Varieties of False Memory

False memories have been described in many different contexts, but their characteristics and underlying mechanisms have seldom been compared or debated. Those reviewed in the present paper include: spontaneous confabulation in brain disease, false recognition cases, delusional memories and other delusions in psychosis, “confabulations” in schizophrenia, “internalised” false confessions for crime, apparently false or distorted memories for child abuse, pseudologia fantastica, the acquisition of new identities or “scripts” following fugue or in multiple personality, and momentary confabulation in healthy subjects. It is suggested that these should be viewed as different types of false memory, and that confabulations and delusions should be kept conceptually distinct. However, they can all be characterised within a general model of memory and executive function, provided that social factors and some notion of “self” (here called a “personal semantic belief system”) are included in the model.