How accurate is our memory? A scientific analysis of memory distortions and what we can do about the
Introduction
Undoubtedly, one of the most advantageous mechanisms at human disposal is our memory. From remembering how to tie our shoe to remembering how to play Beethoven’s 5th on the piano, human memory provides a highly practical, indeed necessary, tool for survival and reproduction. But with high utility comes high complexity. The vast, dark cavern that is the mystery of memory began to see some light relatively late in the history of science. Due to memory’s highly subjective nature, science seemed unarmed to grapple with such a phenomenon. Bertrand Russel famously expresses in Analysis of Mind that although his analysis of memory is faulty, he sees no way that it can be improved (Russel, 1921, p.187). How, then, should science approach the formal study of memory? As we begin to learn more about memory, it is becoming increasingly clear that we must distinguish aspects of memory that we wish to study. This can be seen in the variety of fields in which memory is subject to analysis—neuroscience, cognitive science, experimental psychology, and philosophy, just to name a few. It is hopeful, if not expected, that we will arrive at a more complete understanding of memory with the integration of these approaches and their methodologies. To this end, the present article reviews current and past scientific literature on memory distortion in a fashion such that, upon completion, the reader should have a healthy understanding regarding the mechanisms of memory and their distortions. The article concludes with suggestions for how science's relationship with the public should proceed in light of the counter-intuitive findings in memory research.
How Accurate it our Memory? A scientific analysis of memory distortions and what we can do about them.
A Brief History of Memory
In the most general sense, memory can be defined as a process. Philosopher John Locke describes memory as the ability to “revive perceptions, which [the mind] has once had, with this additional perception annexed to them, that [the mind] has had them before” (1690/1975, p. 150). Beyond this procedural description, Ebbinghaus (1885) distinguishes between three types of memory. These types are described as voluntary memory which can be recalled at will, involuntary memory that arises without our intention, and memories that do not come into conscious awareness at all but still nonetheless exhibit their effects in human cognition/behavior. These very general descriptions of memory work as useful definitions, but are not very explanatory at the functional level. Memory certainly seems to work in similar ways to a library—items are collected, stored, and retrieved at a later point in time. However, research into the workings of memory has shown that memories are not simply stored in our brain like books in a library, rather, memories are reconstructed from traces. Barlett (1932) had the impressive insight to propose that memories are reconstructed, before modern research and theorizing of the idea. Upon his analysis, he concluded that “[memory] is an imaginative reconstruction or construction, built out of the relation of our attitude towards a whole active mass of organized past reactions or experience…” (Barlett, 1932, p. 10). It was sometime later that a mechanism by which these memories were reconstructed from was proposed. These mechanisms are memory traces. Memories are thus not stored as literal isomorphisms of perception, but as traces of perceptions that can be later reconstructed “back” to their original form. As we shall see, reconstruction “back to their original form” is sometimes (and perhaps often) an imperfect process.
In his experiments, Karl Lashley (1950) searched for the home of these traces, or engrams, in discrete brain areas of mice. After decades of search, Lashley failed to find these specific traces and eventually proposed that traces exist as distributed connections throughout the cortex (Lashley, 1950; for recent summary see Darrel, 2001). Within the framework of the reconstruction process there is much room for investigation. The processes of encoding, storage, and retrieval all must be conceptualized in terms of traces and reconstruction—leaving open questions about how it might be possible to scientifically investigate memories in a way that is consistent with our everyday folk understanding of it. Although there is much to discover, a considerable amount is known about memory. As we shall see, the research on memory seems to point in the direction of memory processes lying on a spectrum of distortion—where our memories can assist us with reliable storage and retrieval processes or leave us with distorted perceptions of reality.
Memory Distortions
To be aware that you are experiencing a memory distortion is not usually the most obvious experience. This is perhaps why the scientific study of memory distortion has had its birth so late in the history of science. Many investigators would at first attribute distortions of memory to repressed memories. However, researchers have proposed that there is not a mechanism per se that blocks traumatic experiences from being recalled (repressed memories) until it is psychologically safe to do so (McNally, 2009). Rather, people actually succumb to false memories of traumatic events or the traumatic events actually happened, but the person simply failed to think about it or forgot that they had previously recalled it. Upon comparing reports of alien abduction and childhood ritual abuse in context of temporal lobe activity, Paley (1997) concludes that there is evidence showing that these events could have really happened and that it is likely the result of a retrieval processing error. A review of the literature on alien abduction memories can be found in Clark & Loftus (1996).
