[Journal Article] People with highly superior powers of recall also vulnerable to false memories

From the 20 November 2013 Science 360 News Service

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. In a series of tests to determine how false information can manipulate memory formation, the researchers discovered that subjects with highly superior autobiographical memory logged scores similar to those of a control group of subjects with average memory. “

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.”

More on this finding from the UC Irvine press release

Related articles

• People who don’t forget can still be tricked with false memories (medicalxpress.com)
• How Many Of Your Memories Are Fake? (theatlantic.com)
• People with superior recall powers vulnerable to false memories (universityofcalifornia.edu)
• Remember That? No You Don’t. Study Shows False Memories Afflict Us All (science.time.com)