Models of confabulation: A critical review and a new framework

Abstract

Confabulation can be defined as statements or actions that involve distortions of memories. This paper reviews current theories of confabulation focusing on source monitoring, temporal-context, and retrieval theories. The attributes and criticisms of these three models are discussed. From this review, a three-factor cognitive-neuropsychological framework is proposed, which can be used to explain the variable symptoms of confabulation. The framework takes its basis from the Langdon and Coltheart (2000a, 2000b) cognitive model of delusional belief formation. The model suggests that two deficits are likely in most cases of confabulation—an executive control retrieval deficit and an evaluation deficit. It also takes into consideration how the general organization of the autobiographical memory store and a person's individual emotional/motivational biases can influence confabulatory symptoms and content. This is an overarching framework that can be used to model confabulations, and it builds upon links between delusions and confabulation.

We would like to thank The Royal Rehabilitation Centre, Sydney, for their help with recruiting patient S.D. We also thank Dr. Martha Turner for her helpful comments on an earlier draft.

Notes

¹ This was the high school that S.D. attended, but he left school in 1982.

² That is, Physical Education.

³ Autonoetic consciousness is a feeling of reexperiencing or reliving the past, while noetic consciousness characterizes semantic memory and occurs in the absence of any sense of recollection (Tulving, 1985, 2002).

⁴ There can be reduplication of time, place, and person. For example, a patient studied by Del Grosso Desteri et al. (2002) confabulated that two identical hospitals were located in two streets with identical names.