Misinformation
The continuation of cognitive science and investigations into repressed memories led to some of the major breakthroughs in false memory research. One of the most notable contributions to this area is Loftus’s misinformation research. She found that providing misleading information in a particular fashion about a particular event can lead to a person believing this “misinformation” (Loftus & Hoffman, 1989, Clark & Loftus, 1996). The misinformation effect can be seen in Loftus’s work on misinformation in disguise of leading questions (Loftus, 1975).
In Loftus’ study, participants were shown a video of a car wreck that resulted from a run stop sign and subsequently asked how fast the car was going when it ran the stop sign or how fast the car was going when it turned right. When asked about whether there was a stop sign in the video, participants who were previously asked how fast the car was going when it ran the stop sign, were more likely to say that there was a stop sign compared to the group who was asked how fast the car was going when it turned right.
In the next experiment of her study, all participants were shown a video of 8 demonstrators who interrupted a classroom and half were asked whether the leader of the twelve demonstrators was a male and the other half were asked whether the leader of the four demonstrators male. In line with the results from the first experiment, participants who were asked a week later about the leader with twelve demonstrators reported, on average, seeing more demonstrators than the participants who were asked about the leader with four demonstrators. Loftus concluded with a proposed theory of memory whereby the acquisition process of memory stores the information of some complex experience as some type of representation whereby acquisition of subsequent information can alter the structure of the original representation (Loftus, 1975).
Loftus’s research went on to investigate how the presentation of subsequent information might influence memories of events. Loftus, Miller, and Burns showed slides of a car accident to participants and subsequently exposed them to either consistent, misleading, or irrelevant information (Loftus, Miller, & Burns, 1978). It was found that when participants were exposed to misleading information, there was less accurate responding to questions about the slides compared to the participants who were given consistent information. In a follow up experiment, Loftus, Miller, and Burns (1978) asked whether misinformation had a stronger effect when it is immediately introduced after the event or if it is introduced just before the memory test. They found that participants in the immediate (immediately introduced) questionnaire had a higher proportion of correct answers than the delayed (just before the memory test) questionnaire condition.
Other researchers have looked into what might affect one’s susceptibility to misinformation. Jaschinski & Wentura (2002) looked at the relationship between working memory and the misinformation effect. They found a negative relationship between working memory capacity and the magnitude of the misinformation effect, that is to say participants who were able to recall more words during a working memory test were less susceptible to integrate misleading post-event information. Some have posited that post-event misinformation effects can be accounted for by adaptive memory processes. Schacter, Guerin, and Jacques (2011) argue that the brain mechanism which allows us to update our memories in an attempt to increase their accuracy can also allow inaccurate information to be assimilated. The varying conditions that play into the phenomenon of misinformation are reviewed by Loftus (2005).
Post-event misinformation is not the only type of memory distortion to be studied by science. Associative memory distortions and memory distortions stemming from imagining new events also manifest in human memory systems.
Associative Memory Errors
The most common example of associative memory errors are exhibited when we try to recall something previously perceived, but instead of recalling the actual perception, we recall a related or associated perception that we falsely believe is the true recollection of the original perception. James Deese (1959) realized that there was no way to predict these associated intrusions so he set up an experiment where participants participated in a free recall memory test of words and a subsequent free association test of words. During a free recall test, certain stimuli are studied and then later requested to be recalled (i.e. in any order or without forced choice answers). A free association test involves looking at words or stimuli and assigning an “associate” word that one supposes is related to the word or stimuli. When combining these two tasks, data was amassed on the intrusive words (i.e. words that were not on the original list of words to be memorized) and compared to the results of the free association test (Deese, 1959).
Deese found that “the probability of a particular word occurring as an intrusion in immediate free recall of a list of words may be predicted from the tendency for the intruding word to occur as a response in free association to the items on the list” (Deese, 1959, p. 21). Thus, Deese was able to show that you can more or less predict what types of intrusive recollections will occur during recall based on commonalities within the initial words on the list.
