Fuzzy-Trace Theory and False Memory

“The second major framework used to account for false memory in the DRM paradigm is the Fuzzy Trace Theory (FTT; Brainerd & Reyna, 2002, 2004).”

“count of semantic false recognition (Brainerd et al., 2001; Reyna, 1998; Reyna & Brainerd, 1995), when many items that share meaning are studied, like those in the DRM”

“One account of DRM errors argues that the semantic features shared by the related study words are extracted to form a gist representation that contains little or no item-specific information (Brainerd and Reyna, 2002; Reyna and Brainerd, 1995; Schacter et al., 1998).”

“Although episodic memory and gist memory are simultaneously encoded 80 , episodes guide specific judgements (‘we will need 100 chairs’) whereas gist guides more general, flexible judgements (‘we will need more chairs than usual’) 81 .”

“…like the color of an object or the font in which a word appeared), as specific representations are vulnerable to interference and temporal decay (Brainerd & Reyna, 1990, 2002), eroding rapidly after encoding (Greene & Naveh-Benjamin, 2022a, 2022b; Hardman et al., 2017; Ricker & Hardman, 2017;…”

“However, FTT predicts that high similarity between a target and its mirrored counterpart should inhibit false memories [48].”

“Access to verbatim and gist memories declines over time, but verbatim traces are faster to fade away (Brainerd & Reyna, 2002b) and are also more fragile and sensitive to cognitive load and interferences than gist traces (Abadie & Waroquier, 2020; Abadie et al., 2013; 2017).”

“The Fuzzy-Trace Theory (FTT) suggests another explanation (Brainerd & Reyna, 2002).”

“In contrast, the gist and central theme of the episodes are stored in the essence memory system, generating false memory (Brainerd & Reyna, 2002, 2005).”

“Thus, in line with the notions that emotion boosts recollection more than familiarity (Ochsner, 2000) and that false memories can be accompanied by recollection (Brainerd and Reyna, 2002), the positivity for new emotional compared to new neutral stimuli in the time window of the LPC (rather than the N400) suggests tha…”

“Using this framework, it has been proposed that older adults rely more heavily on gist information when performing mnemonic operations and hence are more likely to make errors for related items because their gist traces’ overlap (Koutstaal and Schacter, 1997; Tun et al., 1998; Brainerd and Reyna, 2002).”

“It is thought that the gist-representation remains while the verbatim representation fades (Brainerd and Reyna 2002), allowing the rememberer to retain key information even as their grasp of the details fade.”

“For example, fuzzy-trace theory states that retrieval of verbatim traces allows vivid remembering, and it anticipates repetition to be beneficial (Brainerd & Reyna, 2002).”

“On the other hand, the strategy that encourages verbatim retrieval may not necessarily increase true recognition as FTT argues that true memories for studied words are due to both verbatim and gist retrieval (Brainerd & Reyna, 2002).”

“Also the FTT (Reyna & Brainerd, 1995; Brainerd & Reyna, 2002) assumes the intervention of a monitoring process during the memory task.”

“One possible explanation for the induction of false autobiographical memories is derived from an influential theory called fuzzy trace theory (FTT) [8] positing that there are two types of memory processes: verbatim and ‘gist’ memory traces.”

“Refira-se, ainda, que as ilusões de memória também se explicam pelo efeito do intervalo de retenção, uma vez que as memórias literais se vão tornando, com o tempo, mais inacessíveis que as de essência (Brainerd & Reyna, 2002).”

“Johnson’s source-confusion theory of false memory, with Loftus’s constructivist theory of false memory, and with Reyna’s fuzzy-trace theory of false memory [30-35].”

“Fuzzy-trace theory posits that memory of a studied list leaves two kinds of traces in memory: verbatim and gist (Brainerd & Reyna, 2002, 2005; Reyna & Brainerd, 1995).”

“Gist memory results from the researcher's remembrance of abstract information at the expense of critical details pertaining to some phenomena, and takes the form of episodic interpretation of concepts such as relations or ©The Authors patterns (Brainerd and Reyna, 2002).”

“Various theoretical models have been proposed to account for false memories in the DRM paradigm, which can be summarised within two broad frameworks, the activation-monitoring framework e.g., 4,32 and the fuzzy-trace theory e.g., 33–35 .”

“One of the theories that best overcomes the difficulty of explaining all memory errors with a common theoretical perspective is the fuzzy-trace theory (Brainerd & Reyna, 2002).”

