constructive and reconstructive memory

2001). Squire et al. information contained in memory traces and knowledge, expectations, and beliefs. information contained in memory traces and knowledge, expectations, and beliefs. Koutstaal W, Schacter D.L, Verfaellie M, Brenner C, Jackson E.M. Perceptually-based false recognition of novel objects in amnesia: effects of category size and similarity to prototype. When false recognition is unopposed by true recognition: gist-based memory distortion in Alzheimer's disease. Remember, the participants in the story were British. The foregoing research provides not only insights into the constructive nature of episodic memory, but also some clues regarding the functional basis of constructive memory processes. In contrast to the extensive cognitive literature on episodic memory of past experiences, there is little evidence concerning simulation of future episodes and a virtual absence of direct comparisons between remembering the past and imagining the future. Thus, when D. B. was asked When will be the next time you see a doctor?, his response (Sometime in the next week) was judged correct because his daughter confirmed that he did have a doctors' appointment the next week. Like amnesics, AD patients show reduced false recognition of lure items that are either semantically or perceptually related to previously studied items (Balota et al. Instead, K. C. provided the same response when asked to think about any part of his personal future or past, describing his mental state as blank (Tulving 1985; Tulving et al. In a related line of research, Dalla Barba et al. We will refer to this idea as the constructive episodic simulation hypothesis: the constructive nature of episodic memory is attributable, at least in part, to the role of the episodic system in allowing us to mentally simulate our personal futures (for similar perspectives, see Suddendorf & Corballis 1997; Suddendorf & Busby 2003; Dudai & Carruthers 2005). With over 2 million YouTube subscribers, over 500 articles, and an annual reach of almost 12 million students, it has become one of the most popular sources of psychological information. Reconstructive memory 2022-11-08 Constructive memory Rating: 7,8/10 1136reviews Constructive memory is a term used to describe the process by which our memories are reconstructed In: Terrace H.S, Metcalfe J, editors. While there has been a great deal of research concerning prospective memoryremembering to do things in the future (e.g. In: Schacter D.L, editor. copyright 2003-2023 Study.com. Webrepresentation. concept of schema in reconstruction This is because observer perspectives are phenomenally dry: they involve less emotional and sensory detail than field perspectives (Fernndez, 2015: 541). However, a strong case can be made that all remembering is reconstructive. the contents by NLM or the National Institutes of Health. Certainly, things would get twisted, right? In contrast, in the partisan statements at recall conditions, the political party buttons were removed during the recall task, but the statements remained intact, including the partisan portion. This condition served as a non-coalitional baseline measurement. derived from other sources. Threats, in this hypothesis, are therefore overrepresented (retrieved selectively) in dreams because this facilitates the ultimate goal of detecting and managing future dangers when and if they arise. WebReconstructive memory The idea that we alter information we have stored when we recall it, based on prior expectations/ knowledge. Reconstructive memory is the process in which we recall our memory of an event or a story. Thus, prior knowledge at a more fine-grained level might contribute to further improvements in average recall over general level knowledge. tired and dream), new words that are unrelated to the study list items (e.g. Johnson 1991; Moscovitch 1995; Burgess & Shallice 1996; Dalla Barba et al. How does reconstructive memory vac___). Verfaellie M, Schacter D.L, Cook S.P. He was also interested in what the participants recalled. (2003) also demonstrated that right frontopolar activity exhibited strong positive correlations with the amount of intentional information produced during the future task, consistent with studies implicating this region in prospective memory (Bechara et al. Because observer perspectives involve information that was not available to perception then they must be distorted. Together, they form the building blocks of memory (the details) and the assembly manual (the script). How might this alter your memories of travel, events, or other information that you learn? In particular, higher levels of activity during the future task were evident in the right frontopolar cortex, consistent with the association of this region with prospective memory (Burgess et al. Tulving (1983, 2002, 2005) has argued that episodic memory affords the ability to engage in