Sometime later, Roediger and McDermott (1995) revisited Deese’s experiment by having participants participate in memory testing of word lists. There was a separate critical lure (i.e. a word that has been deemed associated with a particular set of words; e.g. the critical lure for sit, legs, and seat is chair) for six lists of words derived from Deese’s 1959 study. Roediger and McDermott presented these lists to participants and after a couple of minutes presented the participants with lists of words that contained the critical lure. Participants were then instructed to rate the extent to which they were confident that the words on the new list were on the original lists. They found significantly higher hits for the critical lure words compared to unrelated lure words (Roediger & McDermott, 1959), suggesting that the association aspect of the words is playing a big part in the false recollection.
The paradigm of methodology they created is now commonly referred to as the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) task and consists of presenting word lists to be memorized and then later presenting word lists with critical lures included to the same participants in an attempt to measure false recollection. Schacter, Verfaellie, and Pradere (1996) studied amnesiac participants’ performance on the DRM task and found that they had less false alarms than the controls (i.e. amnesiac patients were less susceptible to critical lures)! They suggested that these interesting findings resulted because the amnesiac patients were unable to remember associative information from the initial word list and thus unable to have that information present when exposed to the critical lure word. Furthermore, it has been shown using fMRIs that there is overlap in brain activity when people have true recollection and false recollection (Garoff-Eaton, Slotnick, & Schacter, 2006). Schacter, Guerin, and Jacques have taken studies such as these to suggest that associative memory errors are but a symptom of an otherwise adaptive memory process (Schacter, Guerin, and Jacques, 2011).
Imagination Inflation
One of the critical differences between imagination inflation and the previously mentioned misinformation effect is the medium of the “inaccurate information”. With the misinformation effect, misleading information that leads to inaccurate memories comes from an outside source. With imagination inflation, however, the “inaccurate information” comes from within. Garry, Manning, Loftus, and Sherman (1996), conducted a study where they surveyed participants on how confident they were that certain childhood events happened to them. Two weeks later, the participants were asked to imagine events by the following prompt:
"You are going to imagine several events. Each time, you will read a brief description of an event. You will be given a few moments to picture the event, and then you will answer some questions about the image. You will be given more details to imagine, and then take a few moments to picture them. Then you will answer some questions about your image. Try to picture each event as clearly and completely as you can. It may help you to form a more complete mental picture if you include familiar places, people, and things in the imagined event. Also, close your eyes if that helps your imagination." (Garry et al, 1996., p. 210)
After participating in the imagination task, participants were told that the surveys they filled out the week prior had been misplaced and that they needed to fill out a new one. This was done in order to compare the confidence of events happening before and after the imagination tasks. They found that, compared to participants who did not imagine an event, participants who did imagine an event that they had previously reported low confidence for were more likely to increase their confidence that the event had happened (Garry et al., 1996).
The authors noted that the imagination task did not influence events that were judged by the participants to have actually happened to them. However, the authors admit that the difference in confidence ratings might not be due entirely to imagination inflation. They posit that the reinterpretation hypothesis and/or hypermnesia may play a role in their obtained results (Garry et al., 1996). Their reinterpretation hypothesis posits that the post-test items were interpreted more broadly than the pre-test items. That is to say—participants interpreted the items differently the second time around. Hypermnesia refers to the tendency for recall to increase after successive testing. The explanation stemming from hypermnesia is simply that taking a pre-test affected post-test results and that if the experimenters could somehow perform the experiment without a pre-test, the results would be different. In the end, the authors concluded that they could not rule out hypermnesia and that perhaps “imagination inflation is sometimes due to new genuine memories and sometimes due to enhanced confidence about false memories” (Garry et al., 1996).
Despite the ambiguity of what contributes to distorted memories when imagination inflation tasks are invoked, there is a solid framework for how imagination inflation affects memories. Johnson and Raye (1981) posited a process termed reality monitoring whereby they assume that both internally and externally created perceptual events create persistent memory traces. Reality monitoring explains memory errors by creating a set of decision rules based on perceptual criteria (e.g. time, location, proximity, pitch, brightness, etc) that distinguish between perceptions that were internally generated (or imagined) or perceptions that were externally generated (not imagined) (Johnson & Raye, 1981). This framework attempts to explain “false” memories by showing that the integration of new information can influence what decision rules are utilized when determining whether a perception was externally or internally generated.
