Most people are pretty confident in their own memory for events, but this research shows that false memory is a lot more frequent than many people realize," said study co-author Ciara Greene, a psychologist at the University College Dublin in Ireland. [5 Strange Facts About Memory]
"In terms of daily life, the take-home message here may be to understand that someone who remembers an event differently from you isn't necessarily lying — someone's memory may be faulty, and it might be yours," Greene said.
In the study, the researchers asked 489 people to rank seven topics from the most to the least interesting. Those topics were football, politics, business, technology, film, science and pop music, according to the study, which the researchers will present on Thursday (Sept. 1) in Barcelona, Spain, at a meeting of the British Psychological Society.
The researchers asked each person to read four news stories about events that were related to the topic they ranked as the most interesting, and four stories about events related to the topic they rated as the least interesting. In each case, three of these events really did occur, but the fourth one was made up. For example, in the "science" category, the fictional story was about recent rediscovery of a supposedly extinct bird species in Senegal. However, in truth, the species is very common in that country and is in no danger of extinction.
The researchers then asked the people to indicate if they remembered each of the four news events by choosing one of the following options: "I remember this," "I remember this differently" or "I do not remember this."
It turned out that people tended to remember the stories from the topics they said they were more interested in, compared with topics they were not interested in. However, the participants also tended to store more false memories related to the topics they were interested in, compared with topics they were not interested in, the researchers found.
This finding "is counterintuitive, interesting and definitely worthy of further scientific examination," said Elizabeth F. Loftus, a psychologist and false-memory expert at the University of California, Irvine, who was not involved in the study.