People with 'perfect' memory can make mistakes

People who can remember details of their daily lives going back decades are still susceptible as everyone else to forming false memories, U.S. scientists say. Researchers at the University of California, Irvine, studying how false information can manipulate memory formation, report they discovered subjects with highly superior autobiographical memory logged scores similar to those of a control group of subjects with average memory in a series of tests. While people with highly superior autobiographical memory, known as hyperthymesia, have the astounding ability to remember even trivial details from their distant past, they are still capable of forming false memories, the researchers said, a finding that could have significant consequences. "Finding susceptibility to false memories even in people with very strong memory could be important for dissemination to people who are not memory experts," Lawrence Patihis, a graduate student in psychology and social behavior, said. "This dissemination could help prevent false memories in the legal and clinical psychology fields, where contamination of memory has had particularly important consequences in the past." "While [people with hyperthymesia] really do have super-autobiographical memory, it can be as malleable as anybody else's, depending on whether misinformation was introduced and how it was processed," Patihis said. "It's a fascinating paradox. In the absence of misinformation, they have what appears to be almost perfect, detailed autobiographical memory, but they are vulnerable to distortions, as anyone else is."