Johnson, Hashtroudi, & Lindsay (1993) extended this framework to be a bit more specific and instead of reality monitoring, posited a source monitoring framework. One way to distinguish reality monitoring from source monitoring is that “reality” does not consist in perceptual and memory representations alone, but is a product of judgment processes (Johnson, Hashtroudi, & Lindsay 1993). This argument extends the monitoring framework beyond the relatively simple reality monitoring framework which consists of decision rules for determining if perceptions are externally or internally generated to the source monitoring framework that incorporates other factors such as prior beliefs and judgments about the natural world. For reviews of imagination inflation and possible mechanisms of action within that framework see Garry & Polaschek, 2000. This framework should not be interpreted to suggest that imagination inflation affects only one type of memory. For example, it has been shown that imagination inflation can produce false recollection of actions that never happened—where more imagination inflation exercises increased the confidence of recalled actions (Goff & Roediger, 1998). Although the phenomenon of imagination inflation is widespread, there are individual differences in susceptibility and resistance (see Heaps & Nash, 1999, Horselenberg, Merckelbach, Muris, Rassin, Sijsenaar, & Spaan, 2000, & Paddock, Joseph, Chan, Terranova, Manning, & Loftus, 1998).
Emotion, Appraisal and Memory
Another line of inquiry that is worth addressing in memory malleability research is that of emotion research. Emotion has been shown to be both beneficial and hindering to memory. When an event is emotionally charged, central aspects of the event tend to be remembered better than peripheral features of the event. Loftus and Christianson (1987) were able to show this by creating slides of traumatic and non-traumatic versions of the same event and showing participants these slides. Participants who were given the traumatic versions tended to recall more central details of the event, but were not able to recall peripheral features of the event as well. This effect can also be exemplified in the weapons focus effect—where people concentrate more on a weapon (a supposedly emotion-eliciting feature) and less on other features of the seen (peripheral features). Loftus, Loftus, and Messo (1987) created a two slide shows of an interaction between a customer and a teller and showed them to participants. In one version of the slides, the customer pointed a gun at the teller and in the other version the customer handed the teller a check. Eye movement recordings for the participants who saw the gun version showed longer and more frequent eye fixations than the participants who saw the check version. If it is correct to assume that the weapon is evoking an emotional response then the weapons focus effect is indeed a reflection of emotion enhancing memory for central features and impeding memory for peripheral features. For a meta-analysis on the weapons focus effect that see Steblay (1992).
Despite the connection between memory and emotion, their mechanisms at lower levels of explanation might not share as much overlap. The encoding of emotion is thought to overlap with the encoding of memory, but only to a degree. Encoding of emotion is a largely separate process than that of encoding memory. From a neurophysiological perspective, the amygdala might process emotion entirely separately from memory processing in the hippocampus and the two might only interact during initial encoding and retrieval. This can result in discrepancies when reporting memories of emotion. Although this "un-relatedness" is somewhat conjecture, the degree to which appraisal and memory functions can be described as distinct entities at various levels of explanation is a potentially testable and explorable concept* (see footnote).
Appraisal
Cognitive theories of emotion posit emotion as the result of an independent process of goal analysis (see Lazarus, 1991). For example, a person will experience happiness when their goals are being met or blockage of a goal has been removed. Anger can be elicited when a goal is blocked and blame is easily attributable. Sadness can be elicited by the irrevocable loss of a goal. The appraisal framework can be used to predict emotions in a given situation. For example, Kuppens, Van Mechelen, Smits, and De Boeck (2003) asked participants to describe recent unpleasant experiences in which they were either asked to include appraisal theory components (e.g. goal obstacle, control, unfairness) or not. After asking participants to rate their negative emotions in their described situation, results showed that negative emotions are associated with distinct patterns of appraisal. It is important to note that not all appraisal theories operate by the same terminology. It is not uncommon for one researcher to use explanations of emotion in terms different than that of another appraisal theorist. An example of this difference in appraisal can be found where Roseman (1989) manipulated stories with motivational states, situational states, probability, legitimacy, and causal agency—all types of appraisals of a given situation. After asking participants to read to stories and to give a measure of the different emotions the protagonist of the story felt, results showed that theory-unique appraisal combinations predicted intensities of emotion.
One caveat to the explanatory power of appraisal theory is whether or not appraisal is the content of an emotional experience or the causal antecedents of emotion. Frijda (1993) discusses this and proposes that characterizing appraisal as content by itself is of limited use, but is better understood as an interplay between content and antecedent events. Understanding how appraisals relate to current emotions allows us to extend this framework to what other attributes might interact with emotions.