mental time travel, which involves projecting oneself into both the past and the future. In all probability, the effects of expert testimony are complex and qualified by other factors (e.g., Leippe et al., 2004). political events and issues), performing similar to control subjects. (The difference in categorization by party that occurs within the two partisan conditions reflects the measurement idiosyncrasies that occur by either removing the buttons or the partisan statement portions for the memory task, and is not of theoretical interest here). HHS Vulnerability Disclosure, Help Trope & Liberman 2003). Participants were instructed to respond same when a test shape was identical to a previously studied shape, similar when a new shape was visually similar to a previously studied one and new to unrelated novel shapes. Episodic memory has two functions, and these two functions correspond to two conceptions of how memory works. (2003), as well as posterior cingulate cortex. This is true even when participants do not remember studying the objects. Bartlett argued that recollection is guided by schemas, or general organizing structures, which aid encoding and retrieval. Consequently, the reanalysis provides clearer and slightly stronger evidence for a selective reduction in categorization by race, compared to either sex or age. By continuing you agree to the use of cookies. The prefrontal cortex: anatomy, physiology, and the frontal lobe. False Memories and the Misinformation Effect They investigated how the valence of events and their temporal distance from the present affect phenomenological qualities of past and future autobiographical events. We attempt to build on this type of argument by suggesting that the constructive nature of episodic memory is highly adaptive for performing a major function of this system: to draw on past experiences in a way that allows us to imagine and simulate episodes that might occur in our personal futures. All rights reserved. In a world of constantly changing environment, literal recall is extraordinarily unimportantif we consider evidence rather than supposition, memory appears to be far more decisively an affair of construction rather than one of mere reproduction (Bartlett 1932, pp. Copyright 2023 Elsevier B.V. or its licensors or contributors. Reconstruction As noted earlier, patients with damage to regions of prefrontal cortex and related brain areas sometimes exhibit the memory distortion known as confabulation. For a recent review on the mental health and wellbeing implications of semantic and episodic memory and prospection, see MacLeod (2016). For example, the disparate features that constitute an episode must be linked or bound together at encoding; failure to adequately bind together appropriate features can result in the common phenomenon of source memory failure, where people retrieve fragments of an episode but do not recollect, or misrecollect, how or when the fragments were acquired, resulting in various kinds of memory illusions and distortions (e.g. Slotnick & Schacter (2004) used a prototype recognition paradigm in which the critical materials were abstract, unfamiliar shapes; all shapes in the study list were visually similar to a non-presented prototype (figure 2). To avoid the reconstructive memory guessing issue mentioned earlier, the two conditions were slightly different from each other. Any discussion of constructive memory must acknowledge the pioneering ideas of Bartlett (1932), who rejected the notion that memory involves a passive replay of a past experience via the awakening of a literal copy of experience. Thus, because anxiety has been associated with a suite of threat-related biases in memory retrieval, an anxious mood may cause threat-related episodic foresight (see also Miloyan, Pachana, & Suddendorf, 2016). 1996)this line of research has been concerned with such topics as the formulation and retention of intentions (e.g. Modeling hippocampal and neocortical contributions to recognition memory: a complementary learning systems approach. Thus, it is conceivable that patients do form and retain a normal gist representation, but do not express this information on explicit tests. False recognition and the right frontal lobe: a case study. Schacter D.L. Richards & French, 1992). H.L. Phenomena from reconstructive memory to encoding specificity can be seen as effects of established concepts on the encoding or retrieval of new material. Regardless of time period, both the past and future conditions elicited shared activity in bilateral frontopolar cortex, probably reflecting the self-referential nature of both types of event representations (Craik et al. Specificity of priming: a cognitive neuroscience perspective. Interestingly, this common pastfuture network is remarkably similar to the network consistently implicated in the retrieval of episodic memories of past autobiographical events (Maguire 