Neuropsychology and Law 6 Flashcards
Pseudo-memories
People can remember entire events that never took place, and can be elicited by providing people with misinformation –> ‘source monitoring errors’.
Frontal lobes
Responsible for evaluating the source of recollected information, when injured can cause source-monitoring errors as well as impair judgment.
Case study
Man was shot through his head, provoking comatose status for longer than a week + affected both right and left frontal lobes.
During police interrogations he could not recall what had happened, his memory only returned after 2 months following a talk with his friends. His description of what happened differed substantially from witnesses declarations + suffered from complete amnesia + he filled in the gaps through his friends’ accounts of his memory.
Consolidation
To consolidate information takes a few minutes, therefore when this process is interrupted by brain damage the experiences right before the accident will not be stored in long-term memory.
Memory
It’s a reconstructive process rather than a reproduction of experiences, meaning different fragments have to be combined to form an entity (see BH case).
Post-Hoc Misinformation Paradigm
Involves presenting misleading information after an event has occurred, altering one’s memory of that event.
Imagination-inflation paradigm
Imagining an improbable event leads to increased confidence in event having taken place.
Semantic relatedness paradigm (DRM)
Deese/Roediger-McDermott –> participants were presented with cues referring to a critical item that is never presented –> explores how related concepts can lead to false memories.
Participants could falsely remember words semantically related to those to which they were exposed but that were actually not presented.
Frontal lobes
Involved in executive functions essential for memory retrieval.
Left prefrontal cortex: organises encoded information.
Right prefrontal cortex: guides retrieval.
Damage leads to significant memory distortions and pseudo-memories.
Brain damage and aging
High rate of false recognition errors + lacunas.
Medial temporal lesions: fewer false recognition errors rather than prefrontal damage.
Dementia of the Alzheimer Type (DAT)
Individuals are particularly prone to pseudo-memories, especially when pre-existing semantic information is activated.
Cognitive inhibitory control
Inefficient functioning of cognitive inhibitory control, important in limiting the spread of activation during retrieval of semantic materia, is related to prefrontal executive dysfunctions. Observable in aging and DAT individuals.
Individual differences
- Personality traits: dissociation, suggestibility, etc.
- Cognitive inhibition: individuals with lower CI more likely.
Constructive memory framework (CMF)
New experiences are organised into patters of features that represent various aspects of said experiences, and each feature is encoded in a different brain region. Therefore, retrieving this information involves ‘pattern completition’.
Accordingly, false memories are influenced by neuropsychological factors during encoding and retrieval stages.
MRIs
Showed that true visual recollections activated more visual processing compared to correct rejections of false auditory events. Frontal regions showed significant differences, suggesting post-retrieval monitoring related to true recognition.