As noted earlier when discussing the weapons focus effect (Loftus, Loftus, & Messo, 1987), attention can be affected when emotionally salient features are present. As it turns out, appraisal theory has something to tell us about our attention. Happiness is elicited when goals are attained (e.g. Stein & Levine, 1989) and this happiness serves as a sort of indicator that no immediate need for goal attainment is needed (e.g. Schwarz & Clore, 1983) so it follows that our attention is less tied-up. This is because our attention is not preoccupied with goal attainment or other problem solving tasks. Happiness is not the only emotion that should influence our attention according to this line of thought. For example, when describing anger, participants have been found to focus more on goals being obstructed or causal agents responsible (e.g. Levine, 1996). This leaves open the question of how current appraisal might affect emotion in other domains, particularly memory of emotion.
In Levine’s (1996) natural experiment, she surveyed supporters of a presidential candidate after he dropped out of the race (to many people’s disappointment) and then again when he rejoined the campaign. The surveys were meant to get a measure of what the supporter’s initial emotional reactions and appraisals (this term being used in a less theoretically strict way than more formal theories would use it such as Lazarus, 1991 & Frijda, 1993) of the drop-out were and what the corresponding measures would be of those participants after the election had ended. A correlation was done on the intensity of the initial reports of emotion and the presence of appraisal components in the participant’s descriptions of their emotion. It was found that participant’s appraisals were closely related to the predictions of appraisal models of emotion. These results show how appraisal theory can be used to predict emotions in real life situations.
The second part of Levine’s study gets at the question of how emotion influences memory from a slightly different angle. When trying to remember our attitudes or emotions, we might expect from the framework explained earlier that somehow “central features” would be remembered better and that “peripheral features” would be less well remembered. This may in fact be true, but the results of Levine’s (1996) study might suggest something different. Levine divided the participants into three groups corresponding to their decision about the returning candidate: returning (participants who planned to vote for another candidate after the withdrawal but ultimately wished their candidate had won), deserting (participants who planned to vote for another candidate after the withdrawal but ultimately wished their candidate had lost), and loyal (participants who planned to vote for their candidate even after he withdrew and still wished he had been selected after the election). The loyal group underestimated the intensity of their sadness and anger, but overestimated feelings of hope. This suggests that because the participant’s appraisal had changed, their memories of their emotion changed. At first, the loyal participants were still pleased with their candidate (as indicated by their preference to still vote for him) so it follows they must have been quite sad when he withdrew. This would be the case because of their seemingly irrevocable loss of candidate (e.g. see Lazarus, 1991 for appraisal descriptions of sadness). However, when asked about him the second time, they still wished he would have won, but underestimated their initial negative emotions and overestimated their initial positive emotions.
Looking back to the framework discussed earlier, it is not clear how factors like “centrality” and “periphery” of memory fit into the framework of memory for emotions. Based on findings like Levine’s (1996) study, suspecting that emotion’s tendency to increase attention for central features somehow carries over to memories of emotions being more stable, is a perhaps misguided suspicion. Levine’s study revealed that memories for emotion might change over time as current appraisals change. For instance the returning group underestimated their initial anger. This can be explained by appraisal theory because when the participants were first surveyed, they wanted their candidate to win so his withdrawal elicited anger (a goal was blocked and blame attributed). But because they did not intend to vote for him after he withdrew, they were less angry. Their current appraisal state of “less angry” seemed to influence their memory of their initial anger. For the deserting group, participants had stable reports of anger, but underestimated initial reports of sadness and hope. Once more, change (or lack thereof) in appraisal seems to explain the change in memory for emotion. Since these participants did not “get over” (or change appraisal) their initial anger after their candidate’s withdrawal their appraisal stayed relatively constant. These participant’s underestimation of initial sadness and hope can be explained similarly as well. Because they did not wish their candidate had won after he returned, they had “less sadness” than they did when he withdrew. In the same way, because they had appraisals that elicited “less hope” during the survey after the election this influenced how they remembered their emotions. By following the same logic, if the participants had “more sadness” and/or “more happiness” at the time of the second survey, their appraisals that were responsible (or constitute, see Frijda, 1993) their current emotions might influence them to overestimate their initial feelings of sadness and happiness.
In all, these results suggest evidence for changes in appraisal affecting memories for emotion in the real world. However, since this was a natural experiment (i.e. the study of a naturally occurring event outside of the laboratory) this can also interpreted in terms of cognitive dissonance (e.g. Festinger, 1957), by saying that a decrease in impression over time makes people recall more negative and less positive initial evaluations and that increases in impression would make people recall less negative and more positive initial evaluations. Although these results can be cashed out in terms of both theories, appraisal theory has a further reach in that it can also predict current emotions where cognitive dissonance theory might lack explanatory power in this area.
