Facts About The Human Brain - 1247 Words

Psychologists are constantly researching the what, when, why, and how of various behaviors of people. One of the more popular topics in this field is memory and the different components involved in false memory in humans. A false memory occurs when a person recalls an event that never happened, or remembers an event differently from the way it happened. For the most part, our brain is a reliable source, but it does contain errors and it is easily tricked. There have been times where I have locked my car, walked into class, and forgot whether I locked my car or not within about a five minute time span. The human brain is complex and highly compartmentalized. Information is consistently getting filtered and filed away into different sections†¦show more content†¦Researchers studied whether illusory information could produce an error on a test when participants already knew the information. The participants read two short stories involving errors with common knowledge such as t he largest ocean being the Atlantic Ocean, when it is really the Pacific Ocean. After solving puzzles for five minutes, participants were to recognize the errors that conflicted with their prior knowledge. The researchers discovered that one exposure to false information in the stories caused participants to miss the correct answers on their final test. Knowledge neglect—having correct information stored in memory, but failing to retrieve it when necessary—was the root cause for this misinformation effect (Fazio, Barber, Rajaram, Ornstein, Marsh, 2013). False memories may be caused by a similar misinformation effect where people may be under certain physiological conditions, and are unable to retrieve a memory. Physiological conditions can alter the way memory works. If a person is stressed, depressed, ecstatic, angry, anxious, or nervous the brain becomes vulnerable to false memories. A study was conducted to study variables such as imagery, stress, and anxiety that influence the creation of false memories. Participants were shown fifty slides of pictures and words; keeping a mental note of animate and inanimate objects. Following this procedure, participants were to