Affective music during episodic memory recollection modulates subsequent false emotional memory traces: an fMRI study.

Music is a powerful medium that influences our emotions and memories. Neuroscience research has demonstrated music's ability to engage brain regions associated with emotion, reward, motivation, and autobiographical memory. While music's role in modulating emotions has been explored extensively, our study investigates whether music can alter the emotional content of memories. Building on the theory that memories can be updated upon retrieval, we tested whether introducing emotional music during memory recollection might introduce false emotional elements into the original memory trace. We developed a 3-day episodic memory task with separate encoding, recollection, and retrieval phases. Our primary hypothesis was that emotional music played during memory recollection would increase the likelihood of introducing novel emotional components into the original memory. Behavioral findings revealed two key outcomes: 1) participants exposed to music during memory recollection were more likely to incorporate novel emotional components congruent with the paired music valence, and 2) memories retrieved 1 day later exhibited a stronger emotional tone than the original memory, congruent with the valence of the music paired during the previous day's recollection. Furthermore, fMRI results revealed altered neural engagement during story recollection with music, including the amygdala, anterior hippocampus, and inferior parietal lobule. Enhanced connectivity between the amygdala and other brain regions, including the frontal and visual cortex, was observed during recollection with music, potentially contributing to more emotionally charged story reconstructions. These findings illuminate the interplay between music, emotion, and memory, offering insights into the consequences of infusing emotional music into memory recollection processes.

Proneness to false memory generation predicts pseudoscientific belief endorsement.

Among cognitive factors that can influence the endorsement of pseudoscientific beliefs, our study focuses on proneness to false memory generation. In this preregistered study, we presented 170 fluent English speakers residing in the USA with a misinformation task aimed at generating false memories. In this task, they first completed an event encoding stage, in which two events were narrated through sequentially presented pictures. One day later, they read a series of sentences relating the same events but which included several inaccurate descriptions aimed at producing a misinformation effect. Finally, we measured the influence of the misinformation manipulation over false memory generation. After completing the misinformation task, participants responded to a questionnaire measuring pseudoscientific beliefs. Our results showed a positive correlation between pseudoscience endorsement and false memory rates, which indicates that the latter might be a key factor influencing susceptibility to pseudoscience. To our knowledge, this is the first study showing a link between the tendency to believe in pseudoscience and variability regarding proneness to develop false memories. Practical implications for the design of new interventions to effectively reduce pseudoscientific beliefs and their negative impact on our society are discussed.

Contradictory findings in the study of emotional false memory: a review on the inadvisability of controlling valence and arousal.

Emotional false memories are the erroneous recollection of events accompanied by an emotional experience. In high-risk domains like psychotherapy and the legal system, emotional false memories are of particular importance. Despite the systematic research conducted on emotional false memories in recent years, findings remain contradictory. Some studies have suggested that negative emotion reduces false memories, while others have suggested that negative emotion increases false memories. Research has mainly employed words and pictures as experimental stimuli, and studies using both types of memory stimuli are reviewed here. From this examination, it emerged that the main reasons for contradictory findings are as follows: (1) different materials have varying effects on inducing false memories, with pictures demonstrating a memory advantage compared to words; (2) recall and recognition tests have been used interchangeably, leading to different false-memory effects depending on the memory test employed; and (3) different studies have adopted different levels of control over valence and arousal when manipulating emotional variables. Future studies should distinguish between the use of different memory materials, examine specific differences in recall and recognition tests, and measure the impact of specific emotions on false memory beyond the dimensions of valence and arousal.

The False Recognition Test, a new tool for the assessment of false memories, with normative data from an Italian sample.

INTRODUCTION: False memory can be defined as remembering something that did not happen. To a certain extent it is a normal phenomenon, but its occurrence seems to increase in healthy and pathological aging, possibly providing relevant clues on some clinical conditions in the spectrum of dementia. We adapted a well-established Deed-Roediger-McDermott paradigm, frequently used in experimental contexts, to devise a new neuropsychological assessment tool, the False Recognition Test (FRT), that can investigate classical facets of episodic memory performance (i.e. free recall and recognition), and assess proneness to produce semantically related and non-semantic false memories. Here we describe the FRT and provide normative data and correction grids to consider the possible effects of age, gender, and education on the FRT scores. METHOD: Two-hundred and thirty-two Italian healthy individuals (99 male) aged 18-91 years, with different educational levels (from primary to university) underwent the FRT, together with validated tests for cognitive screening and episodic memory assessment and one scale for depression. RESULTS: Multiple linear regression analysis revealed that age and education significantly influenced performance on FRT. From the derived linear equations, we provide correction grids for the raw scores of the FRT, and equivalent scores estimated using a nonparametric method. Correlational analysis showed significant associations between FRT subscores and cognitive, executive and memory functions, and depression. CONCLUSION: The FRT may constitute a useful instrument for both clinical and research purposes.

