New research suggests the human tendency to create false memories could be linked to our ability to learn rules.
The phenomenon of misremembering details or making up entire memories is often seen in crime-witness accounts, but researchers believe it could be a symptom of a survival method in which our brains learn trends and process objects into categories, the University of Queen Mary London reported.
The new research suggests false memories may come about in a similar way as when the brain is tricked by optical illusions.
"Our memory is often surprisingly inaccurate, even though we typically feel that we can recall events as they really occurred. For example, witnesses of a nocturnal street robbery might describe the perpetrator as a hooded teenager, when it later turns out that the assailant was middle-aged and balding," said Professor Lars Chittka, from the School of Biological and Chemical Sciences, at QMUL and co-author of the paper.
To make their findings the researchers performed two tests: one that measured people's ability to identify associations within word groups and another that tried to create false memories through words appearing on a list. The results showed participants who were better at grouping words into categories were also more likely to create false memories.
"On the surface creating false memories would seem to be bad for our survival, but historical research suggests that false memories are often those that fall in with previously learned rules and cultural norms which can be useful," Chittka said.
"Our research suggests that individuals who are particularly good at learning rules and classifying objects by common properties are also particularly prone to false memory illusions. So, like optical illusions, it might be that false memories are a by-product of the clever ways our brains monitor the world around us," he concluded.
The findings were published in a recent edition of the journal F1000Research.
