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Virtual Reality Creates False Memories
moon_monkey writes "There's an interesting post on NewScientistTech's blog about virtual reality inducing false memories during a recent experiment (pdf). Ann Schlosser at the University of Washington tested students' ability to learn how to use a real digital camera by operating a virtual one. Although those students who used the virtual camera found it easier to remember how the camera worked, they also experienced more 'false memories'. As the post points out, could this be a serious problem for VR going forward?"
So I didn't really lose my virginity? it was just VR? Damn
In a world of acronyms, the words are the real victims.
Just design it the way they think it should work. Problem solved.
Regardless of whether this happened in reality or a virtual reality it still happend so how are the memories false? Or is this just a matter of distinguishing between real and virtual worlds if so then that makes perfect sense because dreams imo are our own virtual reality and I've had some dreams that I couldn't distinguish between reality when I woke up.
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--A wise old fart named SC0RN
Doesnt that mean if they make it real virtual reality people will gain true memories? I could see some use with this for educational purposes...
I often confuse my sex life with Leisure Suit Larry's
That's the whole point of virtual reality: be realistic enough to be indistinguishable from reality. The fact that it results in more false memories already is just evidence that we're finally catching up with the goals set for virtual reality decades ago.
Actually, this has appeared in sci fi books for years, and of course did they forget flight simulators, driving simulators, and the umpteen simulators that simulate reality to learn a task? Those have been creating Virtual memories that translate into skills.
Did these guys miss the Matrix?
Even in the movie Total Recall this was beaten to death. And in Do Androids Dream of Elctric Sheep.
So nothing really new here to see, an idea that is more than 30 years old?
Anyway, Arnold beat these researchers to it.
Puto
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
Before anyone thinks this might be an indication that memories can be "implanted", I think this may be jumping to conclusions just a tad.
The blog post and the preprint make reference to the notion that people who experienced a "virtual" digital camera were more capable with the real thing...but also "remembered" things about it that weren't true, based on questions asked.
I fail to see how this is "inducing" false memories. Could this possibly be a function of the fact that the simulation isn't 100% accurate, and that "false" "memories" about the item (determined by the number of specific or leading questions that are incorrectly answered) would be reduced as the simulation gets more and more close to, well, reality?
Besides, I think we could do a study and prove that plenty of people have "false memories" with regard to the actual capabilities of real devices...
"The result? Those who used the virtual camera were better at recalling what it could do. But, they also had significantly more false memories about its abilities."
Slashdot is a VR experiment?
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Or, perhaps the simplest answer...your students are dumb, they couldn't remember all of the instructions 100% accurately and screwed them up. Upon questioning their stupidity they responded "the computer...it...it gave me false memories! TETSUOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!"
Something like that.
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I'm not a psychologist but, if I remember correctly from my psych classes, memories is a lie. The things we remember now are not the actual events from the past. What we remember is basically pieces of the truth that has gaps filled in by our mind. I don't really see the difference from this and normal memory.
Freedom is a state of mind. A mind is a state of being. Stay the fuck out of my mind and my being. - Corporate Avenger
I've had dreams - and surprisingly detailed ones - where I was writing code, playing games, or interacting with the computer in some way. I think the human brain is hardwired to adjust to the surrounding environment and begin thinking within that paradigm ... so if you spend the majority of your time in some kind of virtual domain, that's where your thoughts and memories will be formed.
On significant things, like jumping off a ledge and flying; well - we might be able to distinguish between RL and VR in those circumstances.
In bad-analogy-land, if I was to swap a few keys on your keyboard you might find it confusing for a bit, but if I were to paint it green, you'd probably notice (unless it was already green of course).
Of course, where you draw the line between subtle and significant is a whole other argument. But I think the human brain does that already to some extent; remembering important things and discarding irrelevant things.
Serious problem? Doubtful.
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Or, wait, maybe it's not. I guess can't rightly recall now.
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This isn't virtual reality at all. It is research of impact of animated/interactive ad and one static ad on a web site. Of course, the animated ad/product presentation can give you extra information which you will remember. If the ad is designed to show/sell more than there really is, you get false memories since you are not interacting with the real thing, only its idealized avatar (we are speaking about marketing, remember - you will not present the bad things ...). Not exactly sky shattering research here ...
Are false memories a problem? Probably.
Is this a serious problem for VR? I doubt it but there's not enough data to tell.
Does it matter if it's going forward, backward, left, right, up or down? I don't see how this could be relevant.
I really hate that phrase.
"Vuja De"
I remember when, I remember, I remember when I lost my mind, There was something so pleasant about that place...
