Collateral effects: the role of sensorimotor simulation on the creation of false memories

The main assumption for our studies on perceptiona and memory for actions is that the observation of an action creates a sensorimotor activation/resonance that creates a mental representation of that action that is ‘moved forward’ in time. The prediction is thus that seeing a person getting ready to perform an action might also create, after a delay, the memory of having seen the forward part of the action. The same effect should not be observed for backward parts of the action. Specifically, memory for actions have been investigated using images representing an actor acting on a series of objects of common use. Participants in a first experiment saw a series of photos of actions being performed on objects (eg. blowing one’s nose) and 15 minutes later performed a recognition task. At recognition, they were presented with photos representing backward and forward moments of the action they saw at encoding. Results have shown that participants tended to accept as ‘seen’ photos of the forward parts of the action seen, rather than photos of backward parts of that action, confirming the hypothesis. In a pilot study, we have also explored the role of temporal distance between encoding and recognition. Results have shown that 3 days after encoding participants did no longer tend to accept as ‘seen’ forward photos more than backward photos, indicating that the effect is short-lived.