Eyes on Memory: Pupillometry in Encoding and Retrieval.

This review critically examines the contributions of pupillometry to memory research, primarily focusing on its enhancement of our understanding of memory encoding and retrieval mechanisms mainly investigated with the recognition memory paradigm. The evidence supports a close link between pupil response and memory formation, notably influenced by the type of novelty detected. This proposal reconciles inconsistencies in the literature regarding pupil response patterns that may predict successful memory formation, and highlights important implications for encoding mechanisms. The review also discusses the pupil old/new effect and its significance in the context of recollection and in reflecting brain signals related to familiarity or novelty detection. Additionally, the capacity of pupil response to serve as a true memory signal and to distinguish between true and false memories is evaluated. The evidence provides insights into the nature of false memories and offers a novel understanding of the cognitive mechanisms involved in memory distortions. When integrated with rigorous experimental design, pupillometry can significantly refine theoretical models of memory encoding and retrieval. Furthermore, combining pupillometry with neuroimaging and pharmacological interventions is identified as a promising direction for future research.

Category-Based Effect on False Memory of People with Down Syndrome.

Background: People with Down syndrome (DS) are deficient in verbal memory but relatively preserved in visuospatial perception. Verbal memories are related to semantic knowledge. Receptive ability is better than expressive ability in people with DS but still seriously lags behind their age-matched controls. This lag may result in the weak semantic integration of people with DS. Aims: This study aimed to examine the ability of semantic integration of people with DS by using false-memory tasks. Possible differences in the number of false memories induced by nouns and verbs were of focus. Methods and Procedures: Two phases were involved in the false-memory task. In the study phase, ten-word lists with semantically related associates were presented. In the recognition phase, judgments were to be made about whether the words presented had been heard before. Three types of words were tested: previously presented associates, semantically related lures, and semantically unrelated new words. Outcomes and Results: People with DS overall showed the lowest accuracy among groups in response to tested word types. In the processing of lures, people with DS were worse in recognition than MA controls. In processing unrelated words, people with DS responded least accurately to all types of words compared to control groups. In the processing of associates, people with DS showed similar recognition rates as the MA controls but were less accurate than the CA controls. No difference was observed between nouns and verbs in recognizing word types among groups, though faster responses to nouns than to verbs emerged in college students. Further analyses on topic-wised comparisons of errors across syntactic categories revealed differences in specific concepts among groups, suggesting people with DS were atypical in semantic organization. Conclusions and Implications: People with DS showed mixed patterns in semantic integration by false-memory tasks with delay to associates and deviance to lures together with unrelated words. People with DS showed distinct patterns in processing nouns and verbs while conducting topic-wise comparisons, suggesting that they formed false memories differently based on distinct syntactic categories. We concluded that people with DS develop a deviant semantic structure, hence showing problems in language and social cognition. Category-based rehabilitation is suggested to be implemented for people with DS to improve their semantic knowledge through lexical connections.

From vector spaces to DRM lists: False Memory Generator, a software for automated generation of lists of stimuli inducing false memories.

The formation of false memories is one of the most widely studied topics in cognitive psychology. The Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm is a powerful tool for investigating false memories and revealing the cognitive mechanisms subserving their formation. In this task, participants first memorize a list of words (encoding phase) and next have to indicate whether words presented in a new list were part of the initially memorized one (recognition phase). By employing DRM lists optimized to investigate semantic effects, previous studies highlighted a crucial role of semantic processes in false memory generation, showing that new words semantically related to the studied ones tend to be more erroneously recognized (compared to new words less semantically related). Despite the strengths of the DRM task, this paradigm faces a major limitation in list construction due to its reliance on human-based association norms, posing both practical and theoretical concerns. To address these issues, we developed the False Memory Generator (FMG), an automated and data-driven tool for generating DRM lists, which exploits similarity relationships between items populating a vector space. Here, we present FMG and demonstrate the validity of the lists generated in successfully replicating well-known semantic effects on false memory production. FMG potentially has broad applications by allowing for testing false memory production in domains that go well beyond the current possibilities, as it can be in principle applied to any vector space encoding properties related to word referents (e.g., lexical, orthographic, phonological, sensory, affective, etc.) or other type of stimuli (e.g., images, sounds, etc.).

