Monday, March 30, 2009

source attribution errors

I read the article "Imagination Inflation", and found the concept of source attribution errors interesting. I think of all the different ways that our memory can be confused and altered, this one seems most likely to occur without coercion. It disconnects the recalled/reconstructed situation with the reason for it being recalled/reconstructed, ie someone asking you to recount a past event or using the example from class, a police officer trying to get information out of you, which are more likely to alert people to the possibility of uncertainty, altered memory, or confusion. In the example given in class of the car being broken into, because she could remember the moment when she became confused (when the cop suggested a hatchback), she could consciously be aware of confusion and uncertainty in connection to her memory of the car and the theft, especially since the conversation would be the most recent memory attached to that situation. If she forgot the source of the information, the police officer, she would be more likely to be certain that the car was a hatchback. There are a lot of situations that come up where we are forced to reconstruct memories on our own, without someone coercing the information in an obvious and memorable way (going to a police station, and an event like a theft are less common and stand out in memory, where as having a conversation with a friend/coworker/family member about a high school memory would be more common and the specific conversation would probably be forgotten). If someone is being asked to remember something for a psychologist, it is usually a more dramatic and aware situation, and more likely to stand out in their mind, as well as something like being questioned for a court case, or for an interview, or something more significant of that nature. Where it gets really interesting is when the source attribution errors occur because there is no way to know when that is happening, it doesn't set off any triggers. I wonder how many times i remember something inaccurately because of a source attribution error, there's almost no way to know unless someone notices it and corrects it. I have a personal example of that, that happened recently. A friend of mine was telling me a dramatic story of being on Pratt campus late at night last winter, when a large amount of ice and snow fell off the roof of a building like an avalanche. My friend said that she was with another friend of ours at the time. I laughed, because i was the one she had been with. She only remembered the exciting part of it correctly, the avalanche of snow, and sometime in the past year when the story was remembered and retold many times, she had replaced me with another friend. She had no idea when or how that had happened, or why she only remembered part of it accurately. I think that this was a source attribution error because I know she was not coerced into replacing the memory, and I also know she thought of it and retold it enough times so that she must have had to reconstruct and imagine the event at least half a dozen times over the past year. I know there could be other variables, but this seems to fit the explanation, and i thought it would be a good example.
The article mentions this concept and agrees with what i think about how the situation in which the imagining and memory reconstructions occur effect the final memory.

The interesting thing about the study on imagination inflation effect is that things that never happened at all can be remembered with enough pursuasion due to imagination inflation. I can understand how details and aspects of something that did occur could be altered, because they are smaller parts of a whole, but the actual construction of a nonexistant memory is something i would not have believed so easily. The implications of the possibilities of memory alteration and creation are disturbing, they could result in some awful things. Also, most of our personal identitys are based upon our memories of past events and how we think of ourselves in the context of our past, if our memories are altered this could possibly alter our personalities. Its seems unlikely but it could be possible, it would be interesting to see more studies on this, on how far memory inflation and creation can be pushed.

2 comments:

David An said...
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David An said...

This experiment is very interesting. The experiment interrogated mainly subjects' childhood events. However, this error can happen to people in their daily lives because they imagine every moment. Even these imaginations can be intertwined and create the third events. Sometimes, I get confused of my childhood memories with my dream. In Some part of my memories, I still couldn't figure out whether it was just my dream or real event that had happened to me. "He noted that the mere act of imagining a scenario forces people to create an alternate reality for a short time and to fit the imagined facts into their existing knowledge of the world. The imagination procedure generates event information that subjects may remember, even if they don't remember the source of the information. Event information becomes more available, and therefore more plausible, subjects become more confident that the event will occur." When I have conversation with my friends or teachers if I heard interesting parts thorough the conversation, at the very short moment, I imagine the future events that would happen and could have been more interesting. However, this imagination is created in my thought boundary and intervene the pure memory that is originated from the conversation. After all, I end up with trusting that distorted memory. If I consciously acknowledge that the memory was deceived by my imagination, my brain would store that event in a different part of memory room so it would remain as a imagination. However, if I unconsciously think of that event as my memory, it would be stored as my memory.