What can recent research tell us about the reliability 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.
Autobiographical memory.
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, where as low-knowledge events were dated as too old by about a month. This proves the fact that the timings of high and low knowledgeable events that we hold in our autobiographical memories are not hugely reliable. .
Loftus and Marburger, 1983 discovered that accuracy of dating is improved if we are able to associate the event with some landmark date to help us, for instance the event happening on the same day as the day you got married.
Rubin et al. (1986), in an analysis of a number of studies found that when elderly people look back over their lives, there is a reminiscence bump. That is, people tend to recall a surprisingly high number of events for when they were between the age of 10 and 30 years old and especially between 15 and 25.
