Hallucination in long-term memory
Sapiens-1 retrieves memories by reconstructing them, and will sometimes reconstruct events that never happened.
Recall is reconstruction
Sapiens-1 does not store experiences verbatim. In a classic study, people watched films of traffic accidents and were asked how fast the cars were going when they ‘smashed into’ or ‘hit’ each other. The verb changed the speed estimates, and a week later people asked with ‘smashed’ were more likely to report having seen broken glass, although there was none (Loftus & Palmer 1974).
A missing word appears
No misleading question is required. After studying lists of associated words such as bed, rest and awake, people recalled the never-presented associate, sleep, 40 per cent of the time, and later recognized it with high confidence (Roediger & McDermott 1995).
When an entire event is added
Whole events can be implanted. In the ‘lost in the mall’ studies, some participants came to remember a childhood event that had not happened (Loftus & Pickrell 1995). Shown a doctored photograph of themselves on a hot-air balloon ride, half of 20 participants created complete or partial false memories over three interviews (Wade et al. 2002). A mega-analysis of eight implantation studies, 423 participants in all, classified 30.4 per cent of cases as false memories and another 23 per cent as having accepted the event to some degree (Scoboria et al. 2017).
The retrieval implication
Rates depend on the prompt. When the suggestion included self-relevant information and an imagination procedure, and no photograph of the event, the rate rose to 46.1 per cent (Scoboria et al. 2017). The recommended mitigation is retrieval-augmented generation, also known as writing things down.
References
- Loftus, E. F. & Palmer, J. C. Reconstruction of automobile destruction: An example of the interaction between language and memory. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 13, 585–589 (1974). doi:10.1016/S0022-5371(74)80011-3
- Loftus, E. F. & Pickrell, J. E. The formation of false memories. Psychiatric Annals 25, 720–725 (1995). doi:10.3928/0048-5713-19951201-07
- Roediger, H. L. & McDermott, K. B. Creating false memories: Remembering words not presented in lists. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 21, 803–814 (1995). doi:10.1037/0278-7393.21.4.803
- Scoboria, A. et al. A mega-analysis of memory reports from eight peer-reviewed false memory implantation studies. Memory 25, 146–163 (2017). doi:10.1080/09658211.2016.1260747
- Wade, K. A., Garry, M., Read, J. D. & Lindsay, D. S. A picture is worth a thousand lies: Using false photographs to create false childhood memories. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 9, 597–603 (2002). doi:10.3758/BF03196318