204 • CHAPTER 8 Everyday Memory and Memory Errors

What kinds of events

from their lives are

people most likely to

remember? (206)

Is there something

special about memory

for extraordinary events

like the 9/11 terrorist

attacks? (208)

What properties of the

memory system make it

both highly functional and

also prone to error? (213)

Why is eyewitness

testimony often cited as

the cause of wrongful

convictions? (227)

Some Questions We Will Consider

W

hat would it be like to be able to think of a specific date from

years before and automatically have the events of that day unfold in your

mind? Not special days like holidays or your birthday, but a day on which

nothing “special” happened. How about March 4, 2003? (If that’s your

birthday, pick another date.)

You get the point. This is a diffi cult, if not impossible, task. However, a woman we

will call A.J. can remember what happened on each day of her life, from the age of 11

on. She came to the attention of psychologists by sending an e-mail to James McGaugh,

a memory researcher at UCLA. Her letter, and the results of the many tests that she

subsequently underwent at UCLA, are reported in a paper by Elizabeth Parker, Larry

Cahill, and McGaugh (2006). A.J.’s e-mail read, in part:

I am 34 years old and since I was eleven I have had this unbelievable ability to recall my

past.... I can take a date between 1974 and today, and tell you what day it falls on, what

I was doing that day and if anything of great importance... occurred on that day I can

describe that to you as well.... Whenever I see a date fl ash on the television (or anywhere

else for that matter) I automatically go back to that day and remember where I was, what

I was doing, what day it fell on and on and on and on and on. It is non-stop, uncontrol-

lable and totally exhausting.... I run my entire life through my head every day and it

drives me crazy!!!

A.J. describes her memories as happening automatically and not being under her

conscious control. When given a date she would, within seconds, relate personal experi-

ences and also special events that occurred on that day, and these recollections proved

to be accurate when checked against a diary of daily events that A.J. had been keeping

for 24 years (Parker et al., 2006).

A.J.’s memories cause her distress because she has trouble turning off the “movie”

of her life, and it troubles her that she is unable to forget negative events from the past.

She does, however, fi nd happy memories soothing, commenting that “happy memories

hold my head together.”

What is special about A.J. is that her exceptional memory is for personal experiences—

things that make up what is called autobiographical memory. Other reports of people with

“super memory” are rare, but those who have been studied can perform memory feats

such as remembering long strings of digits or playing many chess games simultaneously.

These feats are achieved by using special memory tricks such as chunking and creating

images. A.J., in contrast, automatically remembers events in her life.

We will return to A.J. later in this chapter when we discuss some of the advantages

and disadvantages of having a memory that far outstrips a typical person’s memory.

Our goal in this chapter is to describe what we know about memory for everyday

events, focusing on the autobiographical events that A.J. is so good at remembering.

Our main focus will be to ask why we remember certain things, and why what we

remember sometimes does not correspond to what actually happened. Studying the errors

we make when remembering leads to the conclusion that what we remember is determined

by creative mental processes. This creativity is a gift that helps us determine what happened

when we have incomplete information, but it can also affect the accuracy of our memory.

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