People With Highly Superior Powers of Recall Also Vulnerable to False Memories

November 19, 2013
Science Daily/University of California - Irvine
http://images.sciencedaily.com/2013/11/131119131438-large.jpg
People who can accurately remember details of their daily lives going back decades are as susceptible as everyone else to forming fake memories, UC Irvine psychologists and neurobiologists have found.

"Finding susceptibility to false memories even in people with very strong memory could be important for dissemination to people who are not memory experts. For example, it could help communicate how widespread our basic susceptibility to memory distortions is," said Lawrence Patihis, a graduate student in psychology & social behavior at UC Irvine. "This dissemination could help prevent false memories in the legal and clinical psychology fields, where contamination of memory has had particularly important consequences in the past."

"What I love about the study is how it communicates something that memory distortion researchers have suspected for some time: that perhaps no one is immune to memory distortion," Patihis said. "It will probably make some nonexperts realize, finally, that if even memory prodigies are susceptible, then they probably are too. This teachable moment is almost as important as the scientific merit of the study. It could help educate people -- including those who deal with memory evidence, such as clinical psychologists and legal professionals -- about false memories."

Science Daily/SOURCE :http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/11/131119131438.htm