Humans with Superior Recall Abilities are Susceptible to False Memory

Some people have amazing recall with the ability to remember details of their daily lives for decades. Yet it turns out that these memories aren't as accurate or infallible as you might think. Scientists have discovered that people with superior recall are just as susceptible as everyone else to forming fake memories.

People that have highly superior autobiographical memory (HSAM) are said to have hyperthymesia. This ability involves being able to remember even trivial details from the distant past. In fact, it can involve recalling daily activities of a life since mid-childhood with almost 100 percent accuracy.

Yet can this memory be manipulated? That's what researchers wanted to find out. They asked 20 people with superior memory and 38 people with average memory to do word association exercises, recall details of photographs depicting a crime and discuss their recollections of video footage of the United Flight 93 crash on 9/11 (such footage does not exist). These tasks in particular incorporated misinformation in an attempt to manipulate what the subjects thought they remembered. In the end, the researchers found that those with superior recall were just as susceptible to forming false memories.

"While they really do have super-autobiographical memory, it can be as malleable as anybody else's, depending on whether misinformation was introduced and how it was processed," said Lawrence Patihis, one of the researchers, in a news release. "It's a fascinating paradox. In the absence of misinformation, they have what appears to be almost perfect, detailed autobiographical memory, but they are vulnerable to distortions, as anyone else is."

Currently, there are still many mysterious about people with highly superior autobiographical memory. Scientists are now studying forgetting curves in both HSAM and control participants in order to find out a little bit more about this ability.

"Finding susceptibility to false memories even in people with very strong memory could be important for dissemination to people who are not memory experts," said Patihis in a news release. "For example, it could help communicate how widespread our basic susceptibility to memory distortions is. This dissemination could help prevent false memories in the legal and clinical psychology fields, where contaminations of memory have had particularly important consequences in the past."

The findings are published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.