False memories in highly superior autobiographical memory individuals

Abstract

The recent identification of highly superior autobiographical memory (HSAM) raised the possibility that there may be individuals who are immune to memory distortions. We measured HSAM participants' and age-and sex-matched controls' susceptibility to false memories using several research paradigms. HSAM participants and controls were both susceptible to false recognition of nonpresented critical lure words in an associative word-list task. In a misinformation task, HSAM participants showed higher overall false memory compared with that of controls for details in a photographic slideshow. HSAM participants were equally as likely as controls to mistakenly report they had seen nonexistent footage of a plane crash. Finding false memories in a superior-memory group suggests that malleable reconstructive mechanisms may be fundamental to episodic remembering. Paradoxically, HSAM individuals may retrieve abundant and accurate autobiographical memories using fallible reconstructive processes.hyperthymesia | DRM | suggestion | crashing memories R esearch on memory distortion suggests that episodic memory often involves a flawed reconstructive process (1-3). Several false-memory paradigms developed in recent decades have demonstrated this. For example, in the Deese-Roediger and McDermott (DRM) (4, 5) paradigm, people falsely remember words not actually presented in a related list of words. In the misinformation paradigm, the content of a person's memory can be changed after they are exposed to misleading postevent information (2, 6, 7). In the nonexistent news-footage paradigm (also known as the "crashing memory" paradigm), people sometimes recall witnessing footage of news events for which no footage actually exists (8, 9). People can even remember events following an imagination exercise that inflates their certainty about events that they only imagined but did not actually experience (10). Even memory for our past emotions seems to be reconstructed and prone to error (11). So far, memory distortions have been investigated in subjects who have typical memory ability [children (12), adults (7), older adults (13)], but not with people with unusually strong memory ability. Memorydistortion phenomena have been explained by theoretical models that state that memory is reconstructed from traces at retrieval (1,3,14), is not reproduced from a permanent recording (15), and is prone to errors caused by source confusion (16) and association (17, 18). These studies and theoretical models paint a picture of human memory as malleable and prone to errors.However, a small number of individuals who have recently been identified appear to be uniquely gifted in their ability to accurately remember even trivial details from their distant past (19-21). Highly superior autobiographical memory (HSAM; also known as hyperthymesia) individuals can remember the day of the week a date fell on and details of what happened that day from every day of their life since mid-childhood. For details that can be verified, HSAM individuals are correct 97% of ...

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