Locksmith
"Memory" is a completely inadequate word to cover all the things we use it for, as if our minds were cameras that recorded our experiences on tape. There are sense memories; emotional memories; recognition memories; navigation memories; skill memories; procedure memories; narrative memories; association memories, and probably dozens more. Memory is not just recall, it has a substantial element of re-creation and imagination.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I mean people already have trouble with memories that actually happened or not ALREADY, without virtual reality. Anything that can create a memory or distort it can make our perception of past-events unique and not always what they really seem to be.
In fact, the study leads me to believe that experiences in reality will produce almost as many false memories as the 'object interactive' VR expereinces
"Indeed, scholars argue that although learning via physical experience with a product is vivid, it can create an illusory sense of competence (Hoch and Deighton 1989)"Here, the 'object interactive' VR experiences create more vivid memories than the 'picture site'.
"Likewise, Bartlett (1932) argued that reconstructive memory is more likely to occur with rich than simplified materials because in the former case, individuals are more likely to "fill in" the missing pieces of their memories"What's more vivid than real experiences? Arguably, because people are less familiar with the VR environment, they might be more prone to produce memories so that their minds can make sense of what occurred.
In the end, I believe false memories occur because people have models (conciously or subconciously) of how the world works in their heads. When the experience is richer, the model must be more complex. When the model is more complex, there are more things to not understand/remember. When there are more things to no understand/remember, there are more things to make up to make sense of it all
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I blame that skinny blonde girl from "Footloose."
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FTA:The result? Those who used the virtual camera were better at recalling what it could do. But, they also had significantly more false memories about its abilities.
Newflash: VR can mislead people and give them a false sense of confidence about what they think they know.
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
that I really didn't kill that 30th level troll and I'm not really a half-elf archer with a pet dragon?
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
It would actually be more interesting if they was no memory retention from virtual experience. Or is the news here that the virtual world isn't real? Thanks, I was beginning to wonder.
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Proof by very large bribes. QED.
Q: What is the number-one phrase most likely to make you look like an asshole in the future?
A: "It wasn't tested, but I assume..." followed by pretty much anything.
This is an interesting development, I think it shows a certain level of maturity has finally be gained within the virtual (technology) world. Up until recently (last 5'ish years), the relationship has been mostly one way: The Desktop Metaphor is one of the prime examples of real-world transfer into a virtual one. The digital camera experiment is a good example of a virtual tool being immersive to the point where, in using a real camera, virtual hooks are now present.
Other good examples of VR transferance: Military Simulators (VBS1/2, et al.), Wii Sports and I am sure there are many others.
Proof by very large bribes. QED.
Now you do have people who get into trouble by mixing reality and fantasy. Take the 4 year old who scared aware theives by surprising them in his red Power Ranger suit.
The phenomena of mixing fantasy and reality is not a problem in virtual reality. It is an error in data processing. Which bits get the reality flag attached?
It actually sounds like incomplete education. People also tend to make things up when they have a lack of data on something, and then convince themselves that 'that's the way it is'. This is also not false memory.
Maybe these shrinks should have their heads examined.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
It is usually just a glitch in the matrix.
False memories are a consequence of insufficient feedback to the mind. Anyone who ever went into an isolation tank (think Altered States, but without the apemen leaving the tank) will tell you. The mind compensates for excluded experience when it's used to experience being included by creating that experience, often indistinguishable from "real" experience of real reality.
Feedback is the return loop of interactivity, after the "sensitive" send loop.. VR is usually (some would say theoretically certainly, as in lesser degrees of infinitude) less interactive than reality. So the mind compensates. Perhaps there is a threshold of interactivity or just feedback (in which we can get a measure of sensitivity) below which the mind starts compensating. Or perhaps it's always a complement, as we remember a continuum of sense images, not the digital representations we actually experienced. From "perfect" VR presentation with no "help" from our minds or in our memories, or down to total hallucinations when the VR is really shoddy, or just perfectly minimalist, like pulling a rorschach trigger.
For an extreme case of these memory tricks, try nemory: What you don't remember, that never happened.
--
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No. It is going to create a problem for the concept of memories, which have always been volatile and unreliable, but for some reason are perceived as accurate fact-recall centers in our brain. Something has to force people to adjust how they think of "memories," and this suggests it might be VR.
Research into "flash-bulb" memories (e.g. "I can remember exactly where I was when I heard about the Challenger") has shown that people's confidence in their memory for small details is barely correlated with the amount of detail they actually recall correctly. Elizabeth Loftus's research into eyewitness accounts and false memories have already shown that it is possible to plant even completely false memories with a reasonable success rate, much less small differences in an otherwise real memory like whether a street sign in a video was a stop or a yield, or what specific features a digital camera has.
from the blog: "It wasn't tested, but I assume real experiences don't generate false memories to the same degree."
Actually, I would assume the opposite: allowing people to play with a real camera briefly would have the same effect.
This is nothing new. They found a few years ago that if a person repeatedly told a story in the first person as if they had done something, after a few years many people would actually believe they had done it. Of course this only works for things that dont contradict other memories and make you querstion it.
