Cognitive Mechanisms Behind the Memory-Undermining Effect of Feigned Crime-Related Amnesia

Oftentimes individuals charged with severe crimes, such as homicide, claim memory loss for their criminal experience (i.e., crime-related amnesia). However, the act of feigning amnesia negatively affects defendants’ genuine memory when they try to remember what they have committed. This dissertation examines the consequences for memory when individuals feign crime-related amnesia, in order to understand and explain why and how this phenomenon occurs. Overall, the most important finding of this dissertation yielded that although, to some extent, inhibition-based mechanism might explain simulators’ impaired recollection; genuine memory for a crime in general remains uncompromised despite a previously feigned amnesia claim.