again, but without the shock, then the noise will stop causing the animal to freeze in fear. Eventually, through a process called extinction learning, the pain of the memory fades away. This process is key to behavioral therapies for patients with conditions like PTSD.

If something reminds someone of the original traumatic memory in a new context, even after extinction, it can solidify again, re-forming the link between the trigger and the response. Sah thinks that a sharper understanding of why some traumatic memories return after therapy may lead to better treatments for disorders such as PTSD and addiction. In a Nature Neuroscience study, Sah and his colleagues used optogenetics in rats to identify the circuitry in the brain that controls the return of traumatic memories.

By understanding those mechanisms, says Sah, it might be possible to develop new drugs to prevent relapses. And thanks to a tidal wave of new tech, Sah says these advances might someday help scientists treat memory disorders the same way that we use drugs to control heart disease. Alex Orlando is an assistant editor at Discover. Register or Log In.

The Magazine Shop. Login Register Stay Curious Subscribe. Newsletter Sign up for our email newsletter for the latest science news. Sign Up. MIT scientists labeled the cells highlighted in red where memory engrams are stored in a mouse hippocampus.

Credit: Steve Ramirez and Xu Liu. The cells shown in green and red are vital for permanent memory storage.