{"id":3288,"date":"2017-04-17T23:39:31","date_gmt":"2017-04-18T03:39:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/?p=3288"},"modified":"2017-09-06T13:37:27","modified_gmt":"2017-09-06T17:37:27","slug":"eager-to-please-confabulation-in-healthy-and-amnesic-individuals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/2017\/04\/17\/eager-to-please-confabulation-in-healthy-and-amnesic-individuals\/","title":{"rendered":"Eager To Please: Confabulation in healthy and amnesic individuals"},"content":{"rendered":"

If we can trust anyone, we should first trust ourselves, right? Not always, as cases of confabulation tell us. Imagine not being able to trust the accuracy of your own memory! And worse, not even knowing that you can\u2019t trust it!<\/p>\n

Individuals who confabulate genuinely believe that their memory is accurate, when in fact they are reporting or remembering false things. For example, an amnesic patient might tell a doctor an elaborate story about his weekend, which he says he spent in New York City exploring art museums. In reality, the patient was in the hospital the entire weekend, but has no doubt that the story he\u2019s relaying to his doctor is true.<\/p>\n

Confabulation<\/strong> is the unconscious process of producing false memories, and it can affect anyone. Those affected by confabulation range from amnesic patients to an average person participating in a psychological study. Obviously, the severity and consequences of the confabulation vary depending on the individual and the situation.
\n<\/p>\n

Confabulation involves an error in source monitoring<\/strong>, which is the attribution of a specific memory to a source. Individuals who confabulate often attribute memories to incorrect sources, or fail to ascertain whether the memory has a source at all. For example, one might think they experienced a situation themselves, and therefore it is coming from their own memory, when in reality it came from a story they heard on the news. Individuals\u2019 failure to examine the source of a false memory is part of the cause of confabulations.<\/p>\n

There are two general types of confabulations: provoked and spontaneous. Spontaneous confabulations usually occur only in people with a brain injury that has caused them amnesia. Provoked confabulations, on the other hand, arise from a cue. They are normally caused by questioning and are the type that are seen in healthy people as well as people with amnesia and other neurological disorders. Individuals will produce provoked confabulations in response to something that challenges memory.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

This woman here might experiencing confabulation!<\/a><\/p><\/div>\n

A paper<\/a> by Max Coltheart examines confabulation in a range of individuals, from healthy to amnesic. Wilson and Nisbett (1978) tested confabulation in healthy individuals by asking random shoppers to choose a the best quality pair of stockings between 4 identical pairs. As a follow up, shoppers were asked to explain why they chose the pair they did. People offered all sorts of explanations, citing the superior texture or hue of the particular pair of stockings, which were obviously unfounded, since the stockings were all virtually the same.<\/p>\n

This displays a classic trait of human nature: the keenness we all show for giving the correct or expected answer. When asked to complete a task, we overlook logic in favor of successful completion of the task: in this case, giving the answer that\u2019s expected. Wouldn\u2019t you rather give a response than admit that you don\u2019t know something?<\/p>\n

Another study in Coltheart’s paper examined confabulation in hypnotized individuals (Barnier, Cox, Connors, Langdon and Coltheart 2010). Subjects were hypnotized to believe that the person in the mirror they were asked to look in was a stranger. When questioned by the experimenters about why they saw a stranger in the mirror, subjects came up with all sorts of explanations in order to make sense of the seemingly impossible situation, including suggesting that they were looking at a photograph or through a hole in the wall. Experimenters also asked the subjects whether one of their family members would be able to tell the difference between them and the person in the mirror. Amazingly, subjects replied \u201cno,\u201d citing specific differences in physical features between themselves and the mirrored person, when of course, just like in the stockings experiment, there were none.<\/p>\n

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Subjects were hypnotized to believe that the person in the mirror they were asked to look in was a stranger<\/a><\/p><\/div>\n

\u00a0<\/strong>These responses, like the subjects\u2019 made-up explanations of the differences between stockings, show the human tendency to find causes, even if they are false, to make sense of a situation.<\/p>\n

In many cases of question-provoked confabulation, researchers point out that the subjects\/patients had the opportunity to respond \u201cI don\u2019t know\u201d when asked to explain the logically impossible situations. Yet instead, they confabulated, coming up with elaborate false explanations for the occurrences. This attempt to rationalize their actions or statements appears to be a better alternative to having no explanation at all (Malle 2006).<\/p>\n

People rely more on external sources of memory (like other people\u2019s accounts of a situation) when they are having trouble remembering or have amnesia, and therefore are more susceptible to suggestibility and other biases that will cause them to create a false memory. One example of this was given by Gudjonsson, Kopelman and MacKeith (Schacter 1999). They described a man who, after being interviewed by the police about a murder case, could not stop seeing visions of the victim\u2019s face, and became suspicious that he was the one who had committed the murder. He ended up confessing erroneously to the murder, and while on trial was unsure what he would plead because he wanted to see all of the evidence before he decided whether he was guilty or not.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

He ended up confessing erroneously to the murder, and while on trial was unsure what he would plead because he wanted to see all of the evidence before he decided whether he was guilty or not <\/a><\/p><\/div>\n

According to what we know about suggestibility, which is one of the seven \u201csins\u201d of memory, hearing other accounts of what happened may have had an impact on this man\u2019s memory, perhaps making him even less sure of whether or not he had committed the murder. In this example, the man is mistrusting of his own memory and is coming to rely on other\u2019s accounts of the incident. This could make him susceptible to both the misinformation effect<\/strong> and the suggestibility effect<\/strong>. The misinformation effect occurs when memory for a particular event is influenced by information after the event; in this case, the trial and police interviews could provide misinformation that might impact the man\u2019s memory. The suggestibility effect is similar, referring to other\u2019s suggestions and the way they might influence memory. In this case, being accused of the crime could make the man more likely to believe that he had committed it.<\/p>\n

Confabulation can occur in disparate situations and have varying degrees of consequence. When confabulations occur in normal humans as a response to a desire to come up with a correct answer, they seem to be of little consequence. However, for amnesic patients or others with brain disorders, confabulations are an unavoidable, unconscious and untruthful reality that plays a significant role in their perception of their daily lives.<\/p>\n

\u00a0References<\/u><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/u>Confabulation. (n.d.). Retrieved April 10, 2017, from https:\/\/mitpress.mit.edu\/sites\/default\/files\/titles\/content\/9780262582711_sch_0001.pdf<\/p>\n

Coltheart, M. (2017). Confabulation and conversation.\u00a0Cortex,87<\/em>, 62-68. doi:10.1016\/j.cortex.2016.08.002<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/u>Malle, B. F. (2006).\u00a0How the mind explains behavior: folk explanations, meaning, and social interaction<\/em>. Cambridge: Mass.<\/p>\n

Schacter, D. L. (1999).\u00a0The cognitive neuropsychology of false memories<\/em>. Hove, East Sussex, UK: Psychology Press.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If we can trust anyone, we should first trust ourselves, right? Not always, as cases of confabulation tell us. Imagine not being able to trust the accuracy of your own memory! And worse, not even knowing that you can\u2019t trust it! Individuals who confabulate genuinely believe that their memory is accurate, when in fact they […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8000,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[80215],"tags":[266336,130400,149747],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3288"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8000"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3288"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3288\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3750,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3288\/revisions\/3750"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3288"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3288"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3288"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}