Szőllősi Ágnes, Bencze Dorottya, Zsebi Soma, Juhász Eszter, Racsmány Mihály
Institute of Psychology, University of Szeged, Szeged, Hungary.
Cognitive Medicine Research Group, Competence Centre for Neurocybernetics of the Life Sciences Cluster of the Centre of Excellence for Interdisciplinary Research, Development and Innovation of the University of Szeged, University of Szeged, Szeged, Hungary.
Sci Rep. 2025 Mar 11;15(1):8369. doi: 10.1038/s41598-024-82292-z.
In addition to episodic memory loss there is an increase in false remembering in ageing especially when the discrimination between studied and new items is difficult in a recognition memory task. The aim of this study was to identify the underlying psychological mechanisms of this behavior, specifically, the possible role of false recollection. We used the Mnemonic Similarity Task, a widely used task in neuroscience research developed to assess the behavioral manifestation of hippocampal computations, pattern separation and pattern completion. First, older and young adults (n = 39 and 44, respectively) were presented with images of everyday objects. Then, on a surprise recognition test, they saw old (studied) and new (non-studied) items as well as visually similar lures of the images seen in the study phase. Instead of using the original Old/New test format, we asked participants to make confidence judgments. Our response frequency and ROC (receiver operating characteristics) analyses revealed overconfidence in false memories for the lures in the group of older adults suggesting false recollection. Such overconfidence was not observed for the completely new stimuli. Our results imply that older adults tend not to acknowledge some memory problems as a consequence of very high confidence in false memories.
除了情景记忆丧失外，衰老过程中错误记忆也会增加，尤其是在识别记忆任务中难以区分已学项目和新项目时。本研究的目的是确定这种行为背后的心理机制，特别是错误回忆可能发挥的作用。我们使用了记忆相似性任务，这是神经科学研究中广泛使用的一项任务，旨在评估海马体计算、模式分离和模式完成的行为表现。首先，向老年人和年轻人（分别为n = 39和44）展示日常物品的图像。然后，在一次突击识别测试中，他们看到了旧的（已学过的）和新的（未学过的）物品，以及在研究阶段看到的图像的视觉上相似的诱饵。我们没有使用原始的旧/新测试格式，而是要求参与者做出置信度判断。我们的反应频率和ROC（接收器操作特征）分析显示，老年人组对诱饵的错误记忆存在过度自信，这表明存在错误回忆。对于全新的刺激，没有观察到这种过度自信。我们的结果表明，由于对错误记忆有非常高的置信度，老年人往往不承认一些记忆问题。