2001), again consistent with the constructive episodic simulation hypothesis. The repeated internal generation of threat-related thoughts may also exacerbate an anxious affective state by increasing the subjective plausibility of those events (Brown et al., 2016; Raune, Macleod, & Holmes, 2005; Wu et al., 2015), further biasing the retrieval of threat-related content from semantic and episodic memory. The results from these studies have provided converging evidence of the beneficial influences of prior knowledge on, Anderson & Bower, 1973, Collins & Quillian, 1969, Mandler 1962, Anderson & Pichert, 1978; Bransford, 1979, Osherson, Smith, Wilkie, Lopez, & Shafir, 1990; Rips, 1975; Shipley, 1993, Bransford, Barclay, & Franks, 1972; McKoon & Ratcliff, 1986, Cabrera & Billman, 1996; Fisher, Gleitman, & Gleitman, 1991; Talmy, 1985, Carey, 1985; Chi, Slotta, & DeLeuuw, 1994; Inhelder & Piaget, 1964; Smith, Carey, & Wiser, 1985, Learning and Memory: A Comprehensive Reference, Thinking about threats: Memory and prospection in human threat management, Brown et al., 2016; Raune, Macleod, & Holmes, 2005; Wu et al., 2015, Baumeister, Bratslavsky, Finkenauer, & Vohs, 2001; Nesse, 2005, Valli & Revonsuo, 2006; Valli et al., 2005; Zadra, Desjardins, & Marcotte, 2006, Klein et al., 2010; Suddendorf & Corballis, 2007, Buss, Haselton, Shackelford, Bleske, & Wakefield, 1998, Tomasello, Melis, Tennie, Wyman, & Herrmann, 2012, Cosmides & Tooby, 1992; Richerson & Boyd, 2005, Nesse, 2009; Sznycer et al., 2016; Trower & Gilbert, 1989, Turnbull, Jenkins, etal., 2004; Fotopoulou, 2009, 2010, Looking the past in the eye: Distortion in memory and the costs and benefits of recalling from an observer perspective, A reanalysis of crossed-dimension Who Said What? paradigm studies, using a better error base-rate correction, depicts the previous and reanalyzed results for the project. The site is secure. All other trademarks and copyrights are the property of their respective owners. The claim that memory is constructive or reconstructive is no longer controversial in psychology. When given word cues and instruction to recall an episode from the past or imagine a future episode, depressed patients showed reduced specificity in their retrieval of both past and future autobiographical events. Insensitivity to future consequences following damage to human prefrontal cortex. However, in the last decades it has generally been taken to mean that our memories are inaccurate or distorted. However, in related false recognition, semantic or perceptual overlap between the new item and a previously studied item drives the false recognition response, whereas the basis for old response to unrelated items is unclear. (2007), indicating that hippocampal amnesics have difficulty imagining new experiences: the hippocampus may play a key role in recombining details of previous experiences into a coherent new imagined construction. 2001b). Indeed, information is not invulnerable to change Its like a teacher waved a magic wand and did the work for me. In such cases, the opposing expert might challenge the generalizability of the research, question the extent of expert agreement about certain factors, or challenge the defense experts conclusions based on the literature. Fernndez recognises that on a reconstructive understanding of memory his example of an observer perspective is not distorted: since reconstruction of the past event in memory has happened in such a way that the resulting memory coheres well with my beliefs about my past (2015: 541 fn. More recent neuroimaging studies of gist-based false recognition using paradigms other than the DRM procedure have replicated and extended these results. Furthermore, imagine if this script were provided by an interviewer, rather than by a childs own experience. - Examples, Advantages & Role in Management, Using Simulation to Analyze and Solve Business Problems, The Monte Carlo Simulation: Scope & Common Applications, What is Forecasting in Business? Einstein G.O, McDaniel M.A. Note, however, that many of the items concerning the public domain did not inquire about specific events, so the evidence for a personal/public distinction is somewhat equivocal. Atance C.M, O'Neill D.K. Previous research using a similar paradigm with healthy subjects revealed the existence of a false priming effect: compared with a baseline condition, participants were more likely to complete stems of related lures with the lure item following study of a list of semantic associates (not surprisingly, priming was also observed for previously studied words, e.g. Race, sex, and age were each crossed with these cues of party support in each of these two conditions. McDermott 1997; McKone & Murphy 2000). For example, some of the regions that we found to be strongly activated when people imagine future events, including hippocampus and parahippocampal cortex, have been linked with imagery for spatial scenes (e.g. Create your account. In fact, it would seem that on this account all observer perspective memories must be understood as distorted. Balota D.A, Cortese M.J, Duchek J.M, Adams D, Roediger H.L, McDermott K.B, Yerys B.E. Bjork & Bjork 1988; Anderson & Schooler 1991; Schacter 1999, 2001). MEMORY In contrast to the concept-learning literature, here concepts are treated in their relation to a system of other concepts, not in relation to the instances they classify. Constructive memory Memory and temporal experience: the effects of episodic memory loss on an amnesic patient's ability to remember the past and imagine the future. Mather et al. 1998; Burgess et al. Here, evidence from studies exploring the influence that positive emotion has in cognition in general, and memory in particular, enriches the model. False recognition in young and older adults: exploring the characteristics of illusory memories. Bartlett F.C. Thus, if a particular neural difference between past and future events is only evident during one phase, collapsing across both phases in a block design or sampling neural activity during another phase in an event-related design could potentially obscure such differences. Constructive Memory constructive For instance, increasing cooperation itself harbours numerous powerful threats (Tomasello, Melis, Tennie, Wyman, & Herrmann, 2012). In many instances, false recognition of the related lure words is indistinguishable from the true recognition rate of studied words (for review of numerous DRM studies, see Gallo 2006). Fernndez states that. 2001; for more detailed review, see Schacter & Slotnick 2004). 1. Impairment of the ability to use or maintain an adequate autobiographical, personalized record of events is relatively common in cerebral disease. Consistent with this constructive episodic simulation hypothesis, we consider cognitive, neuropsychological and neuroimaging evidence showing that there is considerable overlap in the psychological and neural processes involved in remembering the past and imagining the future. However, data from studies of false recognition in amnesic patients reviewed earlier point towards different mechanisms underlying related and unrelated false recognition, because amnesics typically show reduced related false recognition compared with controls, together with either increased or unchanged unrelated false recognition. Johnson et al. false alarms to new related wordsfalse alarms to new unrelated words) relative to age-matched controls. 's responses in light of information provided by his family. A subsequent oldnew recognition test contains studied words (e.g. Schacter D.L. All three social categories were first presented in a neutral, non-partisan context (the left-most condition with each panel). Corresponding to these two functions of memory are two related notions of distortion in memory. noted evidence supporting the idea that representations of new experiences should be conceptualized as patterns of features in which different features represent different facets of encoded experience, including outputs of perceptual systems that analyse specific physical attributes of incoming information and interpretation of these attributes by conceptual or semantic systems analogous to Bartlett's schemas. Constructive Process A large amount of research is consistent with the idea that remembering is reconstructive. Thus, the source of this information in the content of my observer memory must be other than the perceptual experience on which my memory originates. In either of those cases, it seems that my observer memory will be distorted with regards to the content of my belief. Four of the five patients showed an impaired ability to imagine new experiences; the one patient who performed normally exhibited some residual hippocampal sparing that might have supported intact performance. Tulving E. Episodic memory: from mind to brain. We cannot know which environmental pressures brought it first to existence, and indeed the capacity has a collection of implementations. Memories are Graham K.S, Lee A.C, Brett M, Patterson K. The neural basis of autobiographical and semantic memory: new evidence from three PET studies. Create an account to start this course today. On a subsequent recognition test, they were presented either with the same shape from the study list, a related shape that was visually similar to one of the studied shapes or a new unrelated shape. Carrying rocks for use as missiles at some future point may have been vital, and a capacity to plan for this might have been under strong selection pressure (see Suddendorf & Corballis, 2007). sharing sensitive information, make sure youre on a federal Verfaellie M, Page K, Orlando F, Schacter D.L. The cost of this flexibility and constructive processing is reduced accuracy. Bartlett argued that perceiving and comprehending events do not simply happen automatically, but that