Humans perceive their personal memories as fundamentally true, and although memory is prone to inaccuracies, flagrant memory errors are rare. Some patients with damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) recall and act upon patently erroneous memories (spontaneous confabulations). Clinical observations suggest these memories carry a strong sense of confidence, a function ascribed to vmPFC in studies of memory and decision making. However, most studies of the underlying mechanisms of memory overconfidence do not directly probe personal recollections and resort instead to laboratory-based tasks and contrived rating scales. We analyzed naturalistic word use of patients with focal vmPFC damage (N = 18) and matched healthy controls (N = 23) while they recalled autobiographical memories using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) method. We found that patients with spontaneous confabulation (N = 7) tended to over-use words related to the categories of ‘certainty’ and of ‘swearwords’ compared to both non-confabulating vmPFC patients (N = 11) and control participants. Certainty related expressions among confabulating patients were at normal levels during erroneous memories and were over-expressed during accurate memories, contrary to our predictions. We found no elevation in expressions of affect (positive or negative), temporality or drive as would be predicted by some models of confabulation. Thus, erroneous memories may be associated with subjectively lower certainty, but still exceed patients' report criterion because of a global proclivity for overconfidence. This may be compounded by disinhibition reflected by elevated use of swearwords. These findings demonstrate that analysis of naturalistic expressions of memory content can illuminate global meta-mnemonic contributions to memory accuracy complementing indirect laboratory-based correlates of behavior. Memory accuracy is the result of complex interactions among multiple meta-mnemonic processes such as monitoring, report criteria, and control processes which may be shared across decision-making domains.

中文翻译：

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这不是谎言……如果你相信的话：自传体记忆的叙事分析揭示了闲聊患者的过度自信倾向

人类认为自己的个人记忆基本上是真实的，尽管记忆很容易出现不准确的情况，但明显的记忆错误却很少见。一些腹内侧前额皮质（vmPFC）受损的患者会回忆起明显错误的记忆并采取行动（自发的虚构）。临床观察表明，这些记忆带有强烈的自信感，这是记忆和决策研究中 vmPFC 的功能。然而，大多数关于记忆过度自信的潜在机制的研究并不直接探究个人记忆，而是诉诸基于实验室的任务和人为的评分量表。我们分析了局灶性 vmPFC 损伤患者 (N = 18) 和匹配的健康对照组 (N = 23) 在使用语言查询和字数统计 (LIWC) 方法回忆自传体记忆时的自然词语使用情况。我们发现，与非闲聊的 vmPFC 患者 (N = 11) 和对照参与者相比，自发闲聊的患者 (N = 7) 倾向于过度使用与“确定性”和“脏话”类别相关的词语。与我们的预测相反，在错误记忆期间，闲聊患者的确定性相关表达处于正常水平，而在准确记忆期间则过度表达。我们发现情感（积极或消极）、暂时性或驱动力的表达并没有像某些闲谈模型所预测的那样有所提高。因此，错误的记忆可能与主观上较低的确定性有关，但由于总体上过度自信的倾向，仍然超出了患者的报告标准。脏话使用增多所反映出的抑制解除可能会加剧这种情况。这些发现表明，对记忆内容的自然表达的分析可以阐明全局元记忆对记忆准确性的贡献，补充基于实验室的间接行为相关性。记忆准确性是多个元记忆过程之间复杂交互的结果，例如可以在决策域之间共享的监控、报告标准和控制过程。