They've been dealing with this stuff (implants on the track) for decades ..
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Isn't that what's called "imagination"?
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
History (dull) is the recitation of factoids that (generally) no one can dispute. However, the factoids have no meaning, and therefore little truth alone.
History (narrative) draws conclusions from the factoids, and creates historical principles. Subject to the caveat that these are only as good as the person drawing the conclusions, these historical principles have much truth, but become open to interpretation.
Contemporary fiction deliberately masks most/all factoids to sculpt a specific scenario necessary to demonstrate an overall truth the writer has noticed.
Scifi creates a subset of specific scenarios by adding new technology and social conventions to create a wider range of scenarios to use as backdrops. The best Scifi demonstrates truths which are not possible in any other genre.
Fantasy is generally an anti-technology subset cross between fictional history and mythology. It too attempts to create additional backdrop scenarios.
VR creates specific events in an alternate space that may only exist for a single specific user. If an external documentation method were used, they might be as 'factual' as any other event, but there may not be any other person able to verify these events.
We'd need a new word to describe the results of what was termed elsewhere 'faulty data processing'.
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Does it really matter whether said "false memories" come from some virtual experience or not? Those memories are a part of the person's global collection of memories and as such probably carry as much weight as any other memories in shaping that person. The emotions attached to memories generated by virtual experiences are just as real as any other emotions. So does it really matter? The line between virtual experiences and physical experiences is blurring at an accelerating pace and soon even "ordinary" people's lives are going be taking place in virtual spaces at least part of the time whether via VR based training programs or some future VR banking services.
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
If you asked me, I would have rather phrased it "VR going nowhere"
In a similar vein, people have beliefs that are just as "false". And there you have the basis for most of humanities problems.
Homo Sapiens brains just don't work right, depending on my definition of right, and you cannot disabuse me of that notion.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
i've had several dreams in locations that only exist in certain games, mainly FPS.
I'd better get my ass to Mars.
The days of the digital watch are numbered.
I know I've remembered things I thought were real, couldn't place them, and then realized I had dreamed about it. I'm not sure what this "means for dreams going forward". In other words, I wouldn't worry about this VR thing too much. At least in a VR you aren't in an altered mental state like you are when dreaming. I would think that VR memories would be easier to sort out than dream memories, although the VR memories would be more frequent since most dreams are forgotten.
Yes, one reason I try to avoid realistic dreams is that in retrospect it can be confusing trying to work out whether something happened in the real world or the dream world.
One time I asked someone if she'd finished with a cassette I'd loaned her. Turned out I hadn't loaned her anything, I'd just had a dream where I had... Sure enough, I checked the rack and the tape was there.
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You might say that POW brainwashing and cult conversions have some prior art; but the examples you gave are mostly just bad memories that people have too much confidence in, rather than false memories implanted by design.
Damn, that wet dream I had the other night was a false memory but it SURE was good!
Or the belief that Linux is secure by design...
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Rule #2 of Slashclub:
Don't try to talk about Slashclub with your wife.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
But that's not a new problem. It's long been known that eyewitness testimony is highly unreliable, owing to the brains ability to "fill in" details of events with extra information. The classic example is of course the intro Psych course where an unknown assailant kills someone before the whole class, then runs from the room. Ask everyone in the room to describe the assailant and what occurred and you're liable to get as many different stories as there are people. The brain has a way of smoothing over memories and adding in extra bits of information it correlates with experiences to help aid in recall, but this of course leads to degradation of the memory's "truth." THis result should really not come as much of a shock.
This could also explain why multiple user-modified databases, such as Wikipedia, seem to become increasingly less accurate with their information over time. The more garbage input these databases get from users who honestly believe their entries to be entirely true, the less reliable these databases become. Even with parsing out the "errant" data using a system of averages from all the other users' entries, such database are only as accurate as the users who contributed into it.
Given the above, it's probably much safer to simply collect the data you need from several sources (each with a limited number of contributors) and then develop your own collection of data tthat is relevant specifically to your own needs.
If not anything else, it just shows you exactly how detrimental an effect overly-generalized data collection and distribution can have over an entire civilization. We're getting way to lazy with our minds and are beginning to simply accept everything we see and hear from others as being fact. We've become so dependent on our precious easy-access databases that we might one day find ourselves unable to operate in a time of crisis, where every connection to such databases is completely severed.
The solution may not be in technology, but in psychology instead. If we don't start encouraging our children pick up a book and read for the sake of actually reading a book (and I mean "book" as in paper... not an e-book), we could be in for some serious trouble over the next 50 years.
