Essay On False Memory

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I had an opportunity to enter into the graduate school at my undergraduate university, but I give up such opportunity and choose to pursue Ph. D program in Cognitive Psychology at Purdue instead. It is because I would like to do research on human memory through the lens of evolutionary perspective and there is no professor at my undergraduate university whose research interests involve this. My research interest in human memory firstly came from when I wanted to enhance my efficiency of learning new knowledge. I made use of some mnemonics, such as imagery, self-reference and generation, to improve memory accuracy. And these mnemonics are really helpful to my study. Since not all things are easily related to self-reference and generation, imagery…show more content…
Through reading hundreds of papers and lots of literature about the studies of false memory, the final work with my research was a review paper titled “The cognitive and Neural Mechanism of the Production of False Memories”. In this paper, I primarily summarized recent behavioral and neuroimaging studies involving the production of false memories at three stage: encoding, consolidation, and retrieval. During the process of encoding, it may occur under the conditions of imagination inflation, associative or gist-based processing, and self-referential processing. During the process of consolidation, the interference of new incoming information and the effects of sleep on memory consolidation are important sources of the formation of false memory. And during the process of retrieval, it largely due to reconstructive failure. Apart from these, other factors, such as stress, social influence and emotion, are involved in producing false memory as well. More importantly, hippocampus and prefrontal cortex play critical role in the production of both true and false memories, which makes me realize that false memory may be a by-product during the constructive process of memory from evolutionary
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