Effects of emotional ambiguity and emotional intensity on true and false memory.

Whereas the effects of emotional intensity (the perceived strength of an item's valence or arousal) have long been studied in true- and false-memory research, emotional ambiguity (the uncertainty that attaches to perceived emotional intensity) has only been studied recently. Available evidence suggests that emotional ambiguity has reliable effects on true memory that are distinct from those of emotional intensity. However, those findings are mostly restricted to recall, and the effects of emotional ambiguity on false memory remain unexplored. The current study addressed both limitations by measuring the effects of emotional ambiguity and emotional intensity on true and false recognition. In two experiments, we manipulated valence ambiguity and valence intensity (Experiment 1) and arousal ambiguity and arousal intensity (Experiment 2) of Deese/Roediger/McDermott lists. Multiple linear regression analyses were conducted for Experiment 1, Experiment 2, and the combined data of the experiments to separate the effects of emotional ambiguity and emotional intensity. Our results showed that both valence ambiguity and arousal ambiguity improved true recognition, and the effects of valence ambiguity remained robust even when controlling for valence intensity, arousal intensity, and arousal ambiguity. More importantly, for both valence and arousal, there was an interaction between ambiguity and intensity in false memory. Specifically, we found that valence ambiguity increased false recognition with positive valence, while arousal ambiguity amplified the effect of arousal intensity on false recognition. Our results are discussed in the context of the emotional ambiguity hypothesis and fuzzy-trace theory.

Reduced false memory in the second language of Turkish-English bilinguals.

In the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm, studying a list of semantically related words leads to false memory for the critical non-studied word that is related to all the words in the study list. Previous studies questioning whether bilinguals are more prone to false memory in their first language (L1) or second language (L2) in the DRM paradigm revealed mixed results. The present study investigated the same question with Turkish-English bilinguals. The revised hierarchical model proposes that the link between the lexicon and the semantic system is weaker in L2 than in L1, suggesting that false memory in the DRM paradigm that relies on semantic relatedness would be higher in L1 than in L2. Furthermore, previous studies showed that L2 is more resistant to errors in decision-making when the two languages are dissimilar, but not when they are similar, and Turkish and English are historically distant and typologically dissimilar languages. We tested Turkish-English bilingual participants whose L1 is Turkish with Turkish and English DRM word lists that had similar prior norms for generating false recognition. In the recognition test, some of the studied items and the critical non-studied items were presented and participants identified the studied items. False recognition for the critical non-studied items was lower and correct recognition for studied items was higher in L2 than in L1. The results suggest that L2 is more resistant to false memory due to its weaker lexicon and semantic system associations, at least when the two languages spoken by the bilingual are dissimilar.

It's not a lie If you believe it: Narrative analysis of autobiographical memories reveals over-confidence disposition in patients who confabulate.

Humans perceive their personal memories as fundamentally true, and although memory is prone to inaccuracies, flagrant memory errors are rare. Some patients with damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) recall and act upon patently erroneous memories (spontaneous confabulations). Clinical observations suggest these memories carry a strong sense of confidence, a function ascribed to vmPFC in studies of memory and decision making. However, most studies of the underlying mechanisms of memory overconfidence do not directly probe personal recollections and resort instead to laboratory-based tasks and contrived rating scales. We analyzed naturalistic word use of patients with focal vmPFC damage (N = 18) and matched healthy controls (N = 23) while they recalled autobiographical memories using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) method. We found that patients with spontaneous confabulation (N = 7) tended to over-use words related to the categories of 'certainty' and of 'swearwords' compared to both non-confabulating vmPFC patients (N = 11) and control participants. Certainty related expressions among confabulating patients were at normal levels during erroneous memories and were over-expressed during accurate memories, contrary to our predictions. We found no elevation in expressions of affect (positive or negative), temporality or drive as would be predicted by some models of confabulation. Thus, erroneous memories may be associated with subjectively lower certainty, but still exceed patients' report criterion because of a global proclivity for overconfidence. This may be compounded by disinhibition reflected by elevated use of swearwords. These findings demonstrate that analysis of naturalistic expressions of memory content can illuminate global meta-mnemonic contributions to memory accuracy complementing indirect laboratory-based correlates of behavior. Memory accuracy is the result of complex interactions among multiple meta-mnemonic processes such as monitoring, report criteria, and control processes which may be shared across decision-making domains.

How False Memory and True Memory Affect Decision Making in Older Adults: A Dissociative Account.