every event of comprehension involves the mental construction of one's understanding of the event in the world. Evolutionary theories about cognitive processes often hypothesize adaptation to particular environmental problems faced in ancestral environments (Barkow, Cosmides, & Tooby, 1995). The thin translucent bars depict the previously-reported results, using the old error correction method. As we discuss later, a number of investigators have recently articulated a broad view of memory that not only considers the ability of individuals to re-experience past events, but also focuses on the capacity to imagine, simulate or pre-experience episodes in the future (Tulving 1983, 2002, 2005; Suddendorf & Corballis 1997; Atance & O'Neill 2001, 2005; Klein & Loftus 2002; Suddendorf & Busby 2003, 2005; D'Argembeau & Van der Linden 2004; Dudai & Carruthers 2005; Hancock 2005; Buckner & Carroll 2007; Schacter & Addis 2007). As before, categorization by race is reduced in half across both partisan conditions compared to baseline, whereas categorization by sex and by age is negligibly affected by the same partisan manipulations. Reconstructive memory - Wikipedia Disordered memory awareness: recollective confabulation in two cases of persistent deja vecu. In Section 4 I explore in more detail the evidence on remembering traumatic events from an observer perspective. McClelland J.L, McNaughton B.L, O'Reilley R.C. One possibility, then, is that extensive foresight evolved first in the context of cooperative defence from savannah predators. Read, in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2001. either an increase or a decrease with increasing distance) was evident for both past and future events. There's also the overconfidence effect where people give themselves credit for a better memory than they actually have. Okuda J, et al. References Associative illusions of memory. This false recognition deficit roughly parallels patients' true recognition deficit and occurs even though amnesics typically show similar or even increased levels of false recognition to unrelated lure words. 2004, Miller and Gazzaniga 1998, Weinstein and Shanks, 2010). However, this approach faces a challenge in that many useful capacities cannot readily be conceptualised as modules with one circumscribed function. Fernndez outlines a functionally dualistic account of memory. On a storage conception, the function of memory is to preserve past perceptual content. Remembering. Examples of these studies will be described later in this chapter. Research on more complicated inductive reasoning has focused directly on how conceptual organization influences the strength of an inductive argument (Osherson, Smith, Wilkie, Lopez, & Shafir, 1990; Rips, 1975; Shipley, 1993). Suffice it to say that plausibility should not be mistaken as proof. Observer perspectives fail to preserve past perceptual content and so they are in principle distorted memories. Ost J, Costall A. Misremembering Bartlett: a study in serial reproduction. This article considers various forms of memory as they are experimentally studied and discusses evidence for reconstructive processes at work. tired, dream), new words that are unrelated to the study list items (e.g. We unlock the potential of millions of people worldwide. Webfalse memory: n. An imagined event that is believed to be recalled as a memory. In the experiment by Garoff-Eaton et al. Christopher Jude McCarroll, in Consciousness and Cognition, 2017. The only region exhibiting an interaction between temporal direction (i.e. From left to right, with each of the race, sex, and age panels, is first a non-partisan baseline condition, followed on the right by two different partisan conditions, which differ in slight methodological details. A number of studies have consistently revealed that amnesic patients with damage to the hippocampus and related structures in the medial temporal lobe (MTL) show significantly reduced false recognition of non-studied lure words that are either semantically or perceptually related to previously studied words (figure 1; Schacter et al. 1999; Schnider 2003; Moulin et al. To recall the event, we have to pull from schema to fill in the blanks. We build and reinforce schemata early on in our development, as described by social psychologist Jean Piaget. Notably, in all regions exhibiting significant pastfuture differences, future events were associated with more activity than past events, as also observed by Szpunar et al. A persons present knowledge and goals may shape The impairment was especially pronounced for the measure of spatial coherence, indicating that the constructions of the hippocampal patients tended to consist of isolated fragments of information rather than connected scenes. Empirical investigations of the impact of expert testimony on juror decisions show a range of effects, including making jurors more skeptical about eyewitness