What Can Research Tell Us About the Reliabilty of Memory

There are many recent findings and conclusions discovered from investigations about the reliability of memory; some of which are experimental, others of which are interpretations of indirect studies.

Ones autobiographical memory holds recollection of experiences from ones own life.

In most cases it is true to say that events, which are unique, personally important, surprising or emotional, are likely to be well remembered. It has also been proven by Cohen, 1991 that accuracy and quality of our memories decline with time. Therefore as time leads to the fading of memories, this can result in a distortion of our memory for when things happened. The less that people can remember about an event, then often the older the memory is thought to be. Brown et al. (1985) investigated this by asking a set of people to date 50 news events (relating to the period 1977-82) that they would likely either know a lot about (e.g. the shooting of President Reagan), or else have little knowledge of (e.g. 25 people killed in mudslide). They found, as predicted, that the events which people knew a lot about were dated as too recent by over three months, wh

Studies of genuine recovered memories

I can therefore conclude that if one is put in an environment with the same odours as a previous time, then recall of details which were involved in that event are much more accurate and reliable compared to when they are in ‘today’s environment’. This hence means that recreating a specific atmosphere of a scenario will increase the reliability of our memory and its recall.

There is strong support for the existence of genuine recovered memories from the work of Constance Dalenberg. Dalenberg (1996) analysed in depth 17 cases in which women were accusing their fathers of sexual abuse. Dalenberg distinguished between continuous and recovered memories by interviewing the accused fathers and by encouraging the women to seek evidence for and against the accuracy of their memories. It emerged that in four cases, continuous memories were more accurate than recovered memories and in 4 cases, recovered memories were more accurate. In nine cases no difference emerged in the accuracy of continuous and recovered memories. Two cases emerged as clearly the result of false memory syndrome. This study indicates that there are both genuine and false recovered memories, and that recovered memories are, in general, as accurate and reliable as continuous memories.

Does the mood one is in improve the accuracy and reliability of recall?

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