Daniel L. Schacter, Scott A. Guerin, and Peggy L. St. Jacques

Memory distortion: an adaptive perspective (fragments)

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Are memory distortions the reflection of deficient cognitive processing?

It is now widely recognized that human memory is not an exact reproduction of past experiences but is instead an imperfect process that is prone to various kinds of errors and distortions. (…) At the same time, researchers in cognitive neuroscience have begun to examine the neural underpinnings of memory distortion and to determine how brain activity can distinguish between true and false memories.

(…) Bernstein and Loftus clearly express a general view shared by the numerous theories that have been proposed to account for memory distortions: ‘In essence, all memory is false to some degree. Memory is inherently a reconstructive process, whereby we piece together the past to form a coherent narrative that becomes our autobiography.

In the process of reconstructing the past, we color and shape our life’s experiences based on what we know about the world’ (p. 373).

(…)

While it is tempting to conclude that memory distortions point to fundamental flaws in the nature or composition of memory, a growing number of researchers have argued that, to the contrary, many memory distortions reflect the operation of adaptive processes – that is, processes that contribute to the efficient functioning of memory, but as a consequence of serving that role, also produce distortions.

(…)

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Gist-based and associative memory errors

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Gist-based memory errors occur when people falsely recall or recognize a novel word, picture or other type of item that is either perceptually or conceptually related to an item that they did encounter previously: people fail to recollect specific details of an experience and instead remember general information or the gist of what (…)

In addition to supporting the formation of abstractions and generalizations (see main text), gist-based processing potentially reduces memory storage demands by enabling us to form compact event records without retaining numerous details that might not be required later. (…)

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Post-event misinformation

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In the post-event misinformation paradigm, providing erroneous information following the initial encoding of an event increases subsequent endorsement of that information on a later memory test for the original event.

Concluding remarks

(…) studies by Ross and Wilson have documented that people frequently remember their pasts in an overly positive or negative manner in order to inflate their current self-evaluation, which can have beneficial consequences for well-(…)

Nonetheless, we believe that claims for an adaptive perspective on memory distortion do not require arguments for adaptations in the strict evolutionary sense noted above. They are useful theoretically if they can help to focus attention on the nature and consequences of such adaptive processes as imagining the future, gist encoding and retrieval, or memory updating. It is only during the past few years that we have begun to see the emergence of research that is pursuing in earnest the adaptive aspects of memory distortions. (…)

 

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Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3183109/