False Memories Can Form Within Seconds, Study Finds (gizmodo.com) 69
In a new study, scientists found that it's possible for people to form false memories of an event within seconds of it occurring. This almost-immediate misremembering seems to be shaped by our expectations of what should happen, the team says. Gizmodo reports: "This study is unique in two ways, in our opinion. First, it explores memory for events that basically just happened, between 0.3 and 3 seconds ago. Intuitively, we would think that these memories are pretty reliable," lead author Marte Otten, a neuroscientist at the University of Amsterdam, told Gizmodo in an email. "As a second unique feature, we explicitly asked people whether they thought their memories are reliable -- so how confident are they about their response?" To do this, they recruited hundreds of volunteers over a series of four experiments to complete a task: They would look at certain letters and then be asked to recall one highlighted letter right after. However, the scientists used letters that were sometimes reversed in orientation, so the volunteers had to remember whether their selection was mirrored or not. They also focused on the volunteers who were highly confident about their choices during the task.
Overall, the participants regularly misremembered the letters, but in a specific way. People were generally good at remembering when a typical letter was shown, with their inaccuracy rates hovering around 10%. But they were substantially worse at remembering a mirrored letter, with inaccuracy rates up to 40% in some experiments. And, interestingly enough, their memory got worse the longer they had to wait before recalling it. When they were asked to recall what they saw a half second later, for instance, they were wrong less than 20% of the time, but when they were asked three seconds later, the rate rose as high as 30%.
According to Otten, the findings -- published Wednesday in PLOS One -- indicate that our memory starts being shaped almost immediately by our preconceptions. People expect to see a regular letter, and don't get easily fooled into misremembering a mirrored letter. But when the unexpected happens, we might often still default to our missed prediction. This bias doesn't seem to kick in instantaneously, though, since people's short-term memory was better when they had to be especially quick on their feet. "It is only when memory becomes less reliable through the passage of a tiny bit of time, or the addition of extra visual information, that internal expectations about the world start playing a role," Otten said.
Overall, the participants regularly misremembered the letters, but in a specific way. People were generally good at remembering when a typical letter was shown, with their inaccuracy rates hovering around 10%. But they were substantially worse at remembering a mirrored letter, with inaccuracy rates up to 40% in some experiments. And, interestingly enough, their memory got worse the longer they had to wait before recalling it. When they were asked to recall what they saw a half second later, for instance, they were wrong less than 20% of the time, but when they were asked three seconds later, the rate rose as high as 30%.
According to Otten, the findings -- published Wednesday in PLOS One -- indicate that our memory starts being shaped almost immediately by our preconceptions. People expect to see a regular letter, and don't get easily fooled into misremembering a mirrored letter. But when the unexpected happens, we might often still default to our missed prediction. This bias doesn't seem to kick in instantaneously, though, since people's short-term memory was better when they had to be especially quick on their feet. "It is only when memory becomes less reliable through the passage of a tiny bit of time, or the addition of extra visual information, that internal expectations about the world start playing a role," Otten said.
not surprising (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re: not surprising (Score:2)
Re: not surprising (Score:1)
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If you are drunk, and can't fully remember do you simply fill in the gaps with what you expect to have happened.
Re: not surprising (Score:5, Insightful)
No, sometimes it happens when you're perfectly sober but your attention lapses or you get momentarily distracted and you sunconsciously fill the gaps. Do you remember the specific details of your drive to work *this morning* or we're you so engrossed mentally pregaming that big meeting that you weren't paying attention and when asked to describe *today's* trip you're reconstructing it from the sum total of all such trips?
Forget that. No pun intended. (Score:2)
No, sometimes it happens when you're perfectly sober but your attention lapses or you get momentarily distracted and you sunconsciously fill the gaps.
Eye-brain link is NOT a camera. Things one sees... not necessarily as seen or even there. And I'm not talking hallucinations.
Ever had one of those "I thought I glanced X but then I looked back and it was Z" moments? That usually happens when one is not concentrated, just moving around through space, catching things with peripheral vision.
That's your brain just making shit up for ya.
Usually, it is followed by an urge to look back cause the thing you saw just isn't supposed to be there. Like say... a dog with [mirror.co.uk]
Re:not surprising (Score:4, Informative)
Re:not surprising (Score:5, Interesting)
Generally cops can pick that up or will reschedule. I got mugged in a nightclub in the 90s (By the bouncer, turns out it was gangster owned and I annoyed the wrong person when I asked them to stop harrassing my sister.), pretty badly, and dragged my bloody self into the police station. The cop took a statement, but asked I return in the morning when I sobered up because he wasnt sure I was remembering it right.
Next morning I came in with a witness, and gave a much more sensible testimony. That said, because there where differences between the slightly confabulated drunken version and the sober version they couldnt use it, and surprise surprise the video surveilance was missing. They did keep me on file because the prosecutor was actually trying to build a case against the club.
6 months later the cops shut the club down because it was run by the mafia and had drugs running out of it, and lo and behold the guy who I asked to stop harassing my sister was one of those arrested.