“…regard, adopting the DRM paradigm, Brainerd et al. (2010) observed that stimuli with negative valence generally increase false memories production but, at the same time, can also suppress true memory recollection, explaining this result in light of the Fuzzy- Trace Theory (Brainerd & Reyna, 2002).”

“According to FTT (Brainerd & Reyna, 2002), participants encode two traces of study items; verbatim traces that preserve contextual details of individual items and gist traces that represent the overall theme of the list.”

“According to the fuzzy trace theory (Brainerd and Reyna, 2002), low-IQ patients with schizophrenia have both poor verbatim memory (i.”

“Another explanation has been put forward by Brainerd and Reyna within the framework of fuzzy-trace theory (FTT; Brainerd & Reyna, 2002).”

“The utilization of partial information closely resembles the exploitation of the dgistT, or the general similarity [3,32,33], of experienced episodes in recognition memory.”

“Ver-batim details decay rapidly compared to gist [12, 41], and people often commit source-monitoring errors—remembering that they shared but misattributing audience or channel [6, 22, 40, 42].”

“According to the fuzzy-trace theory (FTT; Brainerd & Reyna, 2002), participants would encode two different memory traces: a trace linked to episodic and perceptive features of the studied items, called verbatim trace, and a trace linked to the semantic content of each list, called gist trace, which…”

“According to Brainerd and Reyna (2002), recollection is a more vivid form of remembering, which is supported by the retrieval of verbatim traces, whereas the retrieval of gist traces supports a generic form of remembering, sometimes called familiarity.”

“…on which accurate and false memories are based: Verbatim and gist traces both support true memories, but gist traces support false memories of related distractors, and verbatim traces suppress false memories (e.g. Brainerd & Reyna, 2002; Niezna ń ski et al., 2018, 2019; Reyna et al.,2016).”

“False memories for prototypes have been explained in various ways, such as the hypothesis of spreading activation of prototypes (e.g., Roediger & McDermott, 2000), fuzzy-trace theory (e.g., Brainerd & Reyna, 2002) and conceptual processing fluency (Whittlesea, Masson, & Hughes, 2005).”

“…A is intuitively judged to be superior to option B. Likewise, in a negative frame, option A is represented as ‘some people will die’ and option B as ‘either some people will die or no one will die;’ hence, option B appears to be a better option (Brainerd and Reyna 2002b; Kühberger and Tanner 2010).”

“Furthermore, the existence of a hybrid boost in false recall is also inconsistent with the fuzzy trace model (Brainerd & Reyna, 2002) which currently has no mechanism for phonological contributions to false memory.”

“If memories of cases are reconstructed upon retrieval from piecemeal information, clinicians may retrieve a distorted memory of the reaction (cf. Brainerd & Reyna, 2002), especially if the client’s reaction was disproportionate to the event (and/or behaviors).”

“Although our memories do privilege the most relevant aspects of any given episode (Brainerd & Reyna, 2002; Reyna & Brainerd, 1995), the mnesic representation of that episode often includes features that are seemingly irrelevant in terms of current goals, learning, generalisation, and meaning…”

“However, in situations where perceptual representations are available, such as in an immediate memory test, models of recognition memory suppose that remembering relies on perceptual representations (e.g., Brainerd & Reyna, 2002).”

“This instantiation is then encoded and stored (e.g., McKoon & Ratcliff, 1989) in parallel to the encoded superordinate term (see Brainerd & Reyna, 2002).”

“Second, according to the “fuzzy-trace” theory (eg, Brainerd & Reyna, 1998 , 2002 ), illusory memories arise because of their consistency with the “gist” of the study lists.”

“Three explanations have been proposed to explain the occurrence of false memories in the DRM paradigm: an activation monitoring framework (Gallo & Roediger, 2002; McDermott & Watson, 2001), fuzzy trace theory (Brainerd, Wright, Reyna, & Payne, 2002; Reyna, 1998; Reyna & Brainerd, 1995), and distinctiveness (Bruce, Phi…”

“9 This theory, elaborated by Brainerd and Reyna (2002, 2004), assumes that perceived information is stored in parallel according to two types of traces.”

“Fuzzy Trace Theory posits that individuals encode two types of memory traces: verbatim and gist (Reyna and Brainerd 1995).”

“Because both test probes were from the same object category, participants could not rely on familiarity or gist-level information to make their response (Brainerd & Reyna, 2002).”

“One approach to explaining these false-memory effects, including the bilingualism-related effects, is within the fuzzy-trace theory (Brainerd & Reyna, 2002), which postulates that two types of memory traces are encoded.”