OBJECTIVES: Remembering past rewarding experiences plays a crucial rule in guiding people's decision making in the future. However, as people age, they become less accurate in remembering past events and more susceptible to forming false memories. An important question is how the decline of episodic memory and the increase of false memory may affect older adults' decision-making performance. METHODS: The current study used a newly developed paradigm in which the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) false memory paradigm was combined with a reward learning task to create robust false memories of rewarding experiences. Participants learned that some DRM picture lists brought them a monetary reward and some DRM picture lists did not bring reward. Later, their memories were tested and decision-making preferences were measured. RESULTS: We found that older and younger adults had almost equivalent false and true memories under the rewarding context, but older adults showed significantly lower decision-making preferences for lure pictures and rewarded pictures than younger adults. Furthermore, true and false memories were a stronger predictor of decision-making preferences for younger than for older adults. DISCUSSION: These results together suggest an age-related dissociation between memory and decision making that older adults may be less efficient in using their memory to guide decision making than younger adults. Future research may further investigate its underlying mechanisms and develop potential interventions aiming at strengthening the connection between memory and decision making in older adults to help improve their decision-making performance.

True and false memories for spatial location evoke more similar patterns of brain activity in males than females.

True and false memories recruit a number of shared brain regions; however, they are not completely overlapping. Extensive sex differences have been identified in the brain during true memories and, recently, we identified sex differences in the brain during false memories. In the current fMRI study, we sought to determine whether sex differences existed in the location and extent of overlap between true and false memories. True and false memories activated a number of shared brain regions. Compared to females, males produced a greater number of overlapping brain regions (8 versus 2 activations for males and females, respectively) including the prefrontal cortex, parietal cortex, and early/late visual processing cortices (including V1) in males and prefrontal and parietal cortices in females. Males had significantly higher similarity between true and false memory activation maps, revealed by our novel multi-voxel pattern correlation analysis. Moreover, higher similarity between true and false memory activation maps was associated with higher false memory rates. The current results suggest that true and false memories are more similar in males than females. The significant brain-behavior relationship also suggests that males may be more susceptible to false memory errors due to their highly similar true memory-false memory cortical representations.

Warning before misinformation exposure modulates memory encoding.

Exposure to misleading information after witnessing an event can impair future memory reports about the event. This pervasive form of memory distortion, termed the misinformation effect, can be significantly reduced if individuals are warned about the reliability of post-event information before exposure to misleading information. The present fMRI study investigated whether such prewarnings improve subsequent memory accuracy by influencing encoding-related neural activity during exposure to misinformation. We employed a repeated retrieval misinformation paradigm in which participants watched a crime video (Witnessed Event), completed an initial test of memory, listened to a post-event auditory narrative that contained consistent, neutral, and misleading details (Post-Event Information), and then completed a final test of memory. At the behavioral level, participants who were given a prewarning before the Post-Event Information were less susceptible to misinformation on the final memory test compared with participants who were not given a warning (Karanian et al., Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 117, 22771-22779, 2020). This protection from misinformation was accompanied by greater activity in frontal regions associated with source encoding (lateral PFC) and conflict detection (ACC) during misleading trials as well as a more global reduction in activity in auditory cortex and semantic processing regions (left inferior frontal gyrus) across all trials (consistent, neutral, misleading) of the Post-Event Information narrative. Importantly, the strength of these warning-related activity modulations was associated with better protection from misinformation on the final memory test (improved memory accuracy on misleading trials). Together, these results suggest that warnings modulate encoding-related neural activity during exposure to misinformation to improve memory accuracy.

Repressed Memories (of Sexual Abuse Against Minors) and Statutes of Limitations in Europe: Status Quo and Possible Alternatives.

One of the most heated debates in psychological science concerns the concept of repressed memory. We discuss how the debate on repressed memories continues to surface in legal settings, sometimes even to suggest avenues of legal reform. In the past years, several European countries have extended or abolished the statute of limitations for the prosecution of sexual crimes. Such statutes force legal actions (e.g., prosecution of sexual abuse) to be applied within a certain period of time. One of the reasons for the changes in statutes of limitations concerns the idea of repressed memory. We argue that from a psychological standpoint, these law reforms can be detrimental, particularly when they are done to endorse unfounded psychological theories. The validity of testimonies is compromised many years after the alleged facts, and abolishing the statute of limitations increases the chance that even more (false) recovered memories of abuse might enter the courtroom. We propose solutions to these changes such as establishing an independent expert committee evaluating claims of sexual abuse.

Drawings reveal changes in object memory, but not spatial memory, across time.

