Some people have an amazing ability to recall specific events, like exactly what happened on a particular day decades ago. For example, when one person with such so-called highly superior autobiographical memory (HSAM) was asked what happened on October 19, 1987, she quickly replied that it was a Monday, “the day of the big stock market crash and the cellist Jacqueline du Pré died that day.”
Yet even people with exceptional recall are as susceptible to being manipulated by false memories as the rest of us, according to new research released today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The results could have enormous implications for legal proceedings, and any other forum that relies upon the memory of witnesses.
When a University of California Irvine team led by a graduate student Lawrence Patihis tested 20 super-memory people and 38 age- and sex-matched people with normal memory powers on three different tests known to elicit false memories, the HSAM people performed no better than the others.
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In the test, all the people were asked to read about United Flight 93 of Sept, 11, 2001. Part of what they read stated that “video footage of the plane crashing” was taken by somebody on the ground. In fact, no such video exists.
Yet after reading the material, 20 percent of HSAM people and 29 percent of the other group indicated they had indeed seen the video. In a later interview, 10 percent of HSAM people stuck to their stories. Of the total number of fake details about the crash planted in their minds, there was no significant difference in false memory between HSAM and normal memory participants.
