Fuzzy-Trace Theory and False Memory

“Speci fi cally, because gist is driven by similarity or relatedness among list items and mediated lists do not have a clear or detectable gist (as evidence by the very low accurate guesses in the present study and in Hu ff et al., 2012), it is not clear how FTT would explain such fi ndings.”

“According to the Fuzzy Trace Theory (FTT; Brainerd and Reyna, 2002; Brainerd et al., 2008), both verbatim and gist traces are encoded and activated during the study phase.”

“The basic assumption of fuzzy-trace theory (FTT; Reyna & Brainerd, 1995, 2008, 2011; Brainerd & Reyna, 2002, 2004; Reyna, 2008) is that people in general rely on 2For review, see Evans and Frankish (2009), Evans (2010), Evans and Over (1996), Sloman (1996). their memories for the vague gist of…”

“This could result from a reliance on “gist-based” memory, leading to a disproportionate increase in the false alarm rate (Brainerd & Reyna, 2002).”

“In dual-process models of memory (e.g., Brainerd & Reyna, 2001, 2002), which I use to illustrate the second family of behavioral Us, humans are assumed to store dissociated representations of different aspects of their experience, such as verbatim traces of surface content and gist traces of…”

“That is, FTT stipulates that the capacity of retrieving gist traces from experiences increases with age, leading to a greater propensity to form false memories (Brainerd & Reyna, 2002).”

“This dual-trace idea is supported by research in both false memory (Brainerd & Reyna, 1998, 2002; Brainerd, Reyna, & Poole, 2000; Reyna & Brainerd, 1998) and neuroscience (Dennis, Bowman, & Vandekar, 2012; Reyna, Chapman, Doughert, & Confrey, 2012).”

“…are highly semantically related to studied items; people often mistakenly endorse these lures as studied, and attribute feelings of subjective recollection to their false memories (Brainerd & Reyna, 2002; Flegal & ReuterLorenz, 2014; Gallo & Roediger, 2002; Lampinen, Meier, Amal, & Leding, 2005).”

“The Fuzzy-Trace Theory (FTT), an influential theory, interprets false memory as the result of the interplay of two types of memory traces: verbatim traces and gist traces (e.g., Brainerd & Reyna, 2002).”

“The FTT argues that when presented with a series of items and asked to recall all that were presented, two separate representations are formed: (a) a gist trace and (b) a verbatim trace (Brainerd & Reyna, 2002).”

“According to this account, false memories arise from confusion or conflation between the gist and the verbatim elements [65].”

“It has been suggested that both types of episode information, gist relevant and surface-level details, are encoded and support memory retrieval (e.g., Brainerd & Reyna, 2002).”

“In terms of the FTT, accurate recognition is based on the retrieval of verbatim trace, while false recognition of critical words should be based on gist trace retrieval (cf., Brainerd & Reyna, 2002).”

“According to this view, the SCR in our paradigm may simply reflect direct involuntary input from implicit memory associations for lower-level perceptions, dissociated from gist-based memory (Brainerd & Reyna, 2002).”

“The findings also generally agree with Fuzzy Trace Theory (FTT; Brainerd and Reyna 2002), discussed below.”

“An alternative account is provided by the “fuzzy-trace” theory (e.g., Brainerd & Reyna, 2002; Brainerd et al., 2001), which suggests that memory judgements are based on verbatim and/or gist traces that are encoded in parallel at study.”

“The Fuzzy-Trace Theory, FTT (Brainerd & Reyna, 1993; Brainerd & Reyna, 2002) postulates that false memories are not like authentic ones: they are sustained by a familiarity-based process and they cannot therefore be sustained, unlike authentic ones, by a recollection of the encoding context.”

“On the other hand, according to the FTT participants’ false memories would rely on a semantic trace, called gist trace and linked to the semantic content of each list 10,11 .”

“Specifically, theories differentiate between verbatim and gist representations in memory (Brainerd & Reyna, 2002; Reyna & Brainerd, 1995).”

