Our cheatin' brain: The brain's clever way of showing us the world ...( Whether we choose to admit it or not...),Health

Whether we choose to admit it or not, we all experience memory errors from time to time. Research has suggested that false memory may be a result of having too many other things to remember or perhaps if too much time has passed. However, previous studies have indicated that a specific type of false memory known as "boundary extension" occurs for different reasons. Boundary extension is a mistake that we often make when recalling a view of a scenewe will insist that the boundaries of an image stretched out farther than what we actually saw. Although this error is very common and occurs in people of all ages (from young children to the elderly), few studies have been done examining how quickly boundary extension occurs. That is, it was unknown how long a scene needs to be interrupted before the viewer experiences boundary extension and is convinced they saw more than they actually did.

Psychologists Helene Intraub and Christopher A. Dickinson from the University of Delaware were interested in this effect and wanted to test how quickly boundary extension can occur in a group of volunteers. The researchers created two versions of a photograph- the photographs depicted the same scene but one had a wider view, showing more of the background. In the first experiment, volunteers were shown one view, interrupted very briefly by a "mask" (an unrelated display of lines and curves with a small "happy face" in the center) followed by the same photograph or the other version of the photograph, which remained on the screen. Volunteers were then asked to report whether the picture they were looking at was the same, or showed more or less of the view compared to the first photograph. The second experiment had a similar set up except that the first and second photographs were shown on opposite sides of the monitor forcing the volunteers to shift their eyes from one image to the other so that the interruption included an eye movement.

The results, reported in t
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