Mark D. White

Mark D. White

Bear with me, this is very relevant, especially to the previous post on behavioral law and economics. Even if it's not, it's very interesting.

The new issue of the Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society (16/6, 2010) (open access until February 28, 2011) features a symposium on the cognitive neurosceicne of confabulation. From the introduction by Asaf Gilboa and Mieke Verfaellie:

Patients who confabulate provide information or act based on information that is obviously false or that is clearly inappropriate for the context of retrieval. The patients are unaware of these falsehoods, which has led Moscovitch (1989) to coin the term “honest lying” to describe this intriguing symptom. Patients with confabulation will sometimes cling to their false beliefs even when confronted with the truth or despite being aware of contradictory evidence. Most neuropsychologists could probably agree with the above description; however, despite over a century of research, much else remains controversial. This symposium provides an overview of current ideas about confabulation and presents novel empirical research on the phenomenon. Several aspects of the controversies that characterize the field are represented in this collection of studies. These include even the most basic question of how confabulation should be defined and how many types of confabulation there are. The studies also address questions regarding the neural basis of confabulation and regarding the neurocognitive mechanisms that may underlie its occurrence. We briefly discuss each of these three issues below.

This is an obvious cognitive dysfunction which behavioral economics (as well as neuroeconomics) is well positioned to look into, especially as regards the provision of health care.