A few years later I started working in the courts, and I noticed that yeah that was exactly the problem with drunken testimony, cops couldnt use it because defence could very easy have it struck down as unreliable, but when a sober version was taken later, the defence was still able to subpoena the drunk version and challenge the sober version on the differences.
Moral of the story, if you witness something drunk, by all means call the cops, but tell them you'd rather give any interview testimony when sober.
Or don't call the cops at all, if theres any chance they might turn around and pin it on you [because they *will* twist your words]. In that case, call a lawyer.
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Re:not surprising (Score:5, Insightful)
How can your testimony the next day be more reliable / complete than on the spot? Stuff forgotten due to being drunk doesn't come back magically the next morning. On the contrary, by then you'll have forgotten more stuff! Well, unless the people who you were with filled you in on the details, but then the cops want your testimony, and not your friends'.
The thing is, that when sober, you tend to realize "oh, I don't remember that detail", meanwhile, when drunk, your mind tends to play tricks on you and fill those holes with garbage, without you even realizing. That's what confabulating means.
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Sure but forgotten details arent wrong details. The drunk dude just spits nonsense.
Plus drunk testimony is innadmissable.
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They should have shut it down when the CCTV evidence of your assault wasn't available. Having a licence to serve alcohol, or whatever mechanism they use to regulate clubs, should be dependent on having working CCTV.
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You'd think so,.
Unfortunately the problem with wealthy gangsters, is wealthy gangsters have wealthy gangster lawyers.
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The cops should not have taken your drunk testimony in the first place.
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Hell, this happens almost every day when watching television with my wife. She will repeat a quote that we both *just* heard and when it leaves her mouth, it is different than what I heard previously. I am sure that I do the same exact thing and/or I am misremembering the line. Either way, it is very interesting to me.
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Eyewitness testimony is basically one of the most unreliable forms of testimony there is. It can be easily altered, made identical, and otherwise molded - the brain is extremely good at filling in gaps based on hearing something that makes sense.
E.g., if you are walking down the road, hear an accident, turn around and hear someone yell "he had the walk sign", you can bet if you asked anyone, the walk sign at the traffic light was lit - the brain didn't notice it, but when asked to recall it, that prompt bas
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Yeah, just listen to the "Wrongful Convictions" podcast. Almost every single exoneree was put behind bars in the first place due to corrupt eye-witness testimony.
"False" (Score:2)
Is it a false memory, or no memory and their just guessing?
And is a letter or word flashing by indicative of the way memory generally works?
Re:"False" (Score:4, Funny)
Was "their" for "they're" a false memory, or a kind of typo?
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If they had the option of I can't remember, then I think yes. Then again people may guess just not to look stupid, but that could also apply to real life as well.
Re:"False" (Score:5, Informative)
Memory isn't like a photograph, or writing, etc. It's is a collection of concepts. It gets muddled together in the brain so that people think of a memory as being visual or sonic. The older the memory, the more the concepts of the memory need to be stitched together. Even in just a few hours details vanish and it gets filled in and the person will swear it's the truth and sometimes get angry when someone else disagrees (but then people fight over gold vs blue dress too).
I remember I broke a window once, and ran around the house to tell my father with some embarrassment. However every time he told the story he swore he saw me break it and he wouldn't budge from it.
The idea that this can happen in seconds is interesting. However these are also memories no one is intending to keep, you just need to know that letter in the moment and then immediately toss it away.
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That was a great article (Score:2)
no memory (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: no memory (Score:4, Funny)
I don't remember what you said, I don't even remember who you are, but I feel compelled to...uh...where was I?
Yeah...this does fit observed reality reasonably well.
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That seems like a liminal effect. There are good studies about how moving through a door into a new room can make you lose your train of thought. It's often why people forget what they got up for. Your mind seems to discard its working memory when encountering a new environment.
On mobile devices, everything is so constrained that the UX experience tends to be more jarring when transitioning. All the context of where you were is lost, and is probably triggering a digital version of this liminal effect.
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I think this is an example of the doorway effect [wikipedia.org] in action. When you clear the screen it's like leaving the room. When you reply on a device that retains some context on screen, it's more like looking out the window -- you don't flush the details of the space you're in because you aren't leaving.
These aren't the false memories you're (Score:2)
looking for.
If we're all walking around half way to dementia anyway, what the fuck would it matter if we're made aware of the fact?
Not that ignoring it is particularly honorable along any dimension, but the fact itself is kinda evidence that people will ignore it and go about their business like it isn't the case, same way they've always done.
Of course there might be a small fraction of people who hear this finding and collapse into a useless mess, perpetually questioning every thought that flits their head
Obvious joke is obvious (Score:4, Funny)
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That, or even the *title* of the article.
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I see what what you did.
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And why editors forget that an article was already posted...
More info on methodology please (Score:4, Interesting)
I went to the story looking for info on the obvious issues with "mirrored" letters - that being that quite a few letters are symmetric across the vertical axis. The fact that they don't mention much about the methodology other than the very basics - leaving out specifics e.g. was this all automated; if so, did they eliminate the obvious "problem" letters (M, O, A, etc.); did they screen for participants with dyslexia, and so on - bothers me a little. Especially when the study lead sounds like he had a significant pre-conceived bias going in.
