8 This research provides evidence

in support of claims that memory distortions often reflect the operation of adaptive processes, that an important function of a constructive memory is allowing individuals to flexibly use past experiences to simulate possible future events, and that sensory reactivation can help to distinguish true from false memories. While the theoretical implications of research on constructive memory Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical are important, as noted earlier in the article this research also has clinical and applied implications. Research on memory distortion, for example, played an important role in informing and shaping the debate over the accuracy Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical of recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse that raged for over a decade during the 1990s and 2000s.110,111 Demonstrations that imagining events that never happened can sometimes produce false memories for those events59,112 alerted both researchers

and clinicians to the possible dangers of encouraging patients in psychotherapy to imagine childhood experiences that might or might not have occurred. And, indeed, recent research indicates that there are good reasons to doubt the accuracy of memories Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical of sexual abuse recovered during psychotherapy (in contrast to memories recovered outside of a therapeutic context, which tend to be accurate).111 Research on constructive memory is also relevant understanding inaccuracies in eyewitness memory, which are all too often implicated in wrongful convictions of innocent individuals.4,5 One frequently posed question concerns whether it is possible to distinguish between accurate and inaccurate eyewitness memories, perhaps by using neuroimaging techniques. Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical Although, as discussed earlier, there are both cognitive and neural differences between true and false memories, it is not at all clear that those differences can be reliably detected in individual

cases, as required in the courtroom: most studies that have used neuroimaging to distinguish true and false memories have done next so by averaging Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical across subjects and groups.113 Some recent evidence indicates that neuroimaging can be used to gain insights into the subjective experience of remembering in an individual subject on a single trial. Using a classification technique known as multi voxel pattern analysis, researchers were able to use a pattern classifier to accurately detect when individuals believed that they were remembering a specific event, regardless of whether the event had actually occurred.114 However, the pattern classifier could not reliably determine the Galunisertib objective status of memory for single events, that is, whether the rememberer’s belief about the event was accurate — a failure that would clearly limit its applicability in the courtroom, at least for now.