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

So...

[otacon]

So I didn't really lose my virginity? it was just VR? Damn

Re:So...

[UnknowingFool]

Oh you did, but it wasn't with Heidi Klum. It was with something less attractive. I've seen the YouTube, and all I can say that you're a sick puppy. :P

Re:So...

[Walt Dismal]

This is all baloney. Although ever since I got back from my Mars vacation I've felt a little strange, but my wife tells me it should pass soon.

Re:So...

[Gilmoure]

So...I'm not married to a 5'11" 38F-28-36 librarian/belly-dancer/Unix sys-admin with long dark hair and glasses who digs Conan movies?

I'm confused

[Chineseyes]

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.

Re:I'm confused

[Anonymous Coward]

so how are the memories false?

The memories are false because things did not really happen as the test subjects remembered.

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.

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:I'm confused

[cloricus]

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.

Re:I'm confused

[somersault]

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.

Wow.. higher education sounds a lot more practical based over in the USA! Do you tend to use vagrants as the 'someone', or just international scholarship students who get promised that the money will go to their families?

Re:I'm confused

[OldeTimeGeek]

Ever hear of "Publish or Perish"?

Re:I'm confused

[AI0867]

In another test, people were given some time to study a picture, it was a crossroads with stop signs. When asked what the colour of the traffic light was, 50% of the people said red, 25% said yellow and 25% said green. All insisted the traffic light was really there.

In another study, someone showed it was ridiculously easy to alter test subject's childhood memories to include things that could never have happened.

Human memory is a read-write filesystem, and recalling a memory overwrites it, recalling it with suggestions offered by the outside world can easily alter them.

--
Disclaimer: If this post doesn't make any sense, it's because I'm really, REALLY tired...

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).

EGA memory

[Anonymous Coward]

I often confuse my sex life with Leisure Suit Larry's

"False memories"?

[daveschroeder]

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...

Re:"False memories"?

[QuantumG]

Well, I don't actually know what the questions were, because the paper is very poorly written, but I can imagine it was something like:

        Did you find the viewfinder easy to use? Yes. No. N/A.

The person doing the survey may answer yes or no, ignoring the N/A option, even though there was no viewfinder on the virtual camera. Aha! They must have a false memory of the camera because they expected to see a viewfinder! Wow, how interesting. Or, ya know, they just didn't notice the N/A option because all of the previous questions were straight Yes/No answers.

Today, a young man....

[Pojut]

Today, a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration... that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. There's no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we're the imagination of ourselves. Here's Tom with the weather.

Re:Today, a young man....

[CaffeineAddict2001]

Oh, you know what he's doing now? He's going for the righteous indignation dollar. That's a big dollar. Lot of people are feeling that indignation, we've done research. Huge market. He's doing a good thing.

Gut reaction

[Lord_Dweomer]

My gut reaction is to respond to this with a solid NO. If we experience something "virtually" we're still experiencing it. It is a fundamentally different experience from actually operating the camera. Yes, much of the knowledge gained from actually using the device is directly applicable when you are actually holding it, but there is something to be said for the physical hands-on experience.

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.

Just like real memories...

[aliendisaster]

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.

Doubtful

[tttonyyy]

As the post points out, could this be a serious problem for VR going forward?"

It might only be a problem when applied to subtle differences between VR and real life, like changing the functionality of camera between VR/RL slightly.

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.

This will help VR for advertisement

[paulpach]

As the post points out, could this be a serious problem for VR going forward?

Quite the opposite. This means that you can make an audience believe the camera is more than it really is without actually lying. This is like striking gold for advertisers. If this proves to be true, it is an incentive for advertisers to invest into VR technology.

Dupe!

[muellerr1]

Or, wait, maybe it's not. I guess can't rightly recall now.

I expect there is no one phenomenon of memory

[hey!]

"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.

Re:I Believe There is a Name for That Condition:

[cyclomedia]

Surely "Deja VR" ...

i'll get my coat

Nothing to do with VR

[NereusRen]

Let's get something straight: This was NOT a test of VR versus reality. One group interacted with a camera in VR, and the other group read about it with some pictures. (I don't have a problem with the study, but rather with bloggers who misinterpret it.)

As the post points out, could this be a serious problem for VR going forward?

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.

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: Scifi Books, History, Truth, VR, and Fantasy

[TaoPhoenix]

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'.