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Results

Provoked versus Spontaneous

Research has thus been inconclusive in determining whether or not to distinguish between provoked and spontaneous confabulation. However, one study suggests that, at least in the case of amnesiacs, provoked and spontaneous confabulations are products of different cognitive mechanisms. This study suggests that spontaneous confabulation may be a result of an amnesic patient’s inability to distinguish the chronological order of events in his memory. In contrast, the research specifies that provoked confabulation may be a compensatory mechanism, in which the patient tries to make up for his memory deficiency by attempting to demonstrate competency in recollection, which will often be marked by confabulations.

Issues of Age

Children are particularly susceptible to forced confabulations. When forced to recall, confabulated events, children are less likely to remember that they had previously confabulated these situations, and they are more likely than their adult counterparts to come to remember these confabulations as real events that transpired. Research suggests that this inability to distinguish between past confabulatory and real events is centered on developmental differences in source monitoring (add link to source monitoring here). Children may have underdeveloped encoding skills and/or critical reasoning skills that may impair their abilities to distinguish real memories from false (confabulated) memories. It may also be the case that children are less likely to retrieve the appropriate information necessary for distinguishing real from confabulatory experience.

Abnormal Psychopathology

Confabulations are often marked symptoms of various syndromes and psychopathologies in the adult population including: Korsakoff's syndrome , Alzheimer’s Disease, Schizophrenia, and brain damage.

Korsakoff's Syndrome

A study on confabulation in Korsakoff’s patients found that they are subject to provoked confabulation when prompted with questions pertaining to episodic memory, not semantic memory, and when prompted with questions where the appropriate response would be “I don’t know.” This suggests that confabulation in these patients is “domain-specific.” Korsakoff’s patients who confabulate are more likely to falsely recognize distractor words than healthy adults, suggesting that false recognition is a “confabulatory behavior.”

Alzheimer's Disease

Alzheimer’s patients demonstrate comparable abilities to encode information as healthy elderly adults, suggesting that impairments in encoding are not associated with confabulation. As seen in Korsakoff patients, confabulation in Alzheimer’s patients is higher when prompted with questions investigating episodic memory. Researchers suggest this is due to damage to the posterior cortical regions of the brain which is a symptom characteristic of Alzheimer’s Disease.

Schizophrenia

Unlike other diseases, schizophrenics are more likely to confabulate when prompted with questions regarding their semantic memories, as opposed to episodic memory prompting. Further, confabulation doesn’t appear to be related to any memory deficit in schizophrenic patients, which is contrary to most forms of confabulation. Also, unlike other confabulations, schizophrenic confabulations less often involve the creation of new information, but instead involve an attempt of the patient to “reconstruct” actual details of a past event.

Physical Brain Trauma

Patients with damage to the inferior medial frontal lobe confabulated significantly more than those with damage in the posterior area and healthy controls. This suggests that this region is key in producing confabulatory responses, and that memory deficit is important but not necessary for confabulation.