The Truth Is Out There: Accuracy in Recall of Verifiable Real-World Events

Abstract

How accurate is memory? Although people implicitly assume that their memories faithfully represent past events, the prevailing view in research is that memories are error prone and constructive. Yet little is known about the frequency of errors, particularly in memories for naturalistic experiences. Here, younger and older adults underwent complex real-world experiences that were nonetheless controlled and verifiable, freely recalling these experiences after days to years. As expected, memory quantity and the richness of episodic detail declined with increasing age and retention interval. Details that participants did recall, however, were highly accurate (93%–95%) across age and time. This level of accuracy far exceeded comparatively low estimations among memory scientists and other academics in a survey. These findings suggest that details freely recalled from one-time real-world experiences can retain high correspondence to the ground truth despite significant forgetting, with higher accuracy than expected given the emphasis on fallibility in the field of memory research.

Linking Detail to Temporal Structure in Naturalistic-Event Recall

“…One younger participant recalled no external details, so we artificially added 0.5 external details to each participant’s data before log transformation. We replicated the interaction between age and detail type (internal vs. external) on detail counts, F (1, 38) = 17.29, p < .001, previously established in autobiographical memory studies with self-selected events (e.g., Levine et al, 2002): Older adults reported fewer internal details and more external details than younger adults (Table 1; data also reported by Diamond, Armson, & Levine, 2020). As expected, younger adults had considerably higher internal-detail proportions than older adults, t (22.03) = 3.97, p < .001, d = 1.35, 95% CI = [0.64, 2.07], replicating the established negative effect of age on richness of episodic detail (Levine et al, 2002).…”

“…This would increase demands for multiple deliberate recall-initiation attempts, with which older adults struggle (Craik, 1986), with initiation attempts jumping around more in space and time. The large effects of age on detail richness and temporal organization observed here are not accompanied by effects on recall accuracy, which we explored in a related study using real-world events (Diamond, Armson, & Levine, 2020). Mechanisms underlying detail recovery and temporal context reinstatement may be particularly susceptible to age-related decline.…”

“…We excluded participants who had been to Baycrest within the past month or more than five times in total. Data from Baycrest Tour 1.0 participants are included in two other reports (Diamond, Abdi, & Levine, 2020; Diamond, Armson, & Levine, 2020). The relationship of the present data to those reports is described in the Supplemental Material available online.…”

“…Note: A companion article by Diamond, Armson, and Levine (2020) appears online at https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797620954812 and on pages 1544–1556 of this issue. The two articles overlap in several ways, including research participants, but the theoretical issues explored in the two articles are sufficiently distinct to warrant their publication as separate works.…”

Building bridges: the hippocampus constructs narrative memories across distant events

“…Free recall performance was scored using a procedure developed in our previous behavioral experiments with a similar paradigm (Cohn-Sheehy et al, 2020), and which adapted a well-characterized scoring method from the Autobiographical Memory Interview (Diamond et al, 2020;Levine et al, 2002). Recall data were scored in a blinded fashion by segmenting each participant's typed recall into meaningful detail units, and then determining how many of these details could be verified within specific story events ( Supplementary Data 2-3).…”