From the episodic honeymoon to the birth of a child, people tend to they remember memories with gaps in their deep past. Now, however, researchers are arguing that even recent memories can be wrong.

Scientists trying to map memory capacity claim that people can make mistakes after just a few seconds, a phenomenon they call the “short-term memory illusion.”

“Even in the shortest time, our memory may not be entirely reliable,” the doctor explains. Marte Otten, co-leader of research at the University of Amsterdam. published in the scientific journal Plos One.

“Especially when we have big expectations about how the world should be, when our memory starts to fade a little — even after one and a half, two, three seconds — then we start filling in the gaps based on our expectations,” she said. notes. .

Four experiments

As Otten and her colleagues note in their paper, previous research has shown that when people are shown a rotated or mirrored letter, they often report seeing it in the correct orientation.

Although the scientists initially speculated that the participants were misreading the shape, Otten and her team remained skeptical.

“We thought it was most likely a memory effect. That is, despite the fact that the participants saw it correctly, once they remembered it, everything went wrong,” says Otten.

To explore this further, researchers in general four experiments.

In the first of these, participants were tested to see if they could perform basic visual memory tasks before being presented with a circle of six or eight letters, one or two of which were mirror images.

After a few seconds, the participants were presented with a second circle of letters, which they were ordered to ignore in an attempt to distract them. They were then asked to choose from a range of options a piece that was in a certain position on the first round to rate their reliability.

The results of 23 participants, who often expressed high confidence in their answers, showed that the most common mistake was choosing to mirror the letter. However, this was more common when the target letter itself was indeed a mirror image. Participants are listed as a percentage 37% have seen a real email when in fact they were shown a mirror – and in 11% it was the other way around.

According to the research team, this distortion indicates that the errors were related to the participants’ knowledge of the alphabet and, therefore, to expectations them – and not only in the similarity of the appearance of forms.

The number of errors increased as the delay time or degree of distraction in the experiment increased, but only in those cases where the requested figure was a mirror image and not a real letter.

These scientific findings were confirmed by the results of three more similar experiments, in which a total of 348 people took part.

Source: Guardian