8==8 Bones 8==8
So what they're trying to tell me is they used VR to train people... IE make memories on the use of a certain type of camera... and the adverse effect is false memories. Any use of the camera that they remember before they use a real one aren't real. False memories happen all the time. If you've ever been in an argument of any kind with somebody about past events, it's quite obvious. Each person remembers the event completely differently and it's even possible to cause someone to conjure false memories with nothing more than a couple words used in the right way. I haven't been able to find the articles online but if interested look up Elizabeth F. Loftus. She's done a lot of research on the topic.
This sounds amusingly similar to wavelet encoding - is this way of handling memory, and thus also the false memories, perhaps an artefact from an effective means of packing and hashing data for fast retrieval?
When Chuck Norris kills you in VR, you die in real life, & you remember being killed by him in your next life.
If you lend someone $20 and never see that person again, it was probably worth it.
Dupe.
If this is Virtual then I'm in The Matrix.
If it's real, I may still be in The Matrix.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Religion Much?
Adult entertainment is often a driving force in new technology. I don't understand why this is newsworthy or why it's a problem.
>>As the post points out, could this be a serious problem for VR going forward?
I'd love some false memories, if I could control what I'm "remembering." While they're at it, could they erase some real memories?
That's all fine and good, but now my retarded gardener has developed some kind of strange telekinetic powers - he's going all Dark Phoenix on us!
---GEC
I'm but the humble pupil, seeking to snatch the scratchbuilt pebble from the master's fully articulated hand
fragging and gibbing all day...those were the days.
I've only read a few comments down but already I'm hugely reminded of the "ghost-hacked" people in the movie "Ghost In The Shell"..
From the Wikipedia page: "It turns out that the man has been ghost hacked himself and has no idea of his identity. He thinks he is a high-ranking member of a criminal organization, but is in fact a low-level thug, another puppet being controlled by the Puppet Master. The interrogation of the garbageman reveals that he too has had a simulated experience, or a false memory implanted into his brain. It turns out that he does not really have a family at all."
Prior to this summer, I had never been to Santa Monica California. I did however play Grand Theft Auto San Andreas where the landscape was modeled after southern California. When I got to Santa Monica Beach I had a chilling deja vu experience that I had been there before. At the water's edge I wanted to get up on to Santa Monica Pier but from a distance it looked like one had to walk across a bridge. Then I "remembered" there was a set of stairs going up from the beach. I walked up to the pier from the beach and sure enough, there were the stairs just like I remembered from the game. I couldn't stop thinking about that all day.
Speak truth to power.
I've done that experiment in my college psychology course. The random person enters the room does something crazy and then walks out. Then the group is asked to describe the person. Yes it was hard for a big group of people to accurately describe a person. I told a relative who works in the Justice system about this, and his response was "What the hell are they teaching you there?"
Now my relative is very intelligent and college educated. What threw him for a loop was the fact the experiment was carried out very differently from the way things happen in real life, and that the psychology academia feel the need to impress undergrads with a parlor trick that undermines the undergrads' confidence in the Justice system. If you based your opinion of the Justice system solely upon this experiment you would think that the prisons are FULL of people that didn't do the crime.
What happens in real life is the investigators question witnesses separately (and yes sometimes people have trouble describing features of people with a different ethnicity and sometimes people are too focused on the gun in their face to get a good look at the perpetrator's face). Then the investigators essentially haul in a bunch of people over the next hour or days or weeks and they do a line-up. Just like in the movies. This means that the investigators can have random people in the mix with a real suspect. If the eye-witness picks out a random person then they might be so good of a witness. But if they pick out the suspect then they probably did get a good look. If you still have doubts about the ability of a witness to identify someone then think of the last time you watched a movie and recognize a no-name actor from a different movie that you saw months before.
And remember if you still have doubts about the justice system remember: right to remain silent, adversarial lawyers, cross-examination, discovery of evidence, inadmissible evidence, beyond a reasonable doubt, unanimity of a jury of 12 peers, and appeals, appeals, and more appeals.
I think it gave Keanu Reeves and Carrie Ann Moss the impression they could act. That's some pretty dangerous technology: no one has the right to play God like that.
How many said that they didn't remember there being a light?
I don't think living through an event generates _any_ false memories. It doesn't matter if it's real or virtual. False memories are generated by asking directed questions about an event afterwards. What may be said about this study, is that a virtual reality created memory is more susceptible to false-memory corruption during questioning. Why the author felt the need to jump straight from susceptibility to generating false memories I don't know.
Are people more likely to make stuff up when simply asked to recall a virtual reality event?
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This strikes me as being true for all mediated reality, including television, film, internet, etc. (Electronic) Media has been used to manipulate outlooks and impressions about the world around us since its inception. Often, those outlooks don't mesh with reality.
The virtual reality was obviously just like reading a manual (compared to actual use). So a person will still go into actual practice with a few notions that are going to be incorrect. The question being whether VR narrowed the training time.