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The Journal of Neuroscience, November 7, 2007, 27(45):12190-12197; doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3408-07.2007

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Behavioral/Systems/Cognitive
Trusting Our Memories: Dissociating the Neural Correlates of Confidence in Veridical versus Illusory Memories

Hongkeun Kim¹ and Roberto Cabeza²

¹Department of Rehabilitation Psychology, Daegu University, Daegu 705-714, South Korea, and ²Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina 27708-0999

Correspondence should be addressed to Hongkeun Kim, Department of Rehabilitation Psychology, Daegu University, 2288 Daemyung-dong, Nam-gu, Daegu 705-714, South Korea. Email: hongkn1{at}gmail.com

Although memory confidence and accuracy tend to be positively correlated, people sometimes remember with high confidence events that never happened. How can confidence correlate with accuracy but apply also to illusory memories? One possible explanation is that high confidence in veridical versus illusory memories depends on different neural mechanisms. The present study investigated this possibility using functional magnetic resonance imaging and a modified version of the Deese-Roediger-McDermott false-memory paradigm. Participants read short lists of categorized words, and brain activity was measured while they performed a recognition test with confidence rating. The study yielded three main findings. First, compared with low-confidence responses, high-confidence responses were associated with medial temporal lobe (MTL) activity in the case of true recognition but with frontoparietal activity in the case of false recognition. Second, these regions showed significant confidence-by-veridicality interactions. Finally, only MTL regions showed greater activity for high-confidence true recognition than for high-confidence false recognition, and only frontoparietal regions showed greater activity for high-confidence false recognition than for high-confidence true recognition. These findings indicate that confidence in true recognition is mediated primarily by a recollection-related MTL mechanism, whereas confidence in false recognition reflects mainly a familiarity-related frontoparietal mechanism. This account is consistent with the fuzzy trace theory of false recognition. Correlation analyses revealed that MTL and frontoparietal regions play complementary roles during episodic retrieval. In sum, the present study shows that when one focuses exclusively on high-confidence responses, the neural correlates of true and false memory are clearly different.

Key words: fMRI; false memory; prefrontal cortex; medial temporal lobe; human memory; memory confidence

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Received Feb. 27, 2007; revised Sept. 4, 2007; accepted Sept. 5, 2007.

Correspondence should be addressed to Hongkeun Kim, Department of Rehabilitation Psychology, Daegu University, 2288 Daemyung-dong, Nam-gu, Daegu 705-714, South Korea. Email: hongkn1{at}gmail.com

This article has been cited by other articles:

				N. Abe, J. Okuda, M. Suzuki, H. Sasaki, T. Matsuda, E. Mori, M. Tsukada, and T. Fujii Neural Correlates of True Memory, False Memory, and Deception Cereb Cortex, March 27, 2008; (2008) bhn037v1. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]

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