Remembering What You Experienced

Finally, there is one other area of long-term memory that has been
much studied by researchers—an area that cognitive psychologists
call ‘‘autobiographical memory.’’31 It includes not only long-ago personal
experiences, but also your observations when you witness a
major event, such as a crime.
Commonly, this kind of memory includes a narrative or story
about the event that you relate. But it additionally includes all sorts
of elaborations that contribute to the significance of the story, such
as the imagery you associate with the event and your emotional reactions
to it. These memories also contribute to creating your personal
identity, history, and sense of self, because they are all about what
you experienced.
Researchers are especially interested in looking at how well
these autobiographical memories match what really happened. In
other words, is your recall correct? What is especially interesting
about this type of memory is the way errors can creep in, so you have
distorted memories or remember things that didn’t even happen—
even though your memory assures you that you really were there.
You may make such mistakes for various reasons. One reason is you
want to keep your memories consistent with your own current selfimage
or your current perceptions of the person involved. Another
reason is that you may find something about the memory painful,
so you would rather not recall it or want to edit out the painful parts
from the past.
In general, though, as researchers have found, your memory is
accurate in remembering what’s central to the event. By contrast,
you are more likely to make mistakes in correctly recalling less important
details or specific small bits of tangential information. As
Matlin notes, citing a study by R. Sutherland and H. Hayes, ‘‘When
people do make mistakes, they generally concern peripheral details
and specific information about commonplace events, rather than
central information about important events.’’32 In fact, researchers
have found it’s better not to try to remember a lot of small details;
that’s where you are more likely to make mistakes.
Such mistakes can also occur when you have what researchers
call a ‘‘flashbulb memory,’’ which occurs in a situation where you
initially are involved in, learn of, or observe an event that is very
unusual, surprising, or emotionally arousing. It’s called a flashbulb
memory because it may be especially vivid, such as a shocking event
like 9/11, some especially good news, or the accidental death of
someone close to you. Typically, you are likely to recall exactly where
you were, what happened during the event, what you were doing
when you heard the news, who told you, your own feelings about
the event, and what happened afterwards. Yet, while the very vividness
and distinctiveness of the incident may lead you to remember
it in more detail and with more accuracy than everyday events, particularly
when you talk about it more with others, think about it
more, and consider how the event affects you, you may still make
mistakes. One source of confusion may be the comments and reactions
of others, which may shape your own experience and how you
remember that experience. Then, too, many details may fade over
time.
Another type of error that can creep in to any kind of autobiographical
memory is what researchers call ‘‘consistency bias’’—our
tendency to make what happened in the past more consistent with
our current feelings, beliefs, and general knowledge or expectations
about the way things are.33 This overall outlook we have for seeing
the world is what cognitive psychologists call our ‘‘schema’’—our
generalized knowledge or expectation from past experiences with an
event, object, or person that influences our perception and response
now.34 Thus, we may tend to downplay what seems inconsistent
with who we are now—or who we think others to be. For example,
if you really like your Aunt Mildred and think she is a cool person to
be around, you may tend to diminish or forget your feelings that she
used to treat you badly when you were young. Or if you have become
a solid conservative citizen now, you may tend to downplay or forget
many times when you were a spacey liberal activist in the past.
Thus, when you use memory recall techniques to tap into your
personal autobiography, you have to pay careful attention so you can
distinguish what you really do remember and what you might have
added to or subtracted from your memory of that experience later.
This caution is especially applicable when it comes to eyewitness
reports. You may think you have accurately seen something, but you
really haven’t. There’s a classic test that teachers sometimes do with
students where they have one or two people suddenly come into the
class and do something dramatic—like one person chasing another
with a gun or they have a mock fight—and then run out of the room.
The teacher will then ask the students what they recall, and typically
there are mistakes in identifications. The wrong person is seen holding
the gun, the students think the man with the mustache is clean
shaven, and so on. No wonder that researchers have found that in
over half the cases where defendants have been mistakenly convicted
it’s because of faulty eyewitness testimony.35
One reason that eyewitness memories are often faulty is because
of what researchers call the ‘‘misinformation effect,’’ which occurs
when people are given incorrect information about what they have
observed and they later recall the incorrect information rather than
what they actually saw.36 This disruption is due to what cognitive
psychologists call ‘‘retroactive interference,’’ which occurs when recently
learned new material interferes with recalling a previous
memory correctly. For example, you see something very clearly, but
then someone provides misinformation in asking you a question.
Later you can’t remember what you initially observed because you
are recalling the new information, or you are confused about what
you really saw.37
A good example of this retroactive interference is when a lawyer
or cop is interviewing a witness who has seen a crime occur and asks
what happened when he or she saw the person holding a gun.
Maybe the accused person didn’t have a gun at all, but the witness
will now remember him holding a gun. And so a false memory is
born. In fact, there have been cases where individuals have come to
believe that they committed a crime under intensive questioning.
During the late 1970s and early 1980s, there was an explosion of
false memories that occurred when individuals reported early memories
of childhood abuse that they had forgotten or repressed. While
some of these reports were valid, in many cases they were
remembering imagined memories, sometimes suggested by therapists or because
of the influence of recovered memory therapy groups. A
similar situation has occurred in the more recent priest child abuse
cases involving young males, where some accusers have recalled
long-repressed memories while others have remembered events that
never happened.
The reason for these recovered false memories is that sometimes
therapists probing for reasons for a person’s current problem will
make suggestions while asking their questions. Then clients can
come to believe that they do remember something, which memory
becomes elaborated through further therapy, hypnosis, and interactions
with other clients who are recovering their own memories. Indeed,
cognitive psychologists are able to produce false memories in
the lab. For example, they will give the subject a list containing a
family of related words (such as water, stream, lake, boat, swim)
and later the subject comes up with a related word (e.g., river) that
wasn’t on the original list.38 So the subjects are creating their own
false memories through their active imagination.
So what can you do to remember past events in your life more
accurately? How do you avoid the effects of suggestion, retroactive
interference, and misinformation distorting a past memory or creating
a new one that you think occurred in the past? 42