Friday March 8, 16:50 - 17:50

Adults’ Recollections of Long-past Events

My lecture will review several interrelated lines of research my co-workers and I have conducted to explore adults’ recollections of long-past events. One line of studies assessed adults’ memories of events described in their own personal diaries, written years or decades earlier. Participants read parts of their old diaries and reported on various kinds of memory experiences that arose while doing so. The most striking aspect of the findings is that people very often reported that they had no memories of seemingly memorable events described in their own diaries. Another line of studies used questionnaires in which adults were asked about various childhood events (e.g., being bitten by a dog, winning a prize). For each event, respondents were asked whether or not they had experienced that event during childhood and, if so, whether or not they could recollect anything about the experience (as opposed to just knowing or believing that they had the experience). Respondents also rated the emotion of each event, from -very negative- to -very positive.- Respondents quite often reported no memories of reportedly experienced events, and such no-memory reports were more common for events rated as negative than for those rated as positive. Interestingly, the rate of recollecting reportedly experienced events changed little with age. A third line of research used high-school year books and other archival materials to assess adults’ recollections of high school. In general, participants remembered relatively few of the items on the test; interestingly, accuracy did not decline significantly with age, but confidence did decline with age. The fourth and final line of research to be summarized in my lecture uses photographs of childhood events in the context of suggestive procedures to create false memories of pseudoevents. Taken together, this research indicates that memory for long-past events is typically very incomplete and subject to distortion.