The Consequences Of The Deja Vu Experience

The question of what causes the déjà vu experience has been wondered for many years. A vast variety of theories have been researched, but still no one knows the definite reason of why it transpires. A hypothesis to consider, and what the rest of the report will be focused on, is that déjà vu results from a form of recognition memory known as familiarity-based recognition (Cleary, 2008). To expand on this, the article Recognition Memory, Familiarity, and Déjà vu Experiences will be referenced.

In the text, we learned about memory, which is the ability to store and retrieve information. Looking further into memory, more specifically the seven “sins” of memory, it included memory misattribution. This is defined as the assigning a recollection or an idea to the wrong source. A part of memory is recalling when, where, and how information was acquired, commonly known as source memory. A type of memory misattribution is false recognition, a feeling of familiarity about something that hasn’t been encountered before. Although this is more common in people with damage to their frontal lobes, there is a subjective experience of this that occurs in everyday déjà vu experiences. Individuals with neurological damage

This is the type of memory that allows people to realize that what they are currently experiencing was experienced before (Cleary, 2008) and false recognition in this is what leads us to experience déjà vu. Recognition memory has been experimented using dual process theory, with recollection and familiarity as the processes. Recollection refers to bringing to mind a prior instance in which the current situation previously occurred and familiarity refers to experiencing inly a feeling if familiarity with the current situation. So, the key difference is that with recollection you know where the instance previously occurred, and with familiarity you cannot identify why it feels