Do you sometimes hear words that are entirely different from what was said? And how about mishearing the lyrics to popular songs, as demonstrated in the video below?

If you answered yes to these questions, you are not alone! False hearing is a common phenomenon that happens to people of all ages. For the record, my 5-year-old daughter told me that her class watched Panda Express (instead of Polar Express) in class before winter break!

Although false hearing happens to everyone and can be both entertaining and embarrassing at the same time, it provides valuable insight into how our cognitive system functions. False hearing occurs because we fill in the blanks with our expectations and the context in which the information is presented. In fact, our entire cognitive experience, which includes processes such as perception, attention, and memory, is greatly influenced by our past, culture, and expectations.

In recent studies, researchers found support for higher rates of false hearing in older adults than young adults. Many past studies have also shown that older adults are more likely to falsely remember than young adults. So, can we use our extensive knowledge and theories in false memory to further understand false hearing? In a recent paper published in Psychonomic Society journal, Memory & Cognition, Eric Failes, Mitchell Sommers, and Larry Jacoby (pictured below) reported the results of a study that examined this question and found that false hearing and false memory indeed share a common cognitive mechanism.

In their first experiment, young (18 to 23 years old) and older adults (65 to 81 years old) heard sentences that contained final target words that were presented with speech-shaped background noise — imagine listening to a conversation at a noisy party! Participants heard the following types of sentences:

• congruent: e.g., She put the toys in the box.
• incongruent: e.g., She put the toys in the fox.
• baseline sentences: e.g., The word is page.

They then typed out the target words and explained their responses with one of the following options: hear, know, or guess. They would choose “hear” if they heard the speech sound, “know” if they did not hear the speech sound but still knew that was the target word, and “guess” if they were guessing.

Overall, although participants from both age groups showed more accurate hearing when the context was congruent rather than incongruent, older adults were more influenced by available context (congruent and incongruent) than young adults. Also, older adults made significantly more false hearing errors and were more likely to state that they “heard” the false target words than young adults.

In their second experiment, the authors examined how context might affect memory performance, in a paradigm similar to the one used in Experiment 1. The same participants were primed by valid, neutral, and misleading primes in an implicit memory paradigm involving word pairs. In the study phase, participants studied semantically related cue-target word pairs (e.g., head -skull), and in the test phase, they completed a word fragment completion task (e.g., head-s–l-) by typing the target words. Before each word fragment, a prime (congruent, baseline, or incongruent) would be presented. After typing their answer, they explained their responses by choosing one of three options: remember, know, or guess. They would select “remember” if they could recall specific details, “know” if they knew they studied the word but could not recall details about it, and “guess” if they were purely guessing.

The pattern of results resembled that of the first experiment: the validity of the contextual cues modulated the rate of accuracy in the memory task and the available context had greater influence on older adults’ rather than young adults’ performance. Older adults also exhibited more false memories — they claimed to have “remembered” falsely recalled words more often than young adults, while young adults reported that they “guessed” their response at a higher rate.

Now the exciting finale! In a final set of regression analyses, the authors found that older adults who were more likely to falsely remember were also more likely to report false hearing (see scatter plot below). This finding suggests that false hearing and false memory share a common cognitive mechanism. This mechanism is likely a deficit in inhibitory control, leading older participants to be captured by available context, even when it is incongruent. As described in the capture model, this age-related phenomenon has been found to be caused by a decline in cognitive control and over-reliance on automatic, rather than controlled, mechanisms.

Here’s the take-home message: Perception and memory are reconstructive processes that allow us to represent the world in the best way possible. When controlled processes start to decline in old age, automatic processes fill in the void to compensate for the loss. This ability allows cognition to function seamlessly into old age and should indeed be celebrated!

Psychonomic Society article featured in this post

Failes, E., Sommers, M.S., & Jacoby, L.L. (2020). Blurring past and present: Using false memory to better understand false hearing in young and older adults. Memory & Cognition, 48, 1403–1416. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-020-01068-8