False memories: What the hell are they for?

Recollecting the past is often accompanied by a sense of veracity—a subjective feeling that we are reencountering fragments of an episode as it occurred. Yet years of research suggest that we can be surprisingly inaccurate in what we recall. People can make relatively minor memory errors such as misremembering attributes of past selves and misremembering details of shocking public events. But sometimes these errors are more extreme, such as experiencing illusory recollections of entire childhood events that did not really happen. Why would the memory system fail us, sometimes very dramatically? We examine various false memory phenomena by first considering them to be a by‐product of a powerful and flexible memory system. We then explore the idea that a system that is capable of mentally revising the past serves a predictive function for the future. Finally, we consider the possibility that false memories meet self‐image and social needs. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.