“…or traces are encoded in memory during the study of DRM lists: a specific representation ( verbatim ), based on the perceptual details and shallow structures of words, and a generic representation ( gist ), based on the general meanings of words (Reyna and Brainerd, 1995; Brainerd and Reyna, 2002).”

“Our observation of elevated false alarms to thematic lures might also relate to people’s tendency to rapidly extract schematic gist (Ahmad et al., 2017; Brainerd & Reyna, 2002; Wilburn & Feeney, 2008), which would yield broad memory traces that promote memory errors to story lures overall.”

“this type of false memory, fuzzy-trace theory proposes that when we store an experience, two parallel traces, a verbatim trace for specific information and a gist trace for general meaning, are stored and that false memories depend on the gist trace based on the similarity between stimuli (Brainerd and Reyna, 2002).”

“Object naming is an automatic response when object images are presented, so even if participants were not asked to name the objects in the description and the imagination tasks, the conceptual representations could be processed automatically [11, 20, 21].”

“…theoretical propositions, the similarities of which supplant the differences (Corson & Verrier, 2013), have been made: the fuzzy trace theory (e.g., Brainerd & Reyna, 2002; Reyna & Brainerd, 1995) and the activation-monitoring theory (Johnson, Hashtroudi, & Lindsay, 1993; Roediger, Watson,…”

“Fuzzy Trace Theory (FTT) posits that verbatim codes can be used to monitor and suppress gist codes (Brainerd & Reyna, 2002), and, as Flegal and Reuter-Lorenz (2014) have discussed, their differential availability across delays could influence delay-dependent differences in the incidence of false…”

“As noted, according to Fuzzy Trace theory (Brainerd and Reyna 2002), increased attention to the underlying theme of a study list will increase the saliency and cohesion of the gist representation and thereby increase false memories for lures strongly related to the theme.”

“A prominent example of such a view is fuzzy-trace theory (eg, Brainerd & Reyna, 2002 ; Reyna & Brainerd, 1995 ), which holds that the surface forms and the meaning contents of experience are stored in parallel, with the representations of the former—verbatim traces—dissociated from the latter—gist traces.”

“…of semantically related emotional items compared to semantically related 51COPYRIGHT 2015 BY PSI CHI, THE INTERNATIONAL HONOR SOCIETY IN PSYCHOLOGY (VOL. 20, NO. 1/ISSN 2164-8204) neutral items because the reliance on impaired gist traces would increase as time goes on (Brainerd & Reyna, 2002).”

“Older adults tend to encode common features across experiences and extract their meaning, or ‘gist’ (Brainerd and Reyna, 2015, 2002) rather than the details that distinguish between similar experiences (Bowman et al., 2019; Bowman and Dennis, 2015; Gallo et al., 2006; Koutstaal and Schacter, 1997).”

“For example, in the general encoding task participants orient to conceptual, category-level information, which might encourage connections with prior knowledge (Brainerd and Reyna, 2002; Dewhurst and Robinson, 2004), a mechanism perhaps more available to adults than children.”

“…separately and can be retrieved relatively independently of other information, they suggest that such information is stored generically, as in semantic memory, or in a gist-like format, whereby infor - mation from different episodes is somehow pooled together (see e.g. Brainerd and Reyna 2002).”

“…falsely denied would be more likely to conform to false information given by the co-witness compared to honest control participants, based on FTT (Brainerd & Reyna, 2002), the deception detection principle (Tousig-nant et al., 1986), and the theory of social remembering (Blank, 2009; see above…”

“In this article, we focus on the approach rooted in fuzzy trace theory (FTT), developed over the years by Brainerd, Reyna, and their co-workers (e.g. Brainerd & Reyna, 2002; Brainerd et al., 1999, 1995b; Reyna et al., 2016).”

“While true memory is sustained by both verbatim and gist processes, false memory is sustained only by gist processes that include the critical lures along with the studied items (Reyna and Brainerd, 1995; Brainerd and Reyna, 2002).”

“A variation of the dual-process view of memory is the fuzzy-trace theory (e.g., Brainerd and Reyna 1990, 2002, 2004), which assumes that two qualitatively different types of representations, verbatim trace and gist trace, are encoded in parallel during a study experience.”

“…might afford more generalised memory representations of encoded information (Schacter et al., 2011) either by heightening activation of semantically related information (Gallo, 2010; Gallo & Roediger, 2002; Roediger & McDermott, 1995) or strengthening gist representation (Brainerd & Reyna, 2002).”