Marcia Johnson
Biographical Sketch
Marcia K. Johnson is the Charles C. & Dorathea S. Dilley Professor of Psychology and Chair, Department of Psychology, Yale University. Her laboratory’s primary focus is human memory and cognition. Her early work focused on the relation between comprehension and memory, especially constructive and reconstructive mental processes. Johnson's laboratory pioneered in the systematic study of the mechanisms of memory distortion. For example, Johnson and colleagues' work on reality monitoring has investigated how the memory representations of perception and thought (inferences, imaginations) are alike and how they are different, how they are discriminated, and why they are sometimes confused. Her lab currently is also using neuroimaging to identify brain regions associated with monitoring the origin of information, to explore component processes of cognition, the relation between cognition and emotion, and to identify areas showing age-related dysfunction in cognitive processes. Johnson received the William James Award from the Association for Psychological Science, Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the American Psychological Association, Master Mentor Award from APA’s Division 20, Yale University Graduate School Mentorship Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and Fellowships from the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and the Cattell Foundation. She was Visiting Scientist, Memory Disorders Research Center at the Boston Veterans Affairs Medical Center, has served on the editorial boards of various journals, is past Chair of the Psychonomic Society, and is a Trustee of the Cattell Foundation. Her laboratory’s research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Mental Health, and National Institute on Aging.
Abstract: The Cognitive Neuroscience of True and False Memories
According to the source monitoring framework (SMF), memories are attributions that we make about our mental experiences based on their subjective qualities, our prior knowledge and beliefs, our motives and goals, and the social context. Cognitive behavioral studies using both objective (e.g., recognition, source memory) and subjective (e.g., ratings of memory characteristics) measures have provide much information about the encoding, revival and monitoring processes that yield both true and false memories. This paper will consider how neuroimaging findings (especially from functional magnetic resonance imaging [fMRI] studies), are contributing to our understanding of the relation between memory and reality.