School Seminar: Dr Felipe de Brigard

From false memories to counterfact thinking and back

False memories, or the psychological experience of remembering something that did not happen or that did not happen quite as you seem to remember it, is a common event. Also ubiquitous is our tendency to imagine alternative ways in which past personal events could have occurred but did not—a mental event often called episodic counterfactual thinking. In this talk I will suggest that both episodic counterfactual thinking and certain kind of false memories are profoundly related, which in turn suggests interesting ways in which memory and imagination interface