Confabulation: Motivated reality monitoring

The study addressed the hypothesis that the content of confabulation is emotionally biased. Confabulating amnesic patients were compared with amnesic non-confabulating patients in a memory recognition experiment that manipulated the valence (pleasant, unpleasant), temporal source (past, present, future) and selection agent (self, other) of the to-be-recognised memories. The results revealed that confabulating patients were more likely than amnesic non-confabulating patients to incorrectly recognise past autobiographical events or thoughts as currently relevant memories, and this was more pronounced for pleasant compared to unpleasant events. These findings suggest that motivational factors, along with defective reality and temporality monitoring, contribute to confabulation.