In a more experimental attempt to get at appraisals and emotions effects on memory, Levine and Burgess (1997) attempted to manipulate positive and negative emotions in students and subsequently give them a memory task for a narrative they read after the manipulation. To induce emotion, students were given back a false pop-quiz grade where students who received an “A” were to be the positive emotion group and students who received a “D” were to be in the negative emotion group. All of the students then listened to a narrative about a college student’s experiences and were then asked to write down everything they could remember about the narrative. It is important to note that the researchers did not want the participant’s recollections to be from short term memory because that would have decreased the ability for the researchers to measure emotion’s effects (and thus appraisal) on long term memory. To control for this the participants had to do a quick distractor task between listening to the narrative and writing down everything they could remember. Results from their analysis revealed that their manipulation worked—participants who received an “A” tended to have more positive emotions than participants who received a “D”. To see how emotions affected the participant’s memory, the researchers grouped participants into four groups depending on their reported initial emotion before the experiment: neutral/okay, happiness, angry, and sad. Because the participants could not be randomly assigned to the have these “initial emotions” Levine controlled for GPA so that she would be able to tell if there were academic differences that contributed to recall. The results showed that being happy contributed to remembering goals and outcomes of the narrative. Being sad was associated with remembering outcomes and being angry was associated with enhanced recall of goals.
Memory Research opens up a new Frontier of Skepticism
It is of interest to observe how Levine’s study maps on to what cognitive theories of appraisal predict about appraisal, emotion, and memory. In science, we often rejoice at theories that reliably predict phenomena. However, in the case of Levine’s study and others like hers, we seem to have a theory that reliably predicts how a phenomenon fails. However this could potentially be due to a wrong assumption about what it means to “fail”. This line of thinking is suggested by Schacter, Guerin, and Jacques (2011) where they provide evidence that memory errors reflect adaptive cognitive processes.
Whether or not these memory errors are disposable to human cognition, the fact remains that they exist and so much of our world relies on the assumption that they do not. How do we then proceed with the ever increasing knowledge of memory errors? Two solutions are readily apparent and they indeed need to be implemented simultaneously. These are skepticism and dissemination of knowledge. This could also just be considered a rigorous scientific approach to the study of memory with an emphasis on getting the knowledge out to the public. The crucial point is that the public will receive information even in absence of scientific education. Researchers who are aware of the faults in our cognition should be motivated to ensure that the inevitable flow of knowledge into the pool of human intellect is at least somewhat filtered, if not almost completely. There should be, of course room for push-back so that the science does not lose its rigor. Nonetheless, the best way to implement this filter at the level of the individual is through skepticism. Being appropriately skeptical of claims that you do not feel have a high probability of being true incites further thought from the individual making the claim and acts as the filter for the person listening.
Of course in order to be skeptical about information we must ensure that it gets out there. This is where scientists’ obligation to disseminate knowledge comes into play. For example, consider the topic of climate change and how misinformation about it has given some people the courage to say that it is a topic still being disputed. It is crucial to understand that we can be skeptical about the wrong things all day and think we are making progress. We have to realize in the end there are much better things to be skeptical of. The same can go for memory errors as well. Researchers have to ensure that knowledge about bad assumption regarding memory are known to all who are involved in situations where human memory is expected to be reliable. This includes testimony of any sort—whether in court or elsewhere. Health care workers remembering information about patients is also up for skeptical analysis (not to say that one shouldn’t go to the doctor). When considering people who we might not think of as being prone to memory errors we must press the argument that we should be skeptical of everyone’s memory ability. For even people with highly autobiographical memory are subject to memory errors (Patihis & colleagues, 2013). If we are working with wrong conceptualizations of how memory works (as society often does) we could potentially be promoting skepticism in a way that does not contribute to human flourishing.
Footnote:
The psychological phenomena that we perceive as “memory” and “emotion” have a connection, but perhaps only at their emergent levels. At their reduced level of appraisal (for emotions) and mentalese (for cognitive processes such as memory and learning) there is less of a connection (see Lazarus, 1991 for appraisal and Fodor, 1995 for mentalese as it relates to the language of thought hypothesis and cognitive processes).
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