The detection of simulated amnesia

Claims of amnesia are frequently raised in criminal and civil cases. There is a consensus in the legal community that amnesia is easily faked and practically impossible to disprove, and that many who claim to be amnesic are malingering. The present studies compared, on a variety of memory tasks, subjects instructed to simulate amnesia with subjects who had memory impairments due to brain damage. The simulators displayed patterns of performance different from those of memory-impaired subjects. These results suggest that lay-people have inaccurate beliefs about the cognitive features of amnesia, and do not distinguish among etiologically distinct amnestic disorders. Tasks that exploit lay-people's inaccurate beliefs about amnesia appear promising for the detection of malingering.