The cognitive neuroscience of memory errors

About this book

This thesis reports three studies that examined the neural activity associated with different types of memory errors. Study 1 investigated the neural origins of memory errors that occur when only the general, nonspecific features (but not the specific details) of an item are encoded. Results indicated that specific recognition (i.e., accurate memory for specific details) was accompanied by encoding-related increases in right fusiform activity, whereas nonspecific recognition (i.e., memory errors including false recognition and partial recognition) was associated with encoding-related increases in left fusiform activity coupled with relatively little right fusiform activity. These findings complement previous reports of a laterality effect in the fusiform cortex during repetition priming, and extend those results to the domain of episodic encoding. Study 2 compared the neural correlates of two types of false recognition, related false recognition (i.e., claiming to remember something that is related to a previously encountered item) and unrelated false recognition (i.e., claiming to remember something that is unrelated to previously encountered items). Similar patterns of neural activity were observed during related false recognition and true recognition, whereas unrelated false recognition was accompanied by a distinct pattern of neural activity, which may have reflected a unique cognitive strategy. These findings indicate that different types of false recognition can rely on distinct neural mechanisms. Study 3 explored the neural activity associated with two types of related false recognition, conceptual false recognition (i.e., false alarms resulting from semantic similarities between studied and tested items) and perceptual false recognition (i.e., false alarms resulting from physical similarities between studied and tested items). Results revealed that conceptual false recognition was particularly reliant on frontal cortex activity, which presumably reflected increased semantic processing during conceptual (but not perceptual) false recognition. These results suggest that conceptual and perceptual false recognition rely on at least partially distinct neural substrates. In summary, this research examined the neural correlates of accurate and erroneous memory for different types of information (specific vs. nonspecific; related vs. unrelated; conceptual vs. perceptual). These studies provide valuable insight into the constructive nature of memory by revealing the neural correlates of different types of memory errors.