Close up on Research

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"We've all had that uncanny feeling we know someone without being able to remember why or from where. Usually it turns out they were a school mate or the spouse of a distant colleague. But imagine having that feeling all the time - when you'd never met the person involved. Dr Jamie Ward, a research fellow in BIOLS, is investigating this phenomenon of false memory in a Human Frontiers funded project. He talks about what false memory is and how it might be tackled.

False memory is the opposite of amnesia, where people forget everything and nothing seems familiar. Instead, people with false memory recognise people they don't know, or objects they have never seen. People can have problems with false memory when the frontal lobes of their brain are damaged in some way, whereas amnesia arises when a different part of the brain, such as the Hippocampus, is damaged. Historically people have thought that damage to the frontal lobes of the brain wasn't very important, because afterwards people can still speak, and they still come across as intelligent. We've come to realise, however, that the frontal lobes of the brain play a crucial role, and that damage can lead to people remembering things they haven't done, or recognising people they don't know. It's actually a really new thing to examine memory as residing in the frontal lobes - previously it was thought that all memory processes took place in the Hippocampus.

Our research is mainly looking at people whose memory has been affected by a head injury. Damage to the frontal lobes is especially common in car accidents, when the head can often hit the dashboard. We work with three groups of people - those with frontal lobe injuries, those with other types of memory problems, and a control group. In our tests we might show people flashcards of famous faces, ask them to remember who they have seen and then test them with a new set of cards. The new set would include some of the first faces, but lots of new ones. Those with false memory problems will say they've already seen a lot of the faces that are new. False memory also causes problems with people mistaking intention for act - believing that because they thought about putting the kettle on, for example, that they actually did do it. We test people for this by asking them to imagine or carry out an act - for example picking a pen up. Afterwards we ask them whether they really did it or they just imagined doing it.

Crucially, none of these activities are completely 'abnormal'. I think everyone has at some time forgotten whether or not they really did something or only thought about doing it. Our work might be used to help rehabilitate people with head injuries - and it might also apply to the elderly, because an ageing brain shows deterioration of the frontal lobes. But we are also very interested in how 'normal' memory works. People who have had frontal lobe damage can teach us alot about the normal sorts of problems we all have with memory - like deja vu, for instance.

We work on the assumption that people believe they recognise something because their brain recognises a familiar sign and a decision making mechanism in the brain mistakes the sign for the real thing, leading the person with false memory to believe that they recognise something they don't. Indeed, this process could be described as being a little like deja vu. Unfortunately it is very hard to train the brain out of this process. Although our work might help us devise strategies to improve 'normal' memory, we've had limited success so far with improving the memory of the accident victims. However, we have discovered that problems arise in encoding the memory rather than retrieving it, which is quite a revelation. If people have strong associations with the faces they see, they might be more likely to know whether they definitely saw them or not. So sexy faces and nasty faces are more effective than just plain nice ones!"