THE NEUROPSYCHOLOGY OF FALSE MEMORY

This article reviews recent research into the neuropsychology of false memory as revealed by studies of individuals who have suffered lesion s to the frontal lobes. It is shown that frontal lobe damage gives ris e to confabulation along with a number of laboratory-based demonstrati ons of memory error including source amnesia and impaired metamemory. It is further shown that frontal lobe damage gives rise to a disorder known as pathological false recognition in which patients produce larg e numbers of false alarms during recognition testing. It is argued tha t the most plausible account of these various findings is that frontal lobe damage serves to prevent the creation of an appropriate and prop erly focused retrieval context which may arise because either retrieva l or encoding factors have been compromised.