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But it will never be replicated.
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So the whole goldfish thing was just projection? (Score:1)
Do goldfish really retain memories longer than hu-mans?
The lesson is that memories are not data. (Score:5, Informative)
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He may have gotten the terminology wrong, but the basic concept is correct. We basically store a summary in memory and recreate the details in the process of remembering. Human memory is a very lossy compression scheme. Even worse, the act of remembering causes the memory to get rewritten. Some true aspects may get lost, some false aspects may get reinforced. Human memory is pretty horrible.
No surprise (Score:2)
I mean many people do not remember what you just told them 3 seconds later. They may fantasize that you told them something else though.
Reminds me of a show where they tested witnesses (Score:3)
I for the life of me can't remember what show it was but they setup an experiment. They got random people to sit at the front of a restaurant of an unsuspecting victim. Then someone on the show (not hiding their face or anything) came and did a snatch job on purse or phone or something else. The other people in the restaurant then pretended to call the police while the person who mugged the victim quickly got changed into a police uniform got into a fake police car and drove around the block to arrive.
They then proceeded to take the victims statement including a description of the suspect. Naturally the description of the suspect barely resembled the person who did the mugging, and no one recognised that the person who snatched their purse / wallet / phone was literally standing in front of them asking the victim to describe him to himself.
If these sentences are not grammatically correct it's because I forgot the start of them by the time I got to the end.
ChatGPT (Score:3)
Researchers with bad memory do "memory research" (Score:1)
Dupe (Score:2)
Better Experiements (Score:3)
In my evidence class in law school, the professor staged a pretty good real-life example. At an unannounced time during the class, he had a group of 10 students (not in the class) noisily storm into the class. One of the 10 stole his briefcase. The "thief" didn't try to hide it and held up the brief case before leaving the class with it.
After the commotion died down, he had the 10 students come back in and asked random people in the class to pick out which student had stolen the briefcase. Even though he literally had 60 witnesses who had seen what happened right in front of him, they couldn't agree on which student had been the thief. With cross examination techniques, he was able to easily convince the students who correctly identify the thief that they might have been wrong.
After talking to former students that had taken the class, we learned he'd been doing this "experiment" for decades. It's been known for a very long time that the memories of witnesses can be extremely faulty and can be manipulated by authority and suggestion. All of us think we are in full possession of our senses and are mentally healthy enough not to be gaslit, but the human brain can be incredibly vulnerable.
Things get even worse when you add emotion to the equation. One of my biggest disputes with my spouse was over an event 10 years ago that we remember completely differently. At this point, it's not even clear what actually happened. Both our memories have been strongly colored by our emotions surrounding the event. The truth is we only remember how we felt, not what actually happened.
Magicians Have Known & Exploited This Forever (Score:3)
My wife and I are performing magicians and this is something that has been known about, studied and applied for ages.
A common application is, right before the climax / ending of a magic trick, when the "magic" is revealed, we will do a recap of everything that happened up to that point. Maybe, just to use a contrived example, we want the audience to remember that they shuffled the deck of cards but we want them to forget that we touched it for a moment. We can do that through the recap. To make this even more successful, we can recap by asking leading questions that get the spectator to answer "yes" to certain things ... "and YOU shuffled the deck YOURSELF right?" By having the volunteer answer these questions for themselves, the information comes from "within" .. they decided on the sequence of events and on what was important. You don't trust anyone as much as you trust yourself so if you arrive the conclusion yourself, with a little bit of helpful "aid" from the magician ... there's no convincing you otherwise. And we hear recounts of what happened from audiences after the fact and they often play up how "miraculous" the magic was. As in, we wish we could have done it that way but it would have genuinely been impossible. But thanks to fickle memory we can get the audience to remember things how we want them to.
Another "trick" that is commonly used is to deliver a joke immediately following a "dirty move." By inducing laughter, we can actually get the audience to forget that something just happened. It's a way of "short circuiting" short-term memory and It's kind of crazy how well it works. I even know of some extremely well-practiced magicians who will use this when they make a mistake (which happens to the best of us) in order to "erase" the mistake in the minds of the audience.
None of this is primary. If the fundamentals of misdirection aren't followed, or if the method is weak/transparent then these memory techniques will not save the trick. But used as an additional layer on top of the fundamentals it can create some pretty impossible-seeming illusionry (I just made up a word).
Magic is interesting because it only exists in the minds of the audience. It's the only art-form that I know of that plays with epistemology; how we know what we know.
nothing new (Score:2)
Just another study confirming what has been known for decades.
Fascinating (Score:1)
Police rely upon it, train for it (Score:2)
After that guy was kicked to death by multiple officers in Memphis, a cop posted an account that she`d been trained to then say ``Halt! Weapon down!`` at the body, because witnesses will recall hearing those words, but also flip the order of events to make the memory make sense.
Expected behavior (Score:1)