Review
Memory distortion: an adaptive perspective

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Memory is prone to distortions that can have serious consequences in everyday life. Here we integrate emerging evidence that several types of memory distortions – imagination inflation, gist-based and associative memory errors, and post-event misinformation – reflect adaptive cognitive processes that contribute to the efficient functioning of memory, but produce distortions as a consequence of doing so. We consider recent cognitive and neuroimaging studies that link these distortions with adaptive processes, including simulation of future events, semantic and contextual encoding, creativity, and memory updating. We also discuss new evidence concerning factors that can influence the occurrence of memory distortions, such as sleep and retrieval conditions, as well as conceptual issues related to the development of an adaptive perspective.

Section snippets

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. Studies of memory distortion have a long history in both theoretical and applied cognitive psychology 1, 2, 3. However, they have become even more prominent during the past two decades as a result of increased awareness that memory errors associated with eyewitness misidentification frequently contribute to

Imagination inflation

Imagination inflation occurs when imagining a novel event leads people to i) increase their confidence or belief that the event actually occurred in their personal pasts [23]; ii) claim that they performed an action or perceived an object that they only imagined [24]; or iii) develop a full-blown false recollection of an experience that did not occur [25]. To attribute such effects specifically to imagination, it is important to control for other forms of exposure to novel information. For

Gist-based and associative memory errors

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 happened 1, 45 (see Box 1).

Associative memory errors occur when people falsely recall or recognize a novel item that is an associate of previously studied items [17]

Post-event misinformation

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. Numerous cognitive studies during the past four decades have delineated the conditions under which misinformation effects are observed (for a review see [61]).

More recently, functional neuroimaging studies of the misinformation paradigm have revealed that many of the same brain

Concluding remarks

In this article we have reviewed evidence that supports an adaptive interpretation of three kinds of memory distortions: imagination inflation, gist-based and associative memory errors, and post-event misinformation. However, we do not wish to imply that our list is exhaustive. For example, 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

Acknowledgements

This paper was supported by National Institute of Mental Health MH060941 (DLS), NRSA AG034699 (SAG), and NRSA AG038079 and a L’Oreal USA for Women in Science Fellowship (PLS). We thank Clifford Robbins for help with preparation of the manuscript, and Donna Addis, Brendan Gaesser, Kathy Gerlach, Angela Gutchess, and Karl Szpunar for comments on an earlier draft of the article.

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    These authors contributed equally to the ideas and writing of this manuscript.

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