Fuzzy-Trace Theory and False Memory

“This false recognition of critical lures has been explained in part as involving a reliance on gist (e.g., Brainerd & Reyna, 2002; Payne, Elie, Blackwell, & Neuschatz, 1996).”

“Semantic versus nonsemantic intrusions (age in years) in Experiments 1–3 of Brainerd, Reyna, and Forrest (2002). 368 BRAINERD, REYNA, AND CECI”

“If that is true of schemas, which has a long history in memory research, it certainly is true of gist which is a relatively new concept as applied to memory [187,188].”

“This idea is further supported by memory models that provide evidence for the creation of verbatim and gist-type representations, which might further influence true and false memory recall processes (Brainerd & Reyna 2002).”

“, 1987; Kim and Diamond, 2002) and that, in humans, negative valence increases the likelihood of false memories (Brainerd and Reyna, 2002).”

“They are known as honest lies (Moscovitch, 1989), pseudomemories (Lindsay, Hagen, Read, Wade, & Garry, 2004), phantom recollective experiences (Brainerd & Reyna, 2002), or autobiographical false memories (Loftus, 1997).”

“Particularly relevant to our discussion is the claim that certain speakers are viewed as unreliable because they are difficult to understand (Lev-Ari and Keysar, 2010). Investigating the effects of comprehension on perceived reliability, Lev-Ari and Keysar (2010) collected comprehension ratings and reliability ratings…”

“Whether the presented items were repeated (in the memory condition) or not (in the induction condition), the more abstract representation engendered by spacing would be beneficial at testing because abstract memories tend to be more durable than concrete memories (Brainerd & Reyna, 2002).”

“The dissociation between regions supporting confidence in true versus false recognition is consistent with the fuzzy trace theory (Brainerd and Reyna, 1990, 2002; Schacter et al., 1996c) account of false memories in the DRM paradigm.”

“Fuzzy trace theory (Brainerd & Reyna, 2002) provides a plausible candidate explanation of this effect: according to the theory, both verbatim and gist traces are formed during encoding; gist traces are more readily accessible and so tend to be preferred; hence subjects are led falsely to recognize…”

“consider some imaginary events as real [128], a phenomenon often observed in criminal witness interviews after misleading suggestions [129].”

“This was especially so in the first recognition test and therefore resulted in more interference early after encoding (24).”

“Memorydistortion phenomena have been explained by theoretical models that state that memory is reconstructed from traces at retrieval (1, 3, 14), is not reproduced from a permanent recording (15), and is prone to errors caused by source confusion (16) and association (17, 18).”

“US co-occurrences if we consider what is known about memory maintenance: Forgetting occurs at a higher rate for more detailed, low-level (verbatim) information about a stimulus, whereas more abstract high-level (gist) information is retained over a longer time (e.g., Brainerd & Reyna, 2002).”

“…of elicited and presented words (e.g., Hicks & Marsh, 1998; Mather et al., 1997; Norman & Schacter, 1997), and the other that emphasises the activation and abstraction processes during study that yield both verbatim and gist traces in memory (Brainerd, Reyna, & Kneer, 1995; Reyna, 1998).”

“Gist-based errors occurs when people extract the gist, or general information about thematic content, but fail to encode or retrieve verbatim, item-specific distinguishing details (Brainerd and Reyna, 2002; Koutstaal and Schacter, 1997).”

“…Some are characteristics of controlled laboratory tasks, others of everyday life; some occur for traumatic events with legal consequences, others for innocuous events; some are characteristic of one developmental level, others of another developmental level (Brainerd & Reyna, 2002, p. 164).”

“Research on false memories suggests that the majority of false memories are driven by increases in familiarity or gist-based processes (Brainerd and Reyna, 2002; Jacoby, 1991; Yonelinas et al., 1996) and are incorrectly endorsed as ‘ old events ’ based on their similarity to previously experienced…”

“According to fuzzytrace theory (Brainerd & Reyna, 2002), false memories in the DRM paradigm result from the episodic interpretation of a gist representation, and, therefore, higher rates of false recall in the DRM paradigm result from lists that better produce a coherent gist.”

