Hockenbury Discovering Psychology 5th txtbk

Forgetting251IN FOCUSDéjà Vu Experiences: An Illusion of Memory?The term déjà vu is French for “already seen.” A déjà vuexperience involves brief but intense feelings of familiarityin a situation that has not been previously experienced. Or,in some instances, you have this intense, even eerie, feelingof having experienced the exact situation before as it is happeningto you but you’re not able to recall precisely whenor where. Psychology’s interest in déjà vu extends back tothe late 1800s when the famous American psychologistWilliam James (1890, 1902) wrote about these experiences.Déjà Vu CharacteristicsDéjà vu experiences are common. Psychologist Alan Brown(2004) analyzed the results of more than 30 surveys and foundthat about two-thirds of individuals (68 percent) reported havinghad one or more déjà vu experiences in their life. He also foundthat the incidence of déjà vu experiences changes over the life -span. Young adults in the 20–24 age range tend to have themost frequent occurrences, averaging three déjà vu experiencesper year. For about 1 out of 6 people (16 percent), déjà vu experienceshappen about once a month. But by the time peoplereach the threshold of middle adulthood in their early 40s, déjàvu experiences have dwindled to less than one per year.Although typically triggered by a visual scene, déjà vu experiencescan involve all of the senses. For example, blind people canalso experience déjà vu (O’Connor & Moulin, 2006). The experiencesare most common when people are feeling fatigued oremotionally distressed. They usually occur in the evening hoursand in the company of other people. Interestingly, there is ahigher incidence of déjà vu experiences in people who are welleducated,travel frequently, often watch movies, and regularlyremember their dreams (Brown, 2003; Cleary, 2008). We’ll comeback to that last point shortly.Because déjà vu experiences are often described as being aweird sensation, some people immediately assume that theexperience must have been an instance of clairvoyance, telepathy,or some other paranormal experience. But rather than paranormalexplanations, contemporary psychologists believe thatdéjà vu can provide insights about basic memory processes (seeCleary, 2008; Cleary & Specker, 2007).Explaining Déjà VuThe déjà vu experience typically involves the brief, intense, andeerie feeling of familiarity in a situation you’re certain you’venever experienced before. For example, let’s suppose that youhave an intense déjà vu experience as you arrive to stand in lineto enter Chicago’s Shedd Aquarium. You know you’ve never visitedthe Shedd Aquarium before, so there is no memory sourceyou can identify for the intense feeling of recognition.Psychologist Anne Cleary (2008) believes this sense of familiaritysuddenly arises when enough features in the currentsituation trigger the sensation of matching features alreadycontained in a previous memory. But even though you intuitivelysense and recognize the memory as familiar, you can’t pinpoint asource for that familiarity. This is what memory researchersrefer to as a disruption in source memory or source monitoring—your ability to remember the original details or features of a memory,including when, where, and how you acquired the informationor had the experience.Most likely, your déjà vu experience was due to source amnesia:You have indirectly experienced this scene or situation beforebut you’ve forgotten the memory’s source. And what might thatindirect but forgotten memory source be? Earlier we noted thatpeople who are well-educated, travel a lot, often watch movies,and remember their dreams are more prone to déjà vu experiences(see Brown, 2004; Cleary, 2008). Any one of those factorsis a potential gold mine of memory retrieval clue fragments thatcan match elements of the current scene, triggering a sense offamiliarity. Other sources might be magazine photos, Web sites,or travel brochures. Of course, had you immediately recalled theprevious source from a little over two years ago—a DiscoveryChannel show you watched that featured lots of scenes atChicago’s Shedd Aquarium—you probably wouldn’t have had adéjà vu experience.Another memory explanation for déjà vu involves a form ofencoding failure called inattentional blindness. According to theinattentional blindness explanation, déjà vu can be producedwhen you’re not really paying attention to your surroundings(Brown, 2005). So, suppose you’re oblivious (or blind) to your surroundingswhile chatting on your cell phone as you wait in line toenter the Shedd Aquarium. As the call ends and you’re still thinkingabout the conversation, you glance up at the entrance to theShedd Aquarium and bang! A déjà vu experience!In this case, the feeling that you have been there before is dueto the fact that you really have been there before—a split secondago. While talking on your cell phone, you were nonconsciouslyprocessing information about your surroundings.But when you ended the call, and, a split second later, youshifted your attention, your surroundings were suddenly—andinexplicably—consciously perceived as familiar.A different possible explanation comes from the brain itself.Neurological evidence suggests that at least some instances ofdéjà vu are related to brain dysfunction. In particular, it has longbeen known that déjà vu experiences can be triggered by temporallobe disruptions (see Milner, 1954; Zeman, 2005). Formany people with epilepsy, the seizures often originate in thetemporal lobe. In these people, a déjà vu experience sometimesoccurs just prior to a seizure (Lytton, 2008).For most people, however, déjà vu experiences probablyinvolve the common memory processes of source amnesia andinattentional blindness. To learn about other scientific explanationsfor déjà vu, check out Alan Brown’s (2004) scholarly compilationof the research in his book The Déjà Vu Experience.déjà vu experienceA memory illusion characterized by brief butintense feelings of familiarity in a situationthat has never been experienced before.source memory or source monitoringMemory for when, where, and how a particularexperience or piece of informationwas acquired.