The cognitive neuroscience of memory errors

Rachel Joy Eaton

This thesis reports three studies that examined the neural activity associated with different types of memory errors. Study 1 investigated the neural origins of memory errors that occur when only the general, nonspecific features (but not the specific details) of an item are encoded. Results indicated that specific recognition (i.e., accurate memory for specific details) was accompanied by encoding-related increases in right fusiform activity, whereas nonspecific recognition (i.e., memory errors including false recognition and partial recognition) was associated with encoding-related increases in left fusiform activity coupled with relatively little right fusiform activity. These findings complement previous reports of a laterality effect in the fusiform cortex during repetition priming, and extend those results to the domain of episodic encoding. Study 2 compared the neural...