“Gist-based views of remembering claim that remembering relies on a retained gist, or “episodic interpretations of concepts” (Brainerd & Reyna, 2002, p. 165), which summarize the event, becoming more generalized and abstract over time.14 When a person is asked to recall a past event, he or she uses…”

“Retrieval of gist memories support both true and false memories (Brainerd & Reyna, 2002; Schacter, Verfaellie, & Pradere, 1996), which explains why subjects in our experiment recalled more negative than neutral words and why subjects in Brainerd et al.’s experiment showed more false memories for…”

“In the DRM paradigm, several theories of false memory have been proposed in which intrusions arise supposedly because they are consistent with the underlying meaning or theme of studied material (Arndt & Hirshman, 1998; Brainerd & Reyna, 2002; Toglia, Neuschatz, & Goodwin, 1999; Whittlesea, 2002).”

“…fi t within a larger literature of false memory and aging suggesting that older adults ’ reliance on fa-miliarity and gist traces form the basis of their age-related impairments in false memories (Brainerd and Reyna, 2002; Dennis et al., 2008a, 2008b; Koutstaal and Schacter, 1997; Tun et al., 1998).”

“Abstract memories tend to be more durable than concrete memories, thus at testing, the more abstract representations engendered by spacing would be beneficial (Brainerd & Reyna, 2002).”

“Valerie Reyna (2008; see also Brainerd and Reyna 2002), a leading fuzzy trace theorist, compares gist and verbatim representations in intriguing terms for me here.”

“In Experiment 2, we attempted to selectively target the gist memory parameter for related items, as this process is thought to underlie many phenomena of false memory (e.g., Brainerd & Reyna, 2002).”

“One process that has been proposed to operate during recognition memory is recollection rejection (Brainerd & Reyna, 2002; Brainerd, Wright, Reyna, & Mojardin, 2001) or recall-to-reject (Rotello & Heit, 1999, 2000).”

“For example, spreading-activation theory (Collins & Loftus, 1975), cue-compound theory (Ratcliff & McKoon, 1994), fuzzy-trace theory (Brainerd & Reyna, 2002, 2005a), and the levels-of-processing approach (Craik&Tulving, 1975) all have at their core the finding that semantic processes have an…”

“Up, retrieving this same verbatim trace suppresses them because surface features mismatch, but retrieving the corresponding gist trace supports them because semantic features match (Brainerd & Reyna, 2002).”

“Thus, during retrieval, specific and schematic forms of information are retrieved, and depending on the cues presented at retrieval, the gist-based information may afford the strongest response and the bulk of the remembered information (Brainerd & Reyna, 2002; Reyna & Brainerd, 1995).”

“From a fuzzy-trace perspective, memories are stored along parallel, dissociated traces called verbatim and gist traces (Brainerd & Reyna, 2002 ; for an overview see Brainerd et al, 2008 ).”

“Short study lists and pictures are known to reduce adults’ false memories in this paradigm (eg, Israel & Schacter, 1997 ; Robinson & Roediger, 1997 ) probably because such manipulations encourage verbatim rather than gist processing (Brainerd et al, 2002 ).”

“Alternatively, false memory would imply the extraction of the gist of the memory from the studied word lists (Brainerd & Reyna, 2002 ).”

“Brainerd and Reyna’s (2002) Fuzzy Trace Theory (FTT) also provides an adequate explanation of the present results.”

“In general, our results are consistent with the fuzzy trace theory of false memories (see review of Brainerd & Reyna, 2002).”

“…and Reder 2003; Hege and Dodson 2004; Hockley and Cristi 1996) posits that distinctive processing reduces semantic activation of the critical items by decreasing their associations to list items (Roediger et al. 2001) or by reducing the thematic consistency of the lists (Brainerd and Reyna 2002).”

