False Memories: What Neuroimaging Tells Us About How We Mis-remember the Past

False memories, or erroneous memories for experiences that never truly occurred, are a consequence of the fallibility and malleability of memory. In the current chapter we review recent neuroimaging findings regarding the neural underpinnings of false memories. In doing so, we show how recent functional magnetic resonance imaging studies contribute support to longstanding theories of false memories, including those highlighting both encoding failures and erroneous retrieval. Further, we highlight work examining how aging exacerbates false memories and faulty neural processing associated with such errors of commission. Exciting work utilizing multivoxel analytic approaches further reveals how patterns of neural activity differentiate between true and false information maintained in memory traces within and across memory phases. Future directions for the field of neuroimaging of false memories are also discussed.