Comparing autobiographic memory of two individuals that experienced the same event, is a useful way of understanding the relative accuracy of human memory in context with our daily lives. To test this myself, I had my mother recall the time when we got my dog, which happened about eight years ago, and compared that to my recollection of the same event. We both stated the same sequence of events in getting the dog, such as my brother and his fiancé getting one, and me asking for one from the same litter. We also agreed on the people involved, like my brother, his fiancé, and my step dad, though she remembered the people we got him from as well. While we both got the same gist of the events, we did differ in some of the details, for instance,
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We were both recalling this event in the place in which it started, in the living room at home. This would explain why we both were very good at remembering details that had occurred where we were remembering them at. Many studies have shown that it is better to retrieve information at the location where you learned it at (Anderson, 2015). Robin and Moscovitch (2017) found that in both young and older adults, spatial familiarity with an environment helped with cueing a memory. As for the differences, most of which can be explained by me having more time to remember them, but with the detail that we disagreed on, that being whether my step dad objected or not, can be linked to plausible retrieval and interference. Humans tend to “remember” things that make the most sense to them given their knowledge on the world, if something seems plausible given a scenario, they may misattribute that as having happened (Anderson, 2015). In the case of my mother, given her knowledge about her husband, it is more plausible that he objected to the puppy, because that fits his usual behavior. This information about how he usually behaves then interfered with the memory, and made her remember it differently. I on the other hand do not have such an interference on his attitudes towards dogs, and it was also really funny to me that he had a preference for gender, and color, of the dog, so it stuck out to me. All in
We were both recalling this event in the place in which it started, in the living room at home. This would explain why we both were very good at remembering details that had occurred where we were remembering them at. Many studies have shown that it is better to retrieve information at the location where you learned it at (Anderson, 2015). Robin and Moscovitch (2017) found that in both young and older adults, spatial familiarity with an environment helped with cueing a memory. As for the differences, most of which can be explained by me having more time to remember them, but with the detail that we disagreed on, that being whether my step dad objected or not, can be linked to plausible retrieval and interference. Humans tend to “remember” things that make the most sense to them given their knowledge on the world, if something seems plausible given a scenario, they may misattribute that as having happened (Anderson, 2015). In the case of my mother, given her knowledge about her husband, it is more plausible that he objected to the puppy, because that fits his usual behavior. This information about how he usually behaves then interfered with the memory, and made her remember it differently. I on the other hand do not have such an interference on his attitudes towards dogs, and it was also really funny to me that he had a preference for gender, and color, of the dog, so it stuck out to me. All in