Prediction-Based False Memory: Predictions Alone Can Result in Robust False Memories
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A growing body of literature suggests a powerful role of predictions on memory through prediction violation and prediction confirmation. Violation appears to enhance memory for the event violating the prediction, meanwhile, confirmation boosts memory for the predicted event instead. Crucially, however, the effect of prediction by itself has not been identified as it has typically been studied with its violation or confirmation. Here, we demonstrate the power of predictions on memory by isolating it from its violation and confirmation. In a series of experiments, participants were presented with a real-world object along with three characters and they predicted which character the object belonged to. Upon prediction, participants received either visual confirmation (predicted character showing the item), visual rebuttal (another character showing the item) or no feedback (none of the characters showing the item) with regard to their prediction. When their memory was tested, participants were more likely to falsely remember that their predicted character showed them the item than the other characters did, even when no feedback was provided. This false memory was not eliminated by visual rebuttal and was amplified when participants had a strong item memory. Experiments 2-4 eliminated action (selecting a predicted character) as an alternative explanation and demonstrated that this prediction-based false memory could be modulated through indirect prediction confirmation and violation. Taken together, our findings show that predictions alone are sufficient to induce false memory of predicted events that are robust enough to withstand its direct rebuttal.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it