Dictionary Definition
confabulation
Noun
2 (psychiatry) a plausible but imagined memory
that fills in gaps in what is remembered
User Contributed Dictionary
English
Etymology
Latin confabulari "to talk together", com- "together" + fabulari "to chat" from fabula "fable, tale"Pronunciation
- /kənˌfæbjuˈleɪʃən/, /k@n%f
Extensive Definition
Confabulation, also known as
false memory is the confusion of imagination with memory, and/or the confusion of
true memories with false memories. Confabulation can result from
both organic and psychological causes.
Organic causes
Berlyne (1972) defined
confabulation as “…a falsification of memory occurring in clear
consciousness in association with an organically derived amnesia.” He distinguished
between:
- “momentary” (or “provoked”) confabulations - fleeting, and invariably provoked by questions probing the subject’s memory – sometimes consisting of “real” memories displaced in their temporal context.
- “fantastic” (or “spontaneous”) confabulations - characterised by the spontaneous outpouring of irrelevant associations – sometimes bizarre ideas, which may be held with firm conviction.
Patients who have suffered
brain damage or lesions, especially to the Prefrontal cortical
regions, may have confabulation of memories as a symptom. Patients
with Korsakoff's
syndrome characteristically confabulate by guessing an answer
or imagining an event and then mistaking their guess or imagination
for an actual memory. In some cases, confabulation is a function of
the brain's chemistry, a mapping of the activation of neurons to
brain activity. Confabulation can also occur as a result of damage
to the
Anterior communicating artery (ACoA), in the Circle of
Willis.
Some military
agents, such as BZ,
and deliriant drugs
such as those found in datura, noticeably scopolamine and atropine, may also cause
confabulation.
Psychological causes
Bartlett’s studies of remembering are arguably the first concerted attempt to look at memory illusions phenomena. In one experiment, he asked a group of students to read an Indian folktale and then recall that at various time intervals. As well as errors of omission, interestingly he found numerous errors of commission whereby participants had adapted or added to the story to make it more rational or consistent.In the 1970s a number of
researchers and theories started to emphasise what has been called
the constructivist view of memory, maintaining that reasoning
influences memory, in contrast to the prevailing view at the time
which was that memory is essential for proper reasoning . Theorists
such as Bransford and Franks noted the significance of personal
beliefs and desires, or more technically scripts and schemas, in
memory retrieval.
Constructivism has fallen out
of fashion recently due to the contention that it is either false
or un-testable . Memory is presumably not always reconstructive as
the considerable evidence of its veridical quality is testament.
Constructivism cannot simply be rephrased as the thesis that memory
is not always reproductive. As Reyna and Lloyd and fuzzy-trace
theory purport to both indicate when false memories are likely to
occur and give a more detailed explanatory account than either
reproductive or constructivist views.
Source monitoring refers to
the process by which we discriminate between internally and
externally derived memory sources as well as differentiations
within the external and external domains: differentiating between
two external sources or between internal sources, for instance
between what was said and what was thought. The theory postulates
that these decisions are made based on the characteristics of
memories compared to norms for memories for different sources, such
as the proportions of perceptual, contextual, affective and
semantic information featured in the encoding of the memory. Under
the source monitoring framework false memory is seen as a failure
to attribute information to the correct source. This happens when
there is insufficient information available to discriminate between
different sources (perhaps because of natural deterioration), or
when the wrong criterion is used to discriminate. For example a
doctor might mistakenly think a patient is on a specific medicine
because they were discussing the medicine with a colleague shortly
after seeing them.
Fuzzy trace theory is based on
the assumption that memory is not stored in unitary form. Instead
memories are encoded on a number of levels, from an exact
‘verbatim’ account, to ‘gist’ which represents the overall meaning
of the event. False memory effects are usually (but not always)
explained as a reliance on gist traces in a situation when verbatim
traces are needed. Because of this people may mistakenly recall a
memory that only goes along with a vague gist of what happened,
rather than the exact course of events. Essentially there are three
reasons why people might do this. There is thought to be a general
bias towards the use of gist traces in cognition due to their
resource efficiency and people will tend to use gist traces when it
is thought that they will be adequate to satisfy the demands of the
situation. Second, verbatim traces are said to be inherently less
stable than gist and decay quicker . Finally, during the course of
forgetting memories fragment and gist and verbatim can become
independent.
References
- Brain Fiction: Self-Deception and the Riddle of Confabulation
- Kalat, J. W., (2002). Biological Psychology (8th ed). Toronto, Ontario, Canada: Thomson Wadsworth.
- Stedman, T. L. (2000, January 15). Stedman's Medical Dictionary (27th ed.). Philadelphia, PA: Lippincott Williams & Wilkins.
confabulation in German: Konfabulation
confabulation in Croatian: Konfabulacija
confabulation in Dutch: Confabulatie
confabulation in Polish: Konfabulacja
confabulation in Russian: Конфабуляция
confabulation in Serbian: Конфабулација
confabulation in Swedish:
Konfabulation