Adaptive false memories: Investigating the effect of future planning on false memory

一个人可以记住一件实际上从未发生过的事情，这一想法似乎令人惊讶，然而，通过向人们提供暗示实际上并未呈现的相关信息的信息，很容易产生虚假记忆。研究证明了这一点，在研究中，参与者被引导相信他们在研究了与之相关的单词列表后看到了一个没有出现的单词(例如，参与者可能错误地认为他们在看到或听到相关单词如床、梦、醒、鼾声后看到了单词睡眠)。早期的记忆理论认为，这种错误是由于记忆系统不准确造成的。然而，越来越多的证据表明，某些类型的错误记忆可以在日常思维中发挥有用的作用。例如，根据单词与生存状况的相关性(比如在外国的草原上迷路)对单词进行评级，会增加对与被评分单词相关的新单词的错误记忆。一种可能的解释是，对与我们生存相关的单词进行评级会激活相关知识，这些知识在这种情况下也可能有用。这项拟议的研究将探索当人们思考单词与涉及计划未来活动的情景的相关性时，是否会出现类似的优势。研究参与者将被呈现一系列单词，并被要求以多种方式对它们进行评级，包括它们与过去事件的相关性，与计划中的未来事件的相关性，以及它们是令人愉快的还是令人不快的(这将作为控制条件)。单词列表的结构将会产生高水平的错误记忆(基于先前的研究)。这个假设是，思考一个计划好的未来事件会激活相关的信息，这些信息可能对计划活动有用。如果是这样的话，那么对与未来计划的事件相关的单词进行评级将增加错误记住相关单词的可能性。七个实验将调查未来计划对虚假记忆的作用，并将操纵记忆测试的类型(回忆与识别、意识与无意识记忆)、学习与测试之间的间隔以及研究材料的类型等变量。总体目标是检验这样一种观点，即人类记忆的主要功能之一，包括错误记忆，是指导我们未来的行为。

The idea that a person can have a memory of an event that never in fact occurred seems surprising, yet false memories can easily be created by presenting people with information that hints at related information that is not actually presented. This has been demonstrated by research in which participants are led to believe they saw a non-presented word after studying lists of words that are associated with it (for example, participants might falsely believe they saw the word sleep after seeing or hearing related words such as bed, dream, wake, snore etc). Early theories of memory dismissed such errors as a consequence of an inaccurate memory system. However, evidence is emerging that certain types of false memory can serve a useful role in everyday thinking. For example, rating words for how relevant they are to a survival situation (such as being lost in the grasslands of a foreign country) increases false memories for new words associated with those that were rated. One possible explanation for this is that rating words for their relevance to our survival activates related knowledge that might also be useful in such a situation. The proposed research will explore whether a similar advantage occurs when people think about the relevance of words to a situation involving the planning of a future activity. Participants in the research will be presented with lists of words and asked to rate them in a number of ways, including their relevance to a past event, relevance to a planned future event, and whether they are pleasant or unpleasant (which will act as a control condition). The word lists will be structured in such a way as to produce high levels of false memories (based on previous research). The hypothesis is that thinking about a planned future event activates related information that might be useful in terms of planning the activity. If that is the case then rating words for their relevance to a planned future event will increase the likelihood of falsely remembering related words. Seven experiments will investigate the role of future planning on false memory and will manipulate variables such as the type of memory test (recall versus recognition, conscious versus unconscious memory), the interval between learning and testing, and the type of study materials. The overall aim is to test the view that one of the main functions of human memory, including false memory, is to guide our future behaviour.