Review: Imagination Inflation: Imagining a Childhood Event Inflates Confidence that it Occurred

#Title#

Imagination Inflation: Imagining a Childhood Event Inflates Confidence that it Occurred

#Authors#

Maryanne Garry, Charles G. Manning, Elizabeth F. Loftus

#Venue#

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review

3 (2), 208-214

#DOI#

http://cogprints.org/590/1/199801004.html

#Abstract#

Counterfactual imaginings are known to have far reaching implications. In the present experiment, we ask if imagining events from one's past can affect memory for childhood events. We draw on the social psychology literature showing that imagining a future event increases the subjective likelihood that the event will occur. The concepts of cognitive availability and the source monitoring framework provide reasons to expect that imagination may inflate confidence that a childhood event occurred. However, people routinely produce myriad counterfactual imaginings (i.e., daydreams and fantasies) but usually do not confuse them with past experiences. To determine the effects of imagining a childhood event, we pretested subjects on how confident they were that a number of childhood events had happened, asked them to imagine some of those events, and then gathered new confidence measures. For each of the target items, imagination inflated confidence that the event had occurred in childhood. We discuss implications for situations in which imagination is used as an aid in searching for presumably lost memories.

#Comments#

Am strongly interested in the effect of false memories on the process of expert elicitation.  In particular, the stimulus used in the process of extracting the information from experts.

So, in this paper, I am interested in the quality of the inputs into a session.  Could one plant false memories of the work or knowledge using such systems.  Could it be that using a virtual world to perform the elicitation, if incorrectly configured, will introduce more errors, due to the creation of powerful false memories from the visuals created.  Hmmmm.

Interesting to note that the effect is easier with early childhood memories - attributed to vagueness of distant memory.  This is also possibly related to the credulity of young children; do you become a little childlike by remembering your childhood?  If the effect is consistent, this opens up all sorts of possibilities for creation of beneficial false memories, or to reduce the effects of bad environments (GTA 5 comes to mind) by making sure the rules in such environments make moral sense, removing the effect of such false memories induced by gameplay.

So what is War Thunder doing to me?  Do I know have false memories of driving a Tiger I?

The weird part would be the eerie familiarity of driving the Tiger in real life, the eerie familiarity is my false memory of driving in a game, but I experience familiarity in real life.  Would I discern the difference, can I, as the familiarity is beyond my control to an extent.

Interestingly enough, this experimental method almost reads like an elicitation session.  The experiment manager states to the participant: "What are you likely to do next" while imagining the false event.  They are, in concept, creating a false sequence of events or episodes in the memory.

Note, the early estimate of past memory was repeated after the experimenter has faked losing their results - might be dodgy, could people see through this.  I wonder if they controlled for insight into the ruse; it is not noted in the description of results.

So, the data showed a consistent increase in confidence of remembering the fake event, especially after imagining the event (personal VR :-) ).  They controlled for big jumps, conjectured to be actual priming of actual lost memories; this is important in elicitation.  They also note that the number of big jumps is small.  Also note, that people who did not imagine between tests still went up, but not as much.  Another effect in play, maybe regression to the mean, or just a familiarity effect.  These effects are important in any elicitation test; just repeating questions may bring about a false memory - this is what cops and psychologists do.

They also bring up the issue of self being in the imagination session.  Brings up the idea that an avatar should represent the person who is doing the elicitation, to bring the participant a sense of performing the task in world; might increase the concept of presence.

#ImportantRefs#

Review: Presence and Memory: Immersive Virtual Reality Effects on Cued Recall

#Title#

Presence and Memory: Immersive Virtual Reality Effects on Cued Recall

#Authors#

Jakki Bailey, Jeremy N. Bailenson, Andrea Stevenson Won, June Flora and K. Carrie Armel

#Venue#

Stanford Tech Report - only Preliminary Results

#DOI#

http://vhil.stanford.edu/pubs/2012/bailey-ispr-presence-memory.pdf

#Abstract#

Presence, the psychological experience of “being there,” is an important construct to consider when investigating the impact of mediated experiences on cognition. Though several studies have investigated the influence of presence on the memory of virtual environments (i.e. recalling virtual objects), few have tested how presence impacts memory on subsequent tasks in the physical world. Thirty-three male and female college students were exposed to a pro-environmental message in an immersive virtual environment. After the virtual reality treatment, they completed a memory task in the physical world regarding pro-environmental principles. Results showed a significant negative association between levels of reported presence in the virtual world and the number of correct water conservation examples remembered in the physical world. These findings suggest that media technology that induces presence can influence an individual’s ability to remember information in the physical world. Possible theoretical explanations of how presence may negatively impact cognition are presented.

#Comments#

Here they seek to relate a specific component of VW to memory, viz., presence or subjective levels of being there, with memory recall in cueing experiments.

They use a nVisor SX111 HMD (NVIS, Reston, VA) with a resolution of 2056 x 1024 and a refresh rate of 120 frames per second to perform the work, framerate is very high compared to Oculus, which may improve presence?  Need to keep this in mind.

Experiment context is that the task involved an environmental narrative, so emotional resonance with such a concept could be a factor here as well.  Does it work the same with other more humdrum narratives?

They also look at free recall and cued recall, so the memory tests are of a different type in each case to cover possibly differing memory processes.

Useful presence scale for assessing level of presence: "A five- item scaled was adapted from presence scales used in previous studies (Bailenson and Yee, 2007; Ahn & Bailenson, 2011; Nowak & Biocca, 2003)."

Note they get a NEGATIVE correlation with memory and presence (n=33).  This needs to be considered for my experiments.  It would be interesting to see if a comparison with desktop levels of presence will map to my other results with Unity and Metasonic?!?!?

Negative correlation is potentially explained by:

1. Vivid inputs from VW could drain cognitive capacity to remember items.

2. Arousal - high levels of emotion - limit memory tasks.

3. People who report high levels of presence actually remember things using different processes, and so are actually a different subject group, so could be a confounding factor that needs to be controlled.

4. Only correlational experiment, no details on causation, so needs further work.

An interesting result, bring out many research questions to answer on the relationship of VW elements with cognitive processes.

#ImportantRefs#

Lin, Duh, Parker, Abi-Rached, & Furness, 2002
Mania & Chalmers, 2001
Dinh, Walker, Song, Kobayashi, and Hodges 1999