Time has an immense influence on our memory. Truncated encoding leads to memory for only the 'gist' of an image, and long delays before recall result in generalized memories with few details. Here, we used crowdsourced scoring of hundreds of drawings made from memory after variable encoding (Experiment 1) and retentions of that memory (Experiment 2) to quantify what features of memory content change across time. We found that whereas some features of memory are highly dependent on time, such as the proportion of objects recalled from a scene and false recall for objects not in the original image, spatial memory was highly accurate and relatively independent of time. We also found that we could predict which objects were recalled across time based on the location, meaning, and saliency of the objects. The differential impact of time on object and spatial memory supports a separation of these memory systems.

When does imagery rescripting become a double-edged sword? - Investigating the risk of memory distortion through imagery rescripting in an online Trauma film study.

Imagery Rescripting (ImRs) has proven effective in reducing involuntary emotional memories. However, it is unclear whether and when it may lead to reduced accuracy of voluntary memory. Although previous analogue studies suggest that ImRs does not pose a general risk regarding memory distortion, it can not be ruled out that ImRs could cause memory impairment under certain risk conditions. In our three-day online trauma film study we investigated in a healthy sample (N = 267) whether specific instructions during ImRs as typically provided in clinical practice (i.e., detailed imagery with a sensory focus) increase the risk of memory distortions. Additionally, we examined whether the completeness of the original memory moderates these instruction effects. Contrary to our expectations, a sensory focus during ImRs was associated with higher memory accuracy in a recognition task, independently of the quality of the original memory. These results extend previous findings by suggesting that ImRs does not even impair memory performance when the quality of the original memory is poor and when the production of sensory-rich images is specifically encouraged. Our results question current practices employed to assess witness statement credibility, which are partly based on concerns that trauma-focused interventions like ImRs undermine memory accuracy.

The effects of forewarning and divided attention on context retrieval in false recognition.

After studying a list of words that are semantically associated to a critical lure, participants are more likely to attribute a falsely recognised critical lure to the context of its strong than weak semantic associates. This is known as the source-strength effect. The current study investigated the roles of automatic and controlled processing in context retrieval in false recognition that is demonstrated by the source-strength effect. The results revealed that the source-strength effect was impervious to forewarning (Experiment 1) and remained intact when attentional resources at encoding were reduced (Experiment 2), suggesting that context retrieval in false recognition is based on automatic processes that are not amenable to conscious control and do not require many attentional resources. This interpretation is consistent with the associative activation theory, which proposes that context retrieval in false recognition is based on memory associations between contexts and critical lures that are automatically created when critical lures become automatically activated via spreading activation process.

False recall is associated with larger caudate in males but not in females.

After learning semantically related words, some people are more likely than others to incorrectly recall unstudied but semantically related lures (i.e., Deese-Roediger-McDermott [DRM] false recall). Previous studies have suggested that neural activity in subcortical regions (e.g., the caudate) is involved in false memory, and that there may be sex differences in the neural basis of false memory. However, sex-specific associations between subcortical volumes and false memory are not well understood. This study investigated whether sex modulates the associations between subcortical volumes and DRM false recall in 400 healthy college students. Volumes of subcortical regions including the caudate, accumbens, amygdala, hippocampus, pallidum, putamen and thalamus were obtained from structural magnetic resonance images and measured using FreeSurfer. The results showed that males had lower true and false recall but larger subcortical volumes than females. Interestingly, higher false recall was associated with a larger caudate in males, but not in females. This association was significant after controlling for age and intracranial volume. This study provides new evidence on the neural basis of false recall. It suggests that the caudate plays a role in false recall in young men, and that future studies of the neural correlates of false memory should consider sex differences.

Investigating the neural basis of schematic false memories by examining schematic and lure pattern similarity.

ABSTRACTSchemas allow us to make assumptions about the world based upon previous experiences and aid in memory organisation and retrieval. However, a reliance on schemas may also result in increased false memories to schematically related lures. Prior neuroimaging work has linked schematic processing in memory tasks to activity in prefrontal, visual, and temporal regions. Yet, it is unclear what type of processing in these regions underlies memory errors. The current study examined where schematic lures exhibit greater neural similarity to schematic targets, leading to this memory error, as compared to neural overlap with non-schematic lures, which, like schematic lures, are novel items at retrieval. Results showed that patterns of neural activity in ventromedial prefrontal cortex, medial frontal gyrus, middle temporal gyrus, hippocampus, and occipital cortices exhibited greater neural pattern similarity for schematic targets and schematic lures than between schematic lures and non-schematic lures. As such, results suggest that schematic membership, and not object history, may be more critical to the neural processes underlying memory retrieval in the context of a strong schema.