A new study shows that people can produce false memories in the blink of an eye.
In a series of four experiments led by the University of Amsterdam, researchers showed 534 subjects Western letters in real and mirror orientations.
After showing some participants a disturbance slide with random letters, all participants were asked to recall one of the target letters from the first slide.
After watching the first slide for half a second, nearly 20% of people formed hallucinatory memories of the target letters; After 3 seconds, this increases to 30%.
In fact, the human brain changes memory based on what it expects to see. Because the people involved in the study were so familiar with Western alphabets, their brains wanted to see the letters in the actual direction.
When letters appear mirrored ("Ɔ" instead of "C"), people are more likely to remember pseudo-letters as real letters, even if only a few milliseconds have passed.
The researchers write: "It appears that short-term memory does not always accurately express what has just been perceived. Instead, memories are shaped by what we expect to see, starting with the formation of the first traces of memory. ”
Above: Study participants saw six to eight letters on the screen. Then, they saw a "memory display" with a box marking the location of the target letter. Then there is a disturbing condition containing random letters, which is meant to disturb the original memory. Finally, they were asked to recall which letter in the target area in the first slide and whether it was a pseudo-letter.
By asking participants how confident they were in their memories (on a scale of 1 to 4), the researchers demonstrated that these were false memories, not false guesses.
"Participants all reported with high confidence that they saw the true counterpart of the pseudo-letter target," the researchers wrote. ”
People are more inclined to replace pseudo-letters with real letters than with real letters, suggesting that memory illusions are conditioned by world knowledge of how things normally look.
The researchers distinguished these false memories from the errors they initially perceived by taking measurements at two time points. The only chance is within 0.25 seconds of the letter flashing.
If the error is caused by a perceived error, then the error rate is the same after 500 milliseconds and 3 seconds. When the error rate increases over time, this indicates that false memories are forming.
Above: People are more likely to have false memories of pseudo-letter targets than real letter targets, and the error rate increases with time and memory interference.
In experiments led by psychologist Elizabeth Loftus and others, we know that false long-term memories are easy to generate.
For example, adults can be persuaded to recall vivid but false memories of getting lost and crying in a shopping mall as a child. In another study, people developed false, rich memories of crimes such as theft or assault.
Fake long-term memory is thought to be driven by the "fuzzy trace theory", which holds that memory comes from two parts: verbatim parts, i.e. what happens in real life; and the gist part, where people interpret the meaning of events based on semantic analysis.
A previous study showed that when people saw a photo of a face and occupation, they were more likely to associate criminal labels like "drug dealer" with faces with black characteristics, suggesting that internal biases are shaping memory.
In another study, researchers gave people a list of three or four words that were related to each other (such as nap, nap, bed, and awake). When given a second word list, participants were more likely to remember semantically relevant words that were not in the original word list, such as sleep.
Fuzzy trace theory may also lead to short-term memory illusions, but "cannot fully explain the current findings," the researchers wrote.
These experiments show that our verbatim memory input is immediately combined with previous experiences and expectations.
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