General overview
Memories are not always reliable representations of our past. False memories can be defined as remembering events that never happened or remembering them quite differently from the way they happened (Roediger & McDermott, 1995). This phenomenon which everyone can experience, can occur years, days, hours and even seconds after the real-life event (Atkins & Reuter-Lorenz, 2008).
Our objective is to better understand the mechanisms underlying false memories by examining how they change across the lifespan. Recently, we put forward a new theoretical account of the emergence of false memories (Abadie & Camos, 2019). Our model integrates the fuzzy-trace theory (FTT, Reyna & Brainerd, 1995; Reyna, Lloyd, & Brainerd, 2003) conception of long-term memory with the time-based resource-sharing (TBRS, Barrouillet, Bernardin, & Camos, 2004; Barrouillet & Camos, 2015) functional description of working memory. It predicts that working memory maintenance plays a crucial role in the occurrence of false memories.
Drawing on our theoretical account, we conduct lifespan studies investigating the role of working memory maintenance in false memories. Our first aim is to examine the relation between the development of working memory maintenance mechanisms, namely articulatory rehearsal and attentional refreshing, and the formation of false memories during childhood. Articulatory rehearsal is conceived as a mechanism that allows maintenance of verbal information through subvocal repetition (Baddeley, 1986) while attentional refreshing uses attention to reactivates memory traces of verbal, visual and visuo-spatial information in working memory (Camos et al., 2018). Our second aim is to examine the relation between impairments in working memory maintenance and specific information retrieval associated with false memories, observed in normal aging.
For further detailed information on the childhood and adulthood projects, please refer respectively to the “Children project” and “Young and older adults projects” subsections under the “Projects” tab.