This question has been surprisingly difficult to answer. Furthermore, we know that memory errors can occur – but without experimental manipulations, how often do they actually occur in real-life settings? As a consequence, very little is known about the accuracy of memories for first-person real-world experiences, the kind that make up our lives outside the laboratory. Yet these studies are usually conducted under relatively artificial conditions in the laboratory – people may study a list of words, or pictures, or watch short video clips and then perform a recall test seconds or minutes later, with conditions often designed to encourage memory errors.

As a result of these findings, the prevailing view in memory science is now that our memories are highly error-prone and untrustworthy. Additional factors also increase memory distortions: for example, misleading information, interference, and leading questions.

For example, extremely emotionally arousing events can produce memories that are erroneous even when vivid. And more dramatically, we sometimes remember incorrectly, warping or augmenting the details of past events.Įarlier studies have revealed a variety of factors that affect false remembering. Memories that are at first vivid inevitably fade or disappear altogether. On the other hand, we all know that memory is not a perfect record of the past – remembering is reconstructive process. Our shared belief in the accuracy of each others’ memories grounds our collective social fabric and affects the outcomes of our justice system. On the one hand, we implicitly believe that our own memories correspond to the reality of the past, and this belief is core to our very sense of self. But how much of what you just recalled is wrong? And how would you know? In a new study, we explored how faithful our episodic memory is. This remarkable ability to mentally time travel to a specific past event is called episodic memory. How you got some hummus on your pants, perhaps, or arrived late.

Take a minute or two to recall as many details as you can – who you were with, where you sat, any stray recollections of sights, smells, or thoughts. For example, the last time you ate dinner at a restaurant. Cast your mind back to an experience from your past.

Reliability of memory psychology