Weird Science: Why your first memory might be fake

One of the largest surveys of people's earliest recollections has found that nearly 40 per cent of people had a "first memory" which was actually fictional. Photo / 123RF

Whether it's a glimpse of a pool, a pet, or a parent, most of us have a first memory stored away in our brain.

But when it comes to more vivid recollections of our earliest months, there's a good chance we're actually replaying a self-made illusion.

A just-published UK study that surveyed around 6600 people found more than a third claimed to have memories from age 2 or younger.

Nearly 900 - and most of these people were middle-aged and older adults - were convinced their first recollection stretched back past one year of age.

The researchers set out to scrutinise these apparent memories by asking the study participants to detail their first memory along with their age at the time.

They were told that their memories had to be ones that they were certain they remembered, and not those based on an old picture or family story.

With the descriptions they got back, the researchers investigated their content, language and nature, and then evaluated the likely reasons why people claimed to have memories from an age science tells us is impossible.

As many of these memories dated before the age of two and younger, the researchers suggest that these fictional memories were based on remembered fragments of early experience, or some insights they'd later gleaned from photographs.

As a result, what the person remembering has in mind when recalling these early memories is a mental representation consisting of remembered fragments of early experience and some facts or knowledge about their own childhood, instead of actual memories.

Over time, such mental representations come to be recollectively experienced when they come to mind and so for the individual they quite simply are "memories" with content strongly tied to a particular time.

In particular, fictional very early memories were seen to be more common in middle-aged and older adults - and about four in 10 of this group had fictional memories for infancy.

"Crucially, the person remembering them doesn't know this is fictional," said Professor Martin Conway, of the University of London.

"In fact when people are told that their memories are false they often don't believe it.

"This partly due to the fact that the systems that allow us to remember things are very complex, and it's not until we're 5 or 6 that we form adult-like memories due to the way that the brain develops and due to our maturing understanding of the world."

Even rats stick with bad decisions

The reason we're afraid to cut our losses and leave a time-wasting queue - or get out of a bad marriage - might owe to what's called the "sunken cost fallacy". Photo / 123RF

Here's a situation you've likely been in.

You're standing in a slow line at the cafe and it's likely that wait for your morning long black is going to cause you to miss the bus or make it to work late.

Despite realising this, you opt to stay in the queue because you've already spent too much time in it for that to have all been in vain.

Another example might be sticking it out in a bad marriage or draining your savings on a half-finished home renovation that ended up proving twice as expensive as you'd planned for.

This inability to cut our losses is what psychologists and economists know as the "sunk cost fallacy" - and it's been a problem long considered unique to humans.

But as it turns out, we aren't the only ones who stick with decisions we know to be irrational.

University of Minnesota researchers have just observed the same phenomenon in rats and mice, in a study that saw both the animals and humans take part in a similar economic game.

While mice and rats spent time from a limited budget foraging for flavoured food pieces, humans similarly spent a limited time budget foraging for what humans these days seek - entertaining videos on the web.

Rats and mice ran around a maze that contained four food-delivery-locations, or "restaurants", as PhD student Brian Sweis and his colleagues called them.

On entry into each restaurant, the animal was informed of how long it would be before food would be delivered by an auditory tone.

They had one hour to gather food and thus each entry meant they had to answer a question like, "am I willing to spend 20 seconds from my time budget waiting for my cherry-flavoured food pellet?" with a delay lasting anywhere from one to 30 seconds.

Similarly, humans saw a series of web galleries and were informed of the delay by a download bar.

This meant humans had to answer an equivalent question: "Am I willing to spend 20 seconds from my time budget waiting for my kitten video?"

In this way, each subject from each species revealed their own subjective preferences for individual food flavours or video galleries.

In this task, every entry required two decisions, a first decision when the delay was revealed, but did not count down, and then a second decision if the offer was accepted when subjects could quit and change their minds during the countdown.

Remarkably, the team found that all three species become more reluctant to quit the longer they waited - demonstrating the sunk cost fallacy.

As such, the project built on a number of recent breakthroughs finding that mice, rats, and humans use similar neural systems to make these different types of decisions, that mice and rats also show regret after making mistakes, and that even mice can learn to avoid those mistakes by deliberating first.

But by having all three species play the same game, the researchers revealed a new insight into how different parts of the brain make different types of decisions - and that there is an evolutionary history to the flaws that make us human.

The robot that feels

The robot prototype expresses its "anger" with both its eyes and its skin, which turns spiky through fluidic actuators that are inflated under its skin. Photo / Lindsay France/University Photography

Would a robot that could tell you how it's feeling be too weird?

Whatever you might think about it, scientists in the US have developed a prototype that can more or less do just that.

Cornell University's robot has a skin that covers a grid of texture units, whose shapes change based on the robot's feelings.

Assistant Professor Guy Hoffman, who has given a TEDx talk on "robots with soul" said the inspiration came from the animal world, based on the idea that machines shouldn't be thought of in human terms.

"I've always felt that robots shouldn't just be modelled after humans or be copies of humans," he said.

"We have a lot of interesting relationships with other species. Robots could be thought of as one of those 'other species', not trying to copy what we do but interacting with us with their own language, tapping into our own instincts."

Hoffman didn't have a specific application for his robot with texture-changing skin mapped to its emotional state.

At this point, just proving that it could be done was a big first step.

"It's really just giving us another way to think about how robots could be designed."

Future challenges included scaling the technology to fit into a self-contained robot - whatever shape that robot took - and making the technology more responsive to the robot's immediate emotional changes.