“The verbatim trace represents the surface form of the presented list items, and the gist trace represents the semantic content, including the list words’ meanings, and the semantic relations among items (Brainerd & Reyna, 2002).”

“Although, dual-process memory models have proposed different rates of forgetting dependent on the type of representations (Brainerd & Reyna, 2002; Reyna & Brainerd, 1995) or that different representations are more likely to be forgotten via decay or interference (Sadeh, Ozubko, Winocur, &…”

“…recognition are predicted by Fuzzy Trace Theory and other gist accounts, which assume that gist traces can support both veridical and false memory, but that verbatim traces are often required for veridical memory (Koutstaal and Schacter, 1997; Brainerd and Reyna, 2002; Verfaellie et al., 2002).”

“Future work might more specifically explore why concrete mindsets, associated with more verbatim representations, can lead to identification of more false memories although gist-driven, abstract memories are typically associated with a higher degree of false memory (Brainerd & Reyna, 2002).”

“…developmental studies using the DRM paradigm report that children show fewer memory intrusions than adults, thus suggesting an increase in memory generalization across childhood (e.g. Brainerd & Reyna, 2002; Paz-Alonso, Ghetti, Donohue, Goodman & Bunge, 2008; but see Ghetti, Qin & Goodman, 2002).”

“In turn, the DRM paradigm relies heavily on contextindependent gist-based processing for memory formation of both the semantically related studied (true) words in the DRM lists and the unpresented, yet highly related (false) critical lures (Brainerd & Reyna, 2002).”

“As extensively shown by prior human memory research, people tend to exhibit better memory performance for the gist meaning of a past event than for its details [7,8,9,10].”

“Also, because the verbatim trace of the lie is salient and inconsistent with children’s faded original gist memory (Brainerd & Reyna, 2002), children may discount their original memory and only describe the lie’s contents.”

“…is likely to help us understand more fully how a False Recognition & Retrieval Failure 17 system capable of impressive levels of retention, and which in daily life often serves us well, is also capable of error and distortion (Brainerd & Reyna, 2002; Reyna & Brainerd, 1995; Schacter, 1999).”

“This burgeoning literature includes data on the formation and maintenance of false memories in preschoolers and older children (Brainerd & Reyna, 2002a, 2002b; Brainerd et al., 2002; Ghetti, Qin, & Goodman, 2002; Loftus, 1997) and the role of factors such as misinformation, suggestibility, and…”

“However, other studies have shown that rememberers often spontaneously respond to such questions by retrieving gist representations (Brainerd & Reyna, 2002; Pansky, 2010; Pansky & Koriat, 2004).”

“According to the former (Brainerd and Reyna, 2002), stimuli are encoded into two qualitatively different types of memory traces: a “verbatim” trace, which contains item-specific details (perceptual attributes, position in the list, etc.”

“This later mechanism sometimes supports true recall and is responsible for false recall (e.g., Brainerd & Reyna, 2002; Brainerd et al., 2001).”

“According to the FTT, forgetting is assumed to be the gradual fragmentation of traces, which is higher for verbatim (as opposed to gist) representations.”

“However, we note that there is extensive work in the area of false memories examining illusory recollection (e.g., Brainerd & Reyna, 2002) or the types of phenomenological errors that give rise to compelling memory illusions such as those observed in the Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm (Deese,…”

“…are more likely than younger adults to preferentially focus on semantic as compared with perceptual object information during encoding, thus reducing the availability of perceptual details at test and increasing reliance on semantic gist (Brainerd & Reyna, 2002; Koutstaal et al., 1997, 2003).”

“According to the “fuzzy-trace” theory (e.g., Brainerd & Reyna, 1998, 2002), verbatim traces and gist traces are stored in parallel during list presentation.”