Understanding Psychology (10th Ed)

About how fast were the cars going when they each other?
Six years after being convicted of 
murder based on a so-called repressed 
memory of his daughter, George 
Franklin Sr.’s conviction was overturned.
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Module 21 
Recalling Long-Term Memories 
229
the source of the memory becomes unclear or ambiguous, people may become con-
fused about whether they actually experienced the event or whether it was imagined. 
Ultimately, people come to believe that the event actually occurred (Loftus, 2004; 
Wade, Sharman, & Garry, 2007; Bernstein & Loftus, 2009a). 
There is great controversy regarding the legitimacy of repressed memories. Many 
therapists give great weight to authenticity of repressed memories, and their views 
are supported by research showing that there are specifi c regions of the brain that 
help keep unwanted memories out of awareness. On the other side of the issue are 
researchers who maintain that there is insuffi cient scientifi c support for the existence 
of such memories. There is also a middle ground: memory researchers who suggest 
that false memories are a result of normal information processing. The challenge for 
those on all sides of the issue is to distinguish truth from fi ction (Brown & Pope, 
1996; Strange, Clifasefi , & Garry, 2007; Bernstein & Loftus, 2009b).
 AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL MEMORY: WHERE PAST MEETS PRESENT 
Your memory of experiences in your own past may well be a fi ction—or at least a 
distortion of what actually occurred. The same constructive processes that make us 
inaccurately recall the behavior of others also reduce the accuracy of autobiographi-
cal memories.  Autobiographical memories  are our recollections of circumstances and 
episodes from our own lives. Autobiographical memories encompass the episodic 
memories we hold about ourselves (Rubin, 1999; Sutin & Robins, 2007).
For example, we tend to forget information about our past that is incompatible 
with the way in which we currently see ourselves. One study found that adults who 
were well adjusted but who had been treated for emotional problems during the 
early years of their lives tended to forget important but troubling childhood events, 
such as being in foster care. College students misremember their bad grades—but 
remember their good ones (see Figure 5; Walker, Skowronski, & Thompson, 2003; 
Kemps & Tiggemann, 2007). 
Similarly, when a group of 48-year-olds were asked to recall how they had 
responded on a questionnaire they had completed when they were high school fresh-
man, their accuracy was no better than chance. For example, although 61% of the 
questionnaire respondents said that playing sports and other physical activities was 
their favorite pastime, only 23% of the adults recalled it accurately (Offer et al., 2000). 
It is not just certain kinds of events that are distorted; particular periods of life 
are remembered more easily than others. For example, when people reach late adult-
hood, they remember periods of life in which they experienced major transitions, 
such as attending college and working at their fi rst job, better than they remember 
their middle-age years. Similarly, although most adults’ earliest memories of their 
own lives are of events that occurred when they were toddlers, toddlers show evi-
dence of recall of events that occurred when they were as young as 6 months old 
(Simcock & Hayne, 2002; Wang, 2003; Cordnoldi, De Beni, & Helstrup, 2007).
Travelers who have visited areas of the world in which there is 
no written language often have returned with tales of people 
with phenomenal memories. For instance, storytellers in some 
preliterate cultures can recount long chronicles that recall the 
names and activities of people over many generations. Those 
feats led experts to argue initially that people in preliterate 
societies develop a different, and perhaps better, type of memory 
than do those in cultures that employ a written language. They suggested that in a 
society that lacks writing, people are motivated to recall information with accuracy, 
especially information relating to tribal histories and traditions that would be lost if 
they were not passed down orally from one generation to another (Daftary & Meri, 
2002; Berntsen & Rubin, 2004).