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Edited by George Sperling, University of California, Irvine, CA, and approved October 22, 2013 (received for review July 29, 2013)
Significance
In a unique memory-distortion study with people with extraordinary memory ability, individuals with highly superior autobiographical memory (HSAM) were as susceptible as controls to false memory. The findings suggest that HSAM individuals reconstruct their memories using associative grouping, as demonstrated by a word-list task, and by incorporating postevent information, as shown in misinformation tasks. The findings also suggest that the reconstructive memory mechanisms that produce memory distortions are basic and widespread in humans, and it may be unlikely that anyone is immune. The assumption that no one is immune from false memories has important implications in the legal and clinical psychology fields, where contamination of memory has had particularly important consequences in the past.
Abstract
The recent identification of highly superior autobiographical memory (HSAM) raised the possibility that there may be individuals who are immune to memory distortions. We measured HSAM participants’ and age- and sex-matched controls’ susceptibility to false memories using several research paradigms. HSAM participants and controls were both susceptible to false recognition of nonpresented critical lure words in an associative word-list task. In a misinformation task, HSAM participants showed higher overall false memory compared with that of controls for details in a photographic slideshow. HSAM participants were equally as likely as controls to mistakenly report they had seen nonexistent footage of a plane crash. Finding false memories in a superior-memory group suggests that malleable reconstructive mechanisms may be fundamental to episodic remembering. Paradoxically, HSAM individuals may retrieve abundant and accurate autobiographical memories using fallible reconstructive processes.
Footnotes
- ↵1To whom correspondence should be addressed: E-mail: lpatihis{at}uci.edu.
Author contributions: L.P., S.J.F., A.K.R.L., N.P., R.M.N., C.E.L.S., J.L.M., and E.F.L. designed research; L.P. and A.K.R.L. performed research; L.P., S.J.F., N.P., and R.M.N. analyzed data; and L.P., S.J.F., A.K.R.L., N.P., R.M.N., C.E.L.S., J.L.M., and E.F.L. wrote the paper.
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.
See Commentary on page 20856.
This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.1314373110/-/DCSupplemental.
False memories in superior autobiographical memory
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- Social Sciences
- Psychological and Cognitive Sciences
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