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?"

Comments

Quaid, get your ass to MARS!

[puto]

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

Re:I'm confused

[kalirion]

I think the article means that the people working with VR cameras remembered doing more things in VR than they actually did.

Re:I'm confused

[Billosaur]

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.

Re:Duh

[DragonWriter]

Except this isn't about remembering things that actually happened in VR as "real", its about remembering things that didn't happen at all simply because they were suggested in questioning.

Re:I'm confused

[Saib0t]

If you have the time and/or inclination, read up on the research of Dr. Elizabeth Loftus. She (and others) have demonstrated that it is trivial to create false memories in people. More importantly, once a false memory has been created, it is otherwise indistinguishable from a real one. That means a person cannot rid themselves of a false memory any more than they can rid themselves of a real memory. The implications of this are significant.

Loftus, M.K. Johnson, Marsh, Landau, Hicks, McRae. These guys have worked quite some on false memories. But parent is right, E. Loftus and M.K. Johnson are really interesting to read on these topic. I wouldn't go as far as saying that creating false memories in people is trivial, but some experiments reach upwards of 20% of success in creating false memories in normal people. Problem is, though, that these experiment create extremely simple false memories. It is quite possible, though, to make the difference between a real and false memory. False memories tend to exhibit much less phenomenological characteristics. For instance you can remember very well the sound of a sentence, but not the emotional state you were in when you heard it or in whose company you were at the time or what you thought of the sentence at that time. There has been some work done recently on what these differences. (see Brédart, Defeldre on the topic).

Re:I'm confused

[Anonymous Coward]

Back in the late 1980s, a TV show -- I think it was Totally Hidden Video -- was doing "man on the street" interviews with people in front of some state's capitol.

They asked the pedestrians something like "Are you aware that Senator so-and-so is in there right now being questioned on corruption/fraud charges, etc."

Of course, Senator so-and-so was fictional, but a lot of people agreed what a scumbag he was.

While this was more of a display of ignorance than fasle memories, one woman said, "I feel awful because I voted for him."