Slashdot Mirror
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?"
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...
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.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
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
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.
biopowered.co.uk - catalytically cracking triglycerides for home automotive use since 2008. Just say no to big oil!
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
Is this where my sig goes?
This reminds me of an article that showed up sometime ago (for which I'm too lazy to search). Subjects who had went to Disney World as a child were asked to remember if they met a series of characters while there. The questioners mixed in a non-Disney character, like Bugs Bunny, and a significant number of people claimed to remember meeting the rascally rabbit.
Seriously, Don't take anything I say seriously.
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.
I think that was a Scientific American article on hypnosis and I thought it only happened when the subjects were hypnotized or in a state of deep concentration. Being in that state caused the memories to be recorded in the brain in an indistinguishable way from the way real memories are stored. It made me wonder about that whole day-care satan worship scandal a few years back.
"Contrarily the lookaside buffer might not be the panacea... "
I read TFA and I was thinking this really isn't an issue as it is nothing new. I've heard of the lady you talk of and her research from a shrink friend of mine at uni. I have serious memory issues so this friend and I have spend a lot of time talking over the topic and she often quotes studies where unknowing parties see an event (first hand in front of them) and then when asked about it later (as little as a minute) they are asked to reconstruct the event as accurately as possible. The results in almost all of the instances she has referenced is that very few (and I believe we are talking about a percentage i.e. non existent) people remember what really happened; The rest simply see what they want to see. (Note seeing what they want to see appears, in my opinion, to be based on personal, cultural, and spur of the moment bias.)
Now as I don't have a reliable memory I have to have a system of storing information in the real world and I often see issues of parity between the real world information that I know to be correct (why would I lie to myself?) and memories which can't possibly exist. Maybe VR will make more people aware of these memory short falls that they've never noticed before (or blamed on alcohol!) though I can't see it causing any more problems than that.
I ate your fish.
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.