“Riba et al. explained their findings using a combination of fuzzy trace theory (Brainerd & Reyna, 2002), which holds that false memories occur when people rely on gist rather than verbatimmemory, and the activation‐monitoring account (Balota et al., 1999), which holds that false memories occur when…”

“Information about side effects may also have confirmed participants’ negative preconceptions about medicines, leading them to scrutinise information less, encode only the general gist (Brainerd & Reyna, 2002; Reyna & Brainerd, 1995) or to rely on existing schema when performing the memory tasks.”

“…avoid cuing specific verbatim memories and instead increase recall of gist values retained by participants, we only provided general pumps (i.e., general encouragements) and not specific prompts (i.e., cues to say more about a specific topic; Brainerd & Reyna, 2002; Mills, Reyna, & Estrada, 2008).”

“Two popular accounts of the DRM false memory illusion are the activation-monitoring theory (AMT; Roediger, Balota, & Watson, 2001) and fuzzy-trace theory (FTT; Brainerd & Reyna, 2002; Reyna, 1998; but see Miller, Guerin, & Wolford, 2011, and Miller & Wolford, 1999, for a decision-criterion account).”

“Mediated lists do not contain a strong list theme, which eliminates this possibility from contention (cf. Brainerd & Reyna, 2002).”

“, fuzzy trace theory suggests affect impacts information processing and memory recall; [20, 21]), and the local adaptation for feedback purposes of a standardized, national program such as EPRP.”

“An alternative theory suggests that there are two traces encoded when studying items–verbatim traces, preserving contextual information about items, and gist traces, encoding the overall theme of the studied category [15].”

“According to FTT (Brainerd et al., 2008; Brainerd & Reyna, 2002), because of denial-induced forgetting, participants in the false denial condition would rely more on the gist of the interview than control participants.”

“Several theories have been proposed to account for the DRM illusion (see Gallo, 2006 for review), most prominently the fuzzy-trace theory (Brainerd and Reyna, 2002; Reyna et al., 2016) and the activation-monitoring theory (Roediger et al., 2001a).”

“This idea is consistent with the fuzzy trace theory, which asserts that memory consists of dual independent systems (verbatim and gist representations), and these two systems are encoded in parallel but are stored separately (Brainerd & Reyna, 2002; Reyna & Lloyd, 1997).”

“Another important direction for future research will be to evaluate how reduced AMS relates to other forms of generalization and memory development across childhood such as the development of gist semantic memory (Brainerd & Reyna, 2002).”

“These questions are particularly important for eyewitness testimony where an intense experience might be the focus of a subsequent recollection (Brainerd & Reyna, 2002; Otgaar, Candel, & Merckelbach, 2008) and an errant memory can cause a criminal to be released and an innocent person to be…”

“1Although studies on false memory (e.g., Brainerd & Reyna, 2002) showed that adult witnesses appear to confuse information sources, such as seeing something with their own eyes versus being told about an event.”

“The finding of distinct ERP effects for true and false recognition in the current study is again consistent with fuzzy trace theory (Brainerd & Reyna, 2002), which would predict distinct neural activity for true recognition based on item-specific details and false-recognition based on gist…”

“Brainerd and Reyna ( 2002 ) demonstrated that memories are encoded and stored in multiple levels.”

“The gist trace contains the general meaning of the studied list, and the verbatim trace incorporates the perceptual details of the studied items (e.g., Brainerd & Reyna, 2002; Cabeza & Lennartson, 2005).”

“…false memory effect is given by the fuzzy-trace theory, which states that false memory appears when the gist information of the list (matching the critical lure) is extracted, and the retrieval of verbatim representations is not enough to reject the critical lure (see [43, 44] for more details).”

“Arguably the results have wide ranging applications beyond word lists (Brainerd and Reyna, 2002).”

“Alternatively, since correct recognition was also increased following guessing and recall tasks, these task types may have also promoted the processing of verbatim information which reduced reliance on the gist or thematic consistency of the list at test (e.g., Brainerd & Reyna, 2002).”

