True and false memories, parietal cortex, and confidence judgments

Recent studies have asked whether activity in the medial temporal lobe (MTL) and the neocortex can distinguish true memory from false memory. A frequent complication has been that the confidence associated with correct memory judgments (true memory) is typically higher than the confidence associated with incorrect memory judgments (false memory). Accordingly, it has often been difficult to know whether a finding is related to memory confidence or memory accuracy. In the current study, participants made recognition memory judgments with confidence ratings in response to previously studied scenes and novel scenes. The left hippocampus and 16 other brain regions distinguished true and false memories when confidence ratings were different for the two conditions. Only three regions (all in the parietal cortex) distinguished true and false memories when confidence ratings were equated. These findings illustrate the utility of taking confidence ratings into account when identifying brain regions associated with true and false memories. Neural correlates of true and false memories are most easily interpreted when confidence ratings are similar for the two kinds of memories.

• Publication year

  2015

• Venue

  Learning & memory (Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y.)

• Publication date

  2015-11-01

• Fields of study

  Medicine, Psychology

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1101/lm.038349.115PMID 26472645PMCID 4749729
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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