In the  process of resolving any dispute, the parties usually begin by reciting the facts. Only after the facts are set out and the parties are generally in accord  with what occurred, do the parties begin to work on resolving the dispute.

But suppose a party misremembers the facts?  We have all heard  about our long-term memories mis-identifying suspects or mis-identifying facts. But a recent study reveals that we can also misremember within seconds of the events occurring.

In a post on LiveScience dated April 14, 2023, entitled Short-term memory illusions can warp recollections just seconds after events, study suggests (“LiveScience”) by Ben Turner, the author discusses this new study.

The study  involving four different experiments using 45 participants in the first experiment with the average age of 22 years old at the University of Amsterdam (PLOS ONE at 3.) revealed “… how easily and rapidly humans reimagine experiences to fit our preconceptions, rather than accurately recording what takes place. (LiveScience at 1.)

In  the first experiment, the participants were shown both actual  letters of the  Latin alphabet and pseudo-letters( which were mirrored of the real letters with the correct orientation)   (PLOS ONE at 2.)

What the researchers found revealed ‘short term memory illusion’:

When the participants were asked to recall what they saw just a half second later, they were wrong just under 20% of the time, and this error rate shot up to 30% when asked three seconds later. When asked to recall whether a letter was facing forwards or backwards, participants who responded with high confidence had flipped the letter to its regular position 37% of the time, even though they had been explicitly warned that mirrored letters would appear in the tests and should not be mistakenly reported for real ones. (LiveScience at 2.)

To confirm these findings, the researchers repeated  the experiment with an additional 348 participants and found that these participants also “… showed the same tendency to mentally flip the mirrored letters.” (Id. at 3.)

Based on these experiments, the researchers stated:

In conclusion, four experiments consistently show that illusory memories arise even when the visual stimulus has only been out of sight for very brief periods of time. These results show that even the most recent recollections are susceptible to illusory memories. Moreover, it suggests that internal priors play a crucial role not just during perception, but also in memory. Thus, it seems that short-term memory is not always an accurate representation of what was just perceived. Instead, memory is shaped by what we expected to see, right from the formation of the first memory trace. (PLOS ONE at 13.).

 Thus, our “world knowledge” or “long-standing knowledge about the usual orientation of letters” (Id. at 6.) as well as “response bias ( “Participants might just be more inclined to select real letters instead of pseudo-letters, since real letters are a well-known category. (Id. at 5.)) play a crucial role in how we remember events, even those that just occurred within  a second or two ago.  Thus, our shortest of short-term memories may not be so accurate after all: they may all be simply  illusions!

… Just something to think about.

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