identification (Leippe, 1995), enhancing juror sensitivity to some of the factors that influence identification accuracy (Cutler et al., 1990), and no effect at all (Devenport and Cutler, 2004). D. (You can learn more about flashbulb memories here!). dress) and made a button press when they had an event in mind and (ii) an elaboration phase during which participants generated as much detail as possible about the event (for related evidence from an electrophysiological study of remembered and imagined events that also distinguished between construction and elaboration phases, see Conway et al. Constructive memory. Johnson M.K, Hashtroudi S, Lindsey D.S. Together, these data suggest that there is a core network of neural structures that commonly supports the generation of event representations from one's personal past or future, in line with the constructive episodic simulation hypothesis. Although Bartlett did not advocate the extreme position sometimes ascribed to him that memory is always inaccurate (Ost & Costall 2002), he clearly rejected the importance of reproductive memory: the first notion to get rid of is that memory is primarily or literally reduplicative, or reproductive. Event representations also contained episodic and contextual imagery, perhaps related to activation of precuneus (e.g. The wider, full bars depict the new results, using the new error correction method. Moreover, exploring the possible link between constructive aspects of memory and simulation of the future may help to provide fresh perspectives on such fundamental questions as why imagination is sometimes confused with memory and, more generally, why memories can be badly mistaken. Normal aging and prospective memory. J.D. 2000, 2001, 2003). 2004), the specificity of events in Okuda et al. The person at the end of the line may hear a completely different phrase than the phrase at the beginning of the line. Alfred A. Knopf; New York, NY: 2006. When an event is recalled, we essentially pull up components (i.e., the script and the details) to report the memory. 2005). Memory Retrieval All rights reserved, Who Came Up with Reconstructive Memory? In: Reder L.M, editor. Phenomenal characteristics of memories for perceived and imagined autobiographical events. We consider some recent cognitive, neuropsychological and neuroimaging evidence that is consistent with this hypothesis. Furthermore, the right hippocampus was differentially engaged by the future event task, which may reflect the novelty of future events and/or additional relational processing required when one must recombine disparate details into a coherent event. In contrast, I suggest below (Section 5) that observer perspectives can be epistemically beneficial. Similarly, retrieval cues can potentially match stored experiences other than the sought-after episode, thus resulting in inaccurate memories that blend elements of different experiences (McClelland 1995), so retrieval often involves a preliminary stage in which the rememberer forms a more refined description of the characteristics of the episode to be retrieved (Burgess & Shallice 1996; Norman & Schacter 1996). The previous content of our cooperation project had presented explicit cues of cooperation. Creating false memories: remembering words not presented in lists. butter) and new words that are related to the study list items (e.g. They also support the idea that this type of memory error in control populations reflects the normal operation of healthy adaptive memory processes. A more recent study by Hassabis et al. Interestingly, this early visual area activity for old shapes occurred equally strongly when subjects responded old and when they responded new to the studied shapes, suggesting that this putative sensory reactivation effect reflected some type of non-conscious or implicit memory (Slotnick & Schacter 2004; for further evidence, see Slotnick & Schacter 2006). Budson A.E, Daffner K.R, Desikan R, Schacter D.L. Episodic future thinking. All three social categories were first presented in a neutral, non-partisan context (the left-most condition with each panel). Constructive Support for this interpretation comes from a study that used a modified version of the DRM semantic associates procedure (Verfaellie et al. This overlap was most apparent during the elaboration phase, when participants are focused on generating details about the remembered or imagined event (figures 3 and and4).4). It is well known that patients with damage to the hippocampus and related structures in the MTL have impairments of episodic memory (e.g. More recently, D'Argembeau & Van der Linden (2006) extended these results by showing that individual differences in imagery ability and emotion regulation strategies are similarly related to past and future events.

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constructive and reconstructive memory

constructive and reconstructive memory