Memory recollection and people's belief in their memory recollection fascinates me beyond words...
When the psychologists rated the accuracy of the students’ recollections for things like where they were and what they were doing, the average student scored less than three on a scale of seven. A quarter scored zero. But when the students were asked about their confidence levels, with five being the highest, they averaged 4.17. Their memories were vivid, clear—and wrong. There was no relationship at all between confidence and accuracy.
The strength of the central memory seems to make us confident of all of the details when we should only be confident of a few. Because the shock or other negative emotion helps us to remember the animal (or the explosion), we think we also remember the color (or the call to our parents). “You just feel you know it better,” Phelps says. “And even when we tell them they’re mistaken people still don’t buy it.”
Our misplaced confidence in recalling dramatic events is troubling when we need to rely on a memory for something important—evidence in court, for instance. For now, juries tend to trust the confident witness: she knows what she saw. But that may be changing. Phelps was recently asked to sit on a committee for the National Academy of Sciences to make recommendations about eyewitness testimony in trials. After reviewing the evidence, the committee made several concrete suggestions to changes in current procedures, including “blinded” eyewitness identification (that is, the person showing potential suspects to the witness shouldn’t know which suspect the witness is looking at at any given moment, to avoid giving subconscious cues), standardized instructions to witnesses, along with extensive police training in vision and memory research as it relates to eyewitness testimony, videotaped identification, expert testimony early on in trials about the issues surrounding eyewitness reliability, and early and clear jury instruction on any prior identifications (when and how prior suspects were identified, how confident the witness was at first, and the like). If the committee’s conclusions are taken up, the way memory is treated may, over time, change from something unshakeable to something much less valuable to a case. “Something that is incredibly adaptive normally may not be adaptive somewhere like the courtroom,” Davachi says. “The goal of memory isn’t to keep the details. It’s to be able to generalize from what you know so that you are more confident in acting on it.” You run away from the dog that looks like the one that bit you, rather than standing around questioning how accurate your recall is.
Lovely long article worth reading: http://www.newyorker.com/science/maria- ... collection“The implications for trusting our memories, and getting others to trust them, are huge,” Phelps says. “The more we learn about emotional memory, the more we realize that we can never say what someone will or won’t remember given a particular set of circumstances.” The best we can do, she says, is to err on the side of caution: unless we are talking about the most central part of the recollection, assume that our confidence is misplaced. More often than not, it is.
I accept that my memory is skewed by my emotions and my experiences!! I would doubt my abilities to be a good juror and I would cringe to be called as a witness... :/
How's your memory? Are you confident in your ability to recall memories accurately?
