Confabulation

Readings

• William Hirstein. 2005. Brain Fiction. MIT Press.
• Petter Johansson, Lars Hall, Sverker Sikström, Andreas Olsson (2005) Failure to Detect Mismatches Between Intention and Outcome in a Simple Decision Task. Science. Vol. 310. no. 5745, 116-9. doi:10.1126/science.1111709

Denial of cognitive or bodily deficit

Stuss, Alexander, Lieberman, & Levine. 1978. An Extraordinary Form of Confabulation. Neurology, 28:1166-72.

@A patient with a frontal lobe injury continually propagated responses in an implausible manner. During one interview, when asked if he knew the place, he responded by stating that it was an air-conditioning plant (he was facing a window air-conditioner). When surprised was expressed about his wearing pajamas, he responded,"I keep them in my car and will soon change into my work clothes"@

• Anton's syndrome - denial of blindness
• Hemiplegia - denial of paralysis

Normal subjects

Johansson et. el. (2005)

@Participants made choices between presented face pairs on the basis of attractiveness, while we covertly manipulated the relationship between choice and outcome that they experienced. Participants failed to notice conspicuous mismatches between their intended choice and the outcome they were presented with, while nevertheless offering introspectively derived reasons for why they chose the way they did. We call this effect choice blindness.@