On Believing Yourself

I have always been quite troubled by the fact that I can remember things that never happened. If I am confident that a childhood friend's name was Paul when it was actually Roger, how am I to be certain that I correctly remember how to perform the act of addition, or my distaste for the texture of most mushrooms?

Perhaps even more troubling is the fact that studies devoted to exploring the interplay between confidence and memory have found that, in general, the memories we're most confident in are most likely to be authentic¹ (see figure, below).

The paradox is fairly clear: how can we be confident in a false memory, if confidence correlates with accuracy?

The authors of a recent study suggest, and go a ways towards demonstrating, that two distinct mechanisms are at work, one at work when we express confidence in veridical memories, and one for when we express confidence in false recollections².

Specifically, these authors use fMRI, and a categorized word recall task, to demonstrate that distinct brain areas are active when we're sure of veracious retrospection and another when we're confident in specious anamnesis. The researchers speculate that the latter is due to the familiarity of certain events based on the anatomy of the active sites revealed by the scan (see figure, below).

As a final note, the two areas identified in this study are quite far apart in brain terms, once again pointing to the notion that memory is physiologically and anatomically diffuse. So when you can't remember your first pet's name, don't get too worried, your brain is a big place to search.


References

1. Lindsay DS, Read JD, Sharma K (1998) Accuracy and confidence in person identification: the relationship is strong when witnessing conditions vary widely. Psychol Sci 9:215–218.
2. Kim H, & Cabeza R (2007) Trusting Our Memories: Dissociating the Neural Correlates of Confidence in Veridical versus Illusory Memories. J. Neurosci 27(45):12190-12197