“Through this parallel processing, the recall of studied words becomes a key memory cue when reproducing the gist of the words, resulting in false recall of the critical items (Brainerd & Reyna, 1996, 1998, 2002).”

“We only outline fuzzy trace theory (Brainerd & Reyna, 2002a ; Brainerd, Reyna, & Kneer, 1995), because the simplified conjoint recognition model we used in the present work is based on this theory (Stahl & Klauer, 2008 ).”

“On the contrary, the use of semantic memory in the DRM task is related to participants’ ability to build upon the global meaning of the words studied and to use this information in the subsequent recognition phase (Brainerd & Reyna, 1998, 2002; Reyna & Brainerd, 1995).”

“Conversely, according to fuzzy-trace theory, while studying the words participants would encode a memory trace—called gist trace—linked to the semantic content of each list, which would be responsible for the production of the false recognitions (Brainerd & Reyna, 2002; Reyna & Brainerd, 1995).”

“The latter notion of fuzzy categories agrees with the views of psychologists who think that definitions of everyday categories cannot be completely sharp (Buckner, 2018, p. 5346; Brainerd and Reyna, 2002, p. 164).”

“As false memory has been consistently demonstrated within a wide range of visual scenarios (e.g., Brainerd & Reyna, 2002, 2005; Liebman et al., 2002; Loftus, 2005; Neuschatz et al., 2017; Scoboria et al., 2017), it was hypothesised that participants will demonstrate susceptibility to false memories…”

“Parts of respondents’ comments could be regarded as false memories, or ‘fuzzy traces’ (Brainerd and Reyna 2002), or they could, as Davis (1979) has argued, be interpreted as nostalgia acting as a collective memory, which is a reaction to disruptive, anxiety-producing events and acts to restore a…”

“In the DRM paradigm, the presentation of many items related to a similar theme strengthens a gist representation and is therefore considered responsible for CI false memories (Brainerd & Reyna, 2002; Reyna, 1998).”

“Já as memórias verdadeiras seriam decorrentes, em sua maior parte, da recuperação de memórias literais (Brainerd & Reyna, 2002).”

“On the one hand, it increases the likelihood of false memories (Brainerd & Reyna, 2002; see also Kleider, Pezdek, Goldinger, & Kirk, 2008).”

“Therefore, the strong overlap in shared physical features would make it more likely that participants relied on episodic or recollective-level information, rather than on familiarity or gist-level information to make their response ( Brainerd & Reyna, 2002).”

“Finally, our results also indicate that similar lures are associated with different familiarity processes depending on if they are falsely recognized or not (Brainerd and Reyna, 2002; Cadavid and Beato, 2016).”

“False memory can be generated from the spreading activation of gist or general theme of a list (Brainerd & Reyna, 2002; Chatburn et al., 2017; Reyna & Brainerd, 1995).”

“Alternative theoretical approaches (e.g., Fuzzy Trace Theory, Brainerd & Reyna, 2002; Global Matching Models, Arndt & Hirshman, 1998) have also been proposed; we review those in more depth in the Discussion.”

“Yet another approach, the fuzzy-trace theory (e.g. Brainerd & Reyna, 1998, 2002ab; Brainerd, Reyna, & Kneer, 1995; Brainerd, Reyna, & Mojardin, 1999) assumes that two types of memory trace are encoded in parallel; these are verbatim traces that contain surface information of individual targets, and…”

“According to the Fuzzy-Trace Theory (FTT; e.g., Brainerd & Reyna, 2002), the surface form and semantic properties of DRM study list words are processed in parallel at encoding and stored separately, as verbatim traces and gist traces.”

“…developed by Brainerd, Reyna, and their co-workers for over twenty years, becoming one of the most prominent approaches in memory research (e.g. Brainerd & Reyna, 1998, 2002; Brainerd, Reyna, & Kneer, 1995; Brainerd, Reyna, & Mojardin, 1999; Reyna & Lloyd, 1997; cf. Arndt, 2010; Dodson,…”