How much can we trust our memories? Recent research indicates that we can recognize when we accurately recall events versus when our brain fills in missing details with general knowledge.
Memories consist of specific details and general information, but a study at the University of Birmingham reveals that when general information is more prominent, our confidence in the memory recollection decreases.
This suggests that we can differentiate between these two memory types and assess the reliability of our memories accurately. This study’s results are published in Communications Psychology.
Lead author Dr. Ben Griffiths explained, “We rely on our memories, especially for unique events like a birthday dinner. However, for routine events like our daily commute, the brain stores only the distinctive aspects, such as road construction or a close call, while filling in the rest of the details from existing knowledge.”
The research aimed to determine how well people could recognize these generic or ‘prototypical’ memories and evaluate the trustworthiness of their recollections.
In the study, over 200 participants engaged in experiments where they viewed objects in mismatched colors, like a blue apple. After a simple math task as a distraction, they had to recall the color and identify it from a color bar to assess the accuracy of their memory.
Subsequently, they rated their confidence in the accuracy of their response by selecting ‘sure,’ ‘unsure,’ or ‘guess.’
The researchers utilized unsupervised machine learning to identify patterns in the participants’ responses. This method helped identify the prototypical colors participants tended to choose when uncertain about accurately remembering the shade.
The findings revealed that participants’ confidence in their color selections decreased when the colors resembled prototypical shades identified by the machine learning algorithm. This indicates that we can recognize to what extent prototypes influence our memory gaps and adjust our confidence in our recollection’s accuracy accordingly.
These results have implications for eyewitness testimonies in legal proceedings where confidence in memory accuracy is crucial.
Dr. Griffiths stated, “While facial recognition shows people struggle to differentiate between accurate memories and prototypes, we know less about how event recollection can also be biased, which is equally critical in determining how much to trust an individual’s memory.”
He added, “Our study demonstrates that people are quite adept at recognizing when their recollections are reliable versus when they are influenced by their brain filling in information gaps with generic details.”
