Confabulation and the Brain, 5

PsychCentral identifies two types of confabulation: spontaneous and provoked. A provoked confabulation is when a patient invents an untrue story in response to a question and tends to occur quite commonly among patients with amnesia or dementia. On the other hand, a spontaneous confabulation tends to occur less commonly and involves the telling of an untrue story with no apparent motivation. Sometimes confabulations are verbal and only involve talking about false memories. Behavioral confabulations, on the other hand, occur when the patient acts upon his or her erroneous beliefs. Most studies on confabulation have focused on symptoms related to underlying problems or pathologies that impact memory. Recently, attention is focusing on individuals without identifying underlying problems who exhibit confabulation. More tomorrow.