In an experiment with 421 participants who were required to recall words after a minute and a half and after a day, more than 4,000 “memory justifications” were collected. Despite a decrease in the number of items recalled, the linguistic content and detail of the justifications for the items that were correctly recalled remained almost the same. The study was published in Communications Psychology.
Memory justifications, the belief that a remembered event actually happened, help maintain certainty about our memories. These justifications are affected by the passage of time, but understanding how they change is important to us as a society. A research group from the field of cognitive and brain sciences at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev examined and discovered that real memory retrieval is rich in information and verbal description, and may even produce credibility similar to giving testimony in a legal context. The study findings were published in the journal communication psychology.
Does our belief in the existence of a past event fade like memory? Does our explanation of its existence become less detailed, tangible, or certain over time? Or perhaps, if one is able to recall, the original justification remains stable? Dr. Talia Sade, and doctoral students Avi Gamoran וZohar Raz Gruman From the Department of Cognitive and Brain Sciences at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, we examined a central phenomenon in human memory processes: memory justifications.
Memory justifications are the descriptions that people provide about what made them remember a particular item. Justifications reflect cues from within the individual memory itself, but they also serve a social function: when a person shares a memory with others, the justification they provide is used by the environment to assess the reliability of the memory. When a memory has stable characteristics, detailed descriptions, and valid cues over time, all of these constitute true memory retrieval.
To examine the effects of time on memory justifications, the researchers examined 421 participants (232 women, 189 men, ages 18-35) from an online behavioral research participant database. Over 4,000 memory justifications were collected from participants who were asked to perform recall tasks at two time points—after a minute and a half and after 24 hours. They examined memory justifications both linguistically and behaviorally.
The experiment consisted of two fixed lists of 16 words each. The words were nouns and adjectives of 3–10 letters in length, selected from a research word bank (Penn) containing 1638 words. The lists were constructed so that temporal and joint contributions to memory could be separated, using the association space of words. Participants' internal reflections on the information that evoked the memory were self-reported. After a free recall test phase, participants were asked to describe the information they used to recall the words. Participants were given a cue with each word recalled during the test phase, and justifications were typed in by the participants. For example, a specific description such as: "I remembered the pearls because I made up a story about a pearl necklace" or "I don't know why, I just remembered it." Each justification was analyzed according to its number of internal/external details. The analysis of detail is based on the autobiographical interview, a research method for counting details of personal experiences in memory descriptions, which is also the basis for the automatic tool used by the researchers.
"Participants recalled significantly fewer items after a one-day delay compared to a one-and-a-half-minute delay," she explained. Raz Gruman"This strong effect validated our experimental manipulation. While overall recall declined, justifications for correctly recalled items remained remarkably stable over time: the level of detail of personal experiences remained stable, the rate of justified memories, and word usage patterns did not differ between short and long delays."
The findings of the study indicate thatThe content of justifications is preserved over time.Although the number of items people remembered after a day was much lower, the linguistic content of the justifications for the items they did remember was almost identical at both recall times. Word usage patterns remained stable, vocabulary analysis showed high similarity between immediate and delayed justifications, and there was no decrease in key words that characterize justifications of reliable memories. That is, only the likelihood of recall changed, but not the way people justify recall.
It is also found thatThe level of random detail remained stable- Using an automated tool for identifying personal experiences, it was found that there was no decline in the detail that participants provided in their justifications, even after a full day. That is, when the memory is retrieved, the justification remains rich and structured. The only difference found is related to the level of linguistic certainty.– In the later justifications, slightly more words reflecting hesitation (such as ‘if’, ‘any’ and ‘maybe’) appeared. This is a consistent but superficial change – it does not concern the episodic content itself, but only the linguistic expression of the level of confidence. Words reflecting certainty appeared slightly less, but their frequency was low in advance. Also, Linguistic models predicted credibility better than self-confidence– Using vocabulary-based language analysis, we found that the content of the justification predicted memory reliability better than reported confidence. This pattern emerged in both immediate and delayed memories.
The findings of the study reinforce the understanding that time weakens the accessibility of memory, but does not weaken the quality of the linguistic content of the justification, when the memory is retrieved. The results of the study support an ‘all or nothing’ forgetting mechanism: if the memory is retrieved, the justification remains rich, detailed, and stable, and if not, there is no justification at all.
From a social and applied perspective, since memory justifications serve as an important tool for assessing credibility in situations such as interrogation, testimony, or professional reporting, the findings indicate significant potential: when a person succeeds in formulating a memory justification, its linguistic content remains reliable even after time.
"Our findings highlight that the content of justifications, particularly elements related to the remembered event, may offer a temporally stable window into incidental memory, beyond that captured by subjective certainty. In legal or forensic contexts, where testimony often involves delayed memory, encouraging witnesses to produce written justifications may provide a richer and more reliable basis for assessing memory validity," she concluded. Dr. Sadeh.
This research (grant numbers 1324/23 and 2055/22) was supported by the Israel Science Foundation.
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"Memory justifications serve as an important tool for assessing credibility." Is this also true of collective memory?