Chapter Three - False Recollection: Empirical Findings and Their Theoretical Implications

Abstract This chapter reviews the literature documenting particularly compelling false memories—memory errors that people subjectively experience as similar to authentic memories (referred to as false recollections ). Behavioral and neuroimaging evidence examining three major phenomena that produce false recollection (the misinformation effect, imagination inflation, and DRM lure errors) are reviewed, with the general goal of understanding the kinds of memorial information that underlies them. In particular, this chapter was motivated by consideration of whether familiarity-based processes are sufficient to explain false recollection, or if evidence exists that false recollections are caused by processes similar to those mediating authentic recollection, such as the retrieval of encoding context. Following the review of evidence documenting false recollection, three major theoretical frameworks that explain false recollection are evaluated in light of the evidence, with the goal of advancing understanding of the memory